What just happened? The latest development in Elon Musk’s row with Twitter has seen the platform file a filing with the SEC that rejects Musk’s claims that he was within his rights to walk away from the $44 billion acquisition. Twitter says it has committed to closing the deal at the agreed price of $54.20 per share — the current price is $41.06 — and plans to take legal action to force Musk to buy.
Musk had cited the number of fake accounts on Twitter as Discord’s main point. The world’s richest man previously claimed that Twitter’s alleged refusal to reveal bot numbers was a material breach of the agreement and allowed him to avoid the billion dollar break fee.
In a public filing, Twitter said Musk’s claims were “a story, devised for the purpose of escaping a merger deal that Musk no longer found attractive once the stock market and with it, his enormous personal wealth , had lost value.
Twitter claims less than 5% of accounts on the site are fake. Musk’s team, however, claims that at least 10% of daily active users who see ads are inauthentic, and Twitter is trying to hide that number. The recent filing also claims that Twitter hid the total number of its users who see ads. According to the New York Times, the company said Musk was trying to “distort data received from Twitter to sponsor outlandish conclusions” and that its data is accurate.
Musk’s attorneys say that by using a tool called Botometer, which was designed by Indiana University to measure inauthentic accounts, analysts discovered that Twitter was lying about the number of fakes on the platform. He denies the allegations.
“Twitter miscounted the number of fake accounts and spam on its platform, as part of its scheme to mislead investors about the company’s prospects,” Musk’s legal team wrote. “Twitter’s disclosures have slowly unraveled, with Twitter frantically closing the doors to information in a desperate attempt to prevent Musk’s parties from uncovering his fraud. »
Twitter had previously made available to Musk a “fire hose” of raw data consisting of every tweet posted each day. He then claimed that Twitter had placed an artificial cap on the number of searches his team could perform on the data, but the reality was that he had reached the monthly limit of 100,000 queries, so Twitter raised the cap to 10. million. That still didn’t satisfy Musk.
When Twitter sued Musk for walking away from the deal, he said he treated the process as an “elaborate joke.” Some of the memes used by Musk to poke fun at the situation, including one featuring internet favorite Chuck Norris, were used in the case as evidence.
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 11, 2022
“Counterclaims are a story made for litigation that is contradicted by evidence and common sense,” Twitter said. “Musk invents representations that Twitter has never made and then tries to use, selectively, the extensive confidential data that Twitter has provided to him to ward off a violation of these alleged representations. »
The Financial Times writes that Twitter is “ready to go to war” if that’s what is needed to secure the deal, adding that CEO Parag Agrawal has been “more aggressive internally.”
Twitter won the first battle in the court case last month when the judge agreed to speed up the trial. It will only last five days and will start in October rather than next year, when Musk’s camp wanted it to start.
Twitter lost revenue in the second quarter, which it attributed to the turmoil caused by Musk’s actions.
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