Elon Musk Gives Twitter Ultimatum, Says Deal Won’t Move Forward Until He Has Proof of Fake Account Numbers

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has given Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal an ultimatum regarding his huge deal to buy the social media platform.

Musk warned Agrawal that the deal won’t move forward until he sees accurate data on Twitter’s fake account problem.

Musk has been going back and forth with Agrawal over how to verify Twitterโ€™s numbers.

โ€œ20% fake/spam accounts, while 4 times what Twitter claims, could be *much* higher,” Musk said.

“My offer was based on Twitterโ€™s SEC filings being accurate.

“Yesterday, Twitterโ€™s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%.

“This deal cannot move forward until he does.”

Agrawal tried to explain away the spam data in a lengthy Twitter post.

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โ€œFirst, let me state the obvious: spam harms the experience for real people on Twitter, and therefore can harm our business,” Agrawal said.

“As such, we are strongly incentivized to detect and remove as much spam as we possibly can, every single day.

“Anyone who suggests otherwise is just wrong.

โ€œNext, spam isnโ€™t just โ€˜binaryโ€™ (human / not human).

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“The most advanced spam campaigns use combinations of coordinated humans + automation.

“They also compromise real accounts and then use them to advance their campaign.

“So โ€“ they are sophisticated and hard to catch.

โ€œSome final context: fighting spam is incredibly *dynamic*.

“The adversaries, their goals, and tactics evolve constantly โ€“ often in response to our work!

“You canโ€™t build a set of rules to detect spam today, and hope they will still work tomorrow. They will not.

โ€œWe suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before any of you even see them on Twitter.

“We also lock millions of accounts each week that we suspect may be spam โ€“ if they canโ€™t pass human verification challenges (captchas, phone verification, etc).

โ€œThe hard challenge is that many accounts which look fake superficially โ€“ are actually real people. And some of the spam accounts which are actually the most dangerous โ€“ and cause the most harm to our users โ€“ can look totally legitimate on the surface.

โ€œOur team updates our systems and rules constantly to remove as much spam as possible, without inadvertently suspending real people or adding unnecessary friction for real people when they use Twitter: none of us want to solve a captcha every time we use Twitter.

โ€œNow, we know we arenโ€™t perfect at catching spam.

“And so this is why, after all the spam removal I talked about above, we know some still slips through.

“We measure this internally. And every quarter, we have estimated that <5% of reported mDAU for the quarter are spam accounts.

โ€œOur estimate is based on multiple human reviews (in replicate) of thousands of accounts, that are sampled at random, consistently over time, from *accounts we count as mDAUs*.

“We do this every quarter, and we have been doing this for many years.

โ€œEach human review is based on Twitter rules that define spam and platform manipulation, and uses both public and private data (eg, IP address, phone number, geolocation, client/browser signatures, what the account does when itโ€™s activeโ€ฆ) to make a determination on each account.

โ€œUnfortunately, we donโ€™t believe that this specific estimation can be performed externally, given the critical need to use both public and private information (which we canโ€™t share). Externally, itโ€™s not even possible to know which accounts are counted as mDAUs on any given day.

โ€œThere are LOTS of details that are very important underneath this high-level description.

“We shared an overview of the estimation process with Elon a week ago and look forward to continuing the conversation with him, and all of you.โ€

Musk responded to Agrawal’s long explanationย with a poop emoji.

Later at the 2022 All-In Summit, Musk clarified.

He said he did not believe Twitterโ€™s numbers and thinks it is more like 20% bots.

He also said buying Twitter at a lower price is โ€œnot out of the question.โ€

โ€œThe more questions I ask, the more my concerns grow,โ€ he said.

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