New Delhi: Tesla chief Elon Musk has threatened to cancel his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, accusing the micro-blogging company of hiding data about fake accounts.
In a letter to the company on Monday, Musk said Twitter was in “clear material breach” of its obligations and that he held all rights to terminate the merger agreement.
“Musk believes Twitter is transparently refusing to comply with its obligations under the merger agreement, which is causing further suspicion that the company is withholding the requested data,” his lawyer wrote to the company.
On 13 May, the billionaire had put the deal on hold till he got more information about Twitter’s spam and fake accounts.
Musk said he would wait for the company to provide details “supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of (Twitter) users”.
The company had estimated in a filing on 2 May that “false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5% of its monetisable daily active users during the first quarter”.
Musk’s lawyer wrote Monday: “He is clearly entitled to the requested data to enable him to prepare for transitioning Twitter’s business to his ownership and to facilitate his transaction financing.”
Soon after Musk inked the deal to buy Twitter in the middle of April, the Tesla chief said that one of his priorities would be to remove ‘spam bots’ from the platform.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, however, said while he expected the deal to close, Twitter must be prepared for all scenarios and do what is right for it.
A day after Musk put the deal on hold, Agrawal tweeted: “I won’t use the deal as an excuse to avoid making important decisions for the health of the company, nor will any leader at Twitter.”
“No one at Twitter is working just to keep the lights on. We take pride in our work,” the CEO said.
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