Dusseldorf With a tweet last Friday, Elon Musk sent the shares of the short message service plummeting: In it he questioned the planned takeover of Twitter for $ 44 billion. His suspicion: There could be no real users behind many accounts.
Not only were many investors upset, but Twitter’s lawyers then contacted him, Musk revealed on Sunday night. They accused him of breaching a confidentiality agreement. From the legal department’s point of view, Musk revealed too much about Twitter’s approach to identifying automated tweeting accounts.
According to official figures from 2014, the short message service estimates the proportion of fake or spam accounts to be less than five percent.
On Saturday, Musk published more details on Twitter on how exactly he intends to determine the actual proportion of false users. Accordingly, the Tesla boss wants to randomly select 100 Twitter accounts and check whether they are fake or bot accounts. Statistically, the number of 100 accounts is considered very low for such a survey. After all, there are 229 million daily active accounts on Twitter.
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The fact that Musk nevertheless chose an obviously insufficient number can be understood as criticism of Twitter’s methodology. Because the short message service itself uses a test group of this size, Musk emphasized. Indirectly, the potential buyer probably wanted to explain why he distrusted the official figures from Twitter. The Twitter lawyers, however, see the confidentiality of the takeover negotiations violated.
Twitter sees a breach of trust
On May 6, Musk visited the Twitter headquarters and, according to information from the Wall Street Journal, also asked questions about the false and spam accounts. In the past, Twitter has routinely warned that the percentage of fake users is an estimate and “the actual number of fake or spam users may be higher than we estimate.”
Any sensitive random sampling process is fine. If many people independently get similar results for % of fake/spam/duplicate accounts, that will be telling.
I picked 100 as the sample size number, because that is what Twitter uses to calculate <5% fake/spam/duplicate.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 14, 2022
For some industry observers, however, the concerns that have now been expressed could be a way for Musk to get out of the agreed billion-dollar deal after all, or at least to push the price down. Even if Musk emphasized a few hours after his first tweet that he was still behind the deal: According to the “Wall Street Journal”, the 50-year-old billionaire only dropped this clarifying tweet because his lawyers urged it.
On Sunday, Musk followed up on his Twitter account and clearly criticized the platform’s algorithm, which “manipulates” what is displayed to users. In addition, there may be numerous errors in the code, which is why he wanted to disclose the site’s source code in order to increase “reliability and efficiency”.
The boss of the electric car manufacturer Tesla had agreed with the Twitter board of directors to buy the short message service for 44 billion dollars and to take Twitter off the stock exchange. However, he is dependent on enough shareholders ceding their shares to him. Twitter and Musk previously wanted to complete the acquisition by the end of the year. In the past few months, Musk had already acquired a good nine percent stake in Twitter on the stock exchange.
With agency material
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