Twitter has finally given in to Elon Musk’s demands for internal data the latter said he needs to conduct an independent evaluation of the number of spam and fake accounts on the platform — reports The Washington Post.
The company’s board of directors has agreed to provide a “firehose” consisting of 500 million daily tweets to Musk as soon as this week. This “firehose” contains real-time tweets, where they are sent from, and from what device. Approximately 24 companies pay Twitter for access to this information.
“Twitter has and will continue to cooperatively share information with Mr. Musk to consummate the transaction in accordance with the terms of the merger agreement,” the company told The Post.
“We believe this agreement is in the best interest of all shareholders. We intend to close the transaction and enforce the merger agreement at the agreed price and terms.”
The move comes after the celebrity billionaire threatened to pull the plug on his $44 billion USD offer for Twitter in an SEC filing earlier this week. Musk’s lawyers argued that Twitter’s reluctance in sharing the requested information amounted to a “material breach” of the agreement.
Musk has been stirring up a public storm over Twitter’s bot account estimations since last month. He first said the deal was “temporarily on hold” pending verification of Twitter’s numbers.
Musk assured that he was “still committed” to buying Twitter, but he later said that the deal “cannot move forward” until the social media giant offers up evidence supporting its bot estimates.
Twitter said in an earlier filing that spam and fake accounts made up less than 5% of its monetizable daily active users (mDAUs) during the first quarter of this year. Experts, however, believe the actual number could be double or even triple that. Musk’s own napkin math suggests the number is closer to 20% (and could even be higher).
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s counsel has argued an independent assessment of Twitter’s user base is needed as the number of organic users on the social network is directly related to how much ad revenue Musk can hope to generate from Twitter.
However, some analysts see Musk’s public uproar over bot accounts as an indication that he may be trying to negotiate a lower price for Twitter or pull out of the deal altogether.
Musk offered to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share in April. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO plans to put up $33.5 billion from his own wealth for the bid.
