I'm Not buying again - Elon Musk Tells Twitter

Elon Musk's legal team is terminating his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter. Musk has been attacking Twitter over its bot count and claims that it misled investors and users about the number of fake accounts on its platform, which the company has long estimated to be under 5%. 

Nonetheless, Musk's argument is essentially that Twitter misrepresented its monetizable daily active user counts and in doing so broke the terms of the deal: Twitter is in breach of the Merger Agreement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, according to Tesla CEO Elon Musk's legal team. Twitter has repeatedly claimed that no documents it filed with the SEC since January 1, 2022 included any "untrue statement of a material fact" (Section 4.6(a) of the agreement.

The letter also claims that the company includes suspended accounts in its quarterly mDAU count even though it knows these accounts are fake or spam. … 

The Twitter Board is committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement. We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery.

— Bret Taylor (@btaylor) July 8, 2022

Agrawal has previously pushed back on Musk’s accusation that Twitter is undercounting fake accounts, describing the company’s methodology, which generalizes data for the whole platform based on a random sampling of accounts. 

"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),” Agrawal tweeted in May. 

"Externally, it’s not even possible to know which accounts are counted as mDAUs on any given day."

It’s far from apparent that Musk’s unsubstantiated criticism of Twitter’s bot counts will be deemed a valid enough reason to terminate the deal, particularly given that Twitter is keen to see it through.

For better or worse, we’re going to hear a lot more about that argument in the coming days as Musk and Twitter begin to hash out the messy, months-long ordeal in court.