World richest man and Tesla /SpaceX founder Elon Musk is planning to pull out from his $44 billion deal with Twitter. Whereas, he decided to buy the micro-blogging site ‘Twitter’ in April.
The announcement comes after Musk filed for deal termination with Twitter at the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) office. Officials from Musk’s team claimed that Twitter has made a ‘false and misleading statement during negotiations’ and Musk sees it as a ‘material breach.
“For nearly two months, Musk has sought the data and information necessary to ‘make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on Twitter’s platform’,” Musk’s legal team wrote. They further added, “Twitter has failed or refused to provide this information.”
Musk believes that Twitter comprises 20% of spam and bots accounts on Twitter, but Twitter is hiding this data. At the time of both parties’ agreement, Twitter stated that it has less than 5% spam and bots accounts.
Musk for weeks has been trying to get reliable data, about how many daily active users Twitter has, and in this course, Twitter is misleading with the data coming from its end. But Twitter still believes that there are some possibilities to close the deal, despite this new controversy in a long-running saga.
Twitter board chairman Bret Taylor wrote on Twitter that will “pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement” and feels “confident we will prevail” in court. Twitter has gone to great lengths to show compliance with Musk’s requests.
In early June, the company gave the “firehouse” access to its service so that Musk could receive and analyze tweets information as it was posted. The company has also continuously tried to reassure the public that it has spam and bots under control, and on Thursday, deleted more than a million suspected spam accounts.
On Thursday, it told the press that it was blocking over a million spam accounts, and in May, its CEO wrote a long thread about how Twitter determines how many of its users bots it has.
(with inpits from IANS)