Last month, Elon Musk proposed to acquire Twitter for a whopping $44 billion. But a deal that huge can’t get done without some drama, can it? Last week, Musk said his bid to buy Twitter was “temporarily on hold” pending details about how many spam and fake accounts are on the platform.
Twitter CEO, Parag Agrawal, addressed the issue through a long thread that he posted yesterday. He said, “Let’s talk about spam. And let’s do so with the benefit of data, facts, and context…”
He explained the process of Twitter’s “human review” of potential spam, to which Musk replied, “Have you tried just calling them?”
Parag Agrawal said Twitter’s estimate of spam accounts for the last four quarters was “well under 5%”, and has stayed the same since 2013. He also said that it cannot be reproduced externally, given the need to use both public and private information to determine whether an account is a spam. To which, Elon Musk replied with a poop emoji.
Parag Agrawal also said, “You can’t build a set of rules to detect spam today, and hope they will still work tomorrow. They will not.”
Analysts interpret Musk’s messages as an attempt to pull out of the deal or to try to force a lower price. Whatever be the reason, the Twitter acquisition is getting more and more dramatic every day.