Insight Bureau: Elon Musk has reiterated his claim that fake and spam accounts could make up more than 20 percent of Twitter’s users, saying the deal to acquire the social media company “cannot move forward” until Twitter proves the accuracy of its much lower estimate of less than 5 percent. Musk is currently in the process of buying Twitter and its estimated 226 million monetizable daily active users for $44 billion.
“20% fake/spam accounts, while 4 times what Twitter claims, could be much higher,” the Tesla CEO tweeted “My offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate. Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of 5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does.”
The Tesla CEO’s attempts to get clarity on these numbers led to a public spat with Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal offered details on the number of spam accounts that Twitter suspends every day, and outlined how the team identifies them. But he added that “we don’t believe this specific estimation can be performed externally, given the critical need to use both public and private information (which we can’t share).”