Last week, Elon Musk announced that his deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion is on hold pending the time he receives information on the number of fake accounts that exist on the social media platform. The billionaire has made it very clear that he intends to remove spambots on the platform.
Twitter’s legal team accused Elon Musk of breaching a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) over the weekend. The legal team accused him of revealing that the sample size for the social media’s checks on automated users was 100. In a tweet that the Tesla and Space X boss shared on Saturday, he revealed that “Twitter legal just called to complain that I violated their NDA by revealing the bot check sample size is 100!”
Via a tweet, Elon Musk revealed that he picked 100 as the sample size number because it was the basis of Twitter’s calculation. This tweet what was prompted Twitter’s legal team’s accusation. Elon Musk was only answering questions from random Twitter users and fans.
He was asked by a user to shed light on the process of filtering bot accounts on the platform and his tweet response read “I picked 100 as the sample size number because that is what Twitter uses to calculate <5% fake/spam/duplicate.”
Later on Sunday, during the early hours, he tweeted that he is yet to receive any analysis showing that Twitter had fake accounts of less than 5 percent of its total users. Hours later, he shared that “There is some chance it might be over 90% of daily active users.”
The Twitter-Musk deal has been in the works for weeks waiting to be completed. The pending deal has seen Twitter shares drop. Last week Friday, Twitter shares dropped 18 percent. The social media company’s value also dropped to about $9 billion.
Elon Musk will be required to pay Twitter a termination fee of $1 billion if he can’t secure funding for his bid. Twitter will also have to pay Elon Musk $1 billion in breakup fee if the company decides not to go through with the deal as a result of another offer.
Ibhadojemu Lucky Emmanuel is a graduate of Education and Economics from the University of Benin. He has a passion for tech and business and has been writing professionally for over a period of five years. He's written across various topics and segments and knew tech-business was it when he first stumbled on it. He has a great passion for music and arts, and wants to visit as many countries as he can someday.
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