Tech billionaire Elon Musk got into trouble with the online service's lawyers with his tweets about the planned Twitter takeover. They accused him of breaking a confidentiality agreement, Musk wrote on Sunday night. From the point of view of the legal department, he had revealed too much about Twitter's procedure for determining automated tweeting accounts.
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| Even By Elon Musk's Standards |
Musk announced on Saturday that his team would randomly select 100 followers of the online service's Twitter account and see how high the proportion of fake and bot accounts would be among them. The number of 100 accounts is rather low for such a survey. And Musk obviously wanted that to be noticed: He chose them because Twitter also uses a test group of this size, he said afterwards. The Twitter legal department then complained that this number was subject to a non-disclosure agreement, Musk later wrote.
Musk had raised bot accounts several times before. Also on Friday, when he announced that the planned takeover of Twitter was temporarily suspended. He first wants to wait for calculations to show that the total number of Twitter accounts with no real users is actually less than five percent. Twitter shares then plummeted. Around two hours later, Musk then assured that he was still interested in the acquisition.
Does he want to lower the price?
Musk's action on Friday raised many questions. For one, its takeover agreement with Twitter does not provide for a temporary suspension. On the other hand, Twitter mentioned the estimate of less than five percent bot and fake accounts not only in the most recent quarterly report - but for years. Industry observers wondered whether Musk wanted to try to get out of the expensive deal or at least push the price down . According to the Wall Street Journal, the 50-year-old billionaire only released the second clarifying tweet after pressure from his lawyers.
The head of the electric car manufacturer Tesla had previously agreed on a deal worth around 44 billion dollars with the Twitter board of directors. But he is still dependent on enough shareholders wanting to sell him their shares. Twitter and Musk previously wanted to complete the acquisition by the end of the year. In the past few months, he has already bought a good nine percent stake in Twitter on the stock exchange.
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