“Currently what I’m being told is that there’s just no way to know the number of bots. It’s like, as unknowable as the human soul,” Musk said at the conference (via Bloomberg). The removal of bots was one of Musk’s primary goals behind the acquisition. However, the SpaceX CEO said last week that the acquisition was “temporarily on hold” since he didn’t get a fair estimate of the number of bots on Twitter. Musk later said that his team would conduct an independent investigation into the number of bots. But with that not panning out the way it did, Musk seems to be vying for a price reduction.
Musk got into trouble with Twitter’s legal team over violating a non-disclosure agreement
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal sent out a series of tweets this week defending the company’s stance on bots. He acknowledged that spam accounts continue to get through their filters. “We measure this internally. And every quarter, we have estimated that <5% of reported mDAU (monetizable daily active users) for the quarter are spam accounts.” Agrawal also rejected the notion of accurately evaluating the number of bots through an outside source. “Unfortunately, we don’t believe that this specific estimation can be performed externally, given the critical need to use both public and private information (which we can’t share),” the CEO said. Seeking a price reduction could indicate Musk’s diminishing interest in acquiring Twitter. However, as Engadget notes, Musk has to pay a $1 billion “kill fee” if he chooses to pull the plug on the deal. Legal experts quoted by The Washington Post claim that Twitter could potentially sue the Tesla CEO if the deal doesn’t go through. Musk got into some trouble with Twitter’s legal team last week over the potential violation of a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). This came after Musk revealed some of Twitter’s mechanisms for calculating spam or bot accounts on the platform.