Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s counterattack against Twitter was revealed on Friday, making scathing new claims about the social media’s method of counting bot and spam accounts.
The Washington Post References that Elon Musk’s Twitter counterattack was revealed on Friday and contains scathing allegations about Twitter’s methods of counting bot and spam accounts. Musk accused Twitter of misleading his team and Wall Street about its ad base.
(Dimitrios Kampouris/Getty Images, BNN Edit)
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal (Google Cloud/YouTube)
Musk is attempting to use these allegations to justify backing out of the $44 billion buyout deal. Musk claims that as he learned more about Twitter’s process for determining the authenticity of accounts, he became more concerned and decided the deal was no longer viable.
Musk said during Tesla’s recent annual shareholder meeting: “I understand the product pretty well, so I think I have a good idea of where to direct the engineering team with Twitter to make it fundamentally better. I think it’s something that will be very useful in the world.”
Musk’s counterattack makes it clear he wants out of the deal he agreed to in April to buy the site. Musk alleges that Twitter engaged in fraud, breach of contract and violation of the Texas Securities Act. Musk’s lawyer argues that while Twitter claims it has 238 million daily monetizable active users, the percentage who actually see ads is 65 million lower.
Musk further claims that the majority of ads are only served to fewer than 16 million users, which is less than 7 percent of the number of users that Twitter claims can earn the company revenue from viewing ads.
“Twitter played a months-long game of hide-and-seek to try to run out the clock before the Moscow parties could discern the truth about these representations, which they had to shut down,” the counterattack claims. “The more Twitter avoided even simple inquiries, the more Musk’s parties suspected Twitter had misled them.”
Read more at Washington Post here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan
