San Francisco, July 8 Tech billionaire Elon Musk's offer to buy the microblogging platform Twitter for $44 billion is in serious trouble, media reports say.
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According to The Washington Post, Musk's deal to buy the platform is "in peril" -- based on three anonymous sources who told the paper that the billionaire's camp has "stopped engaging in certain discussion around funding" for the agreement.
Musk is not going it alone in his attempt to buy Twitter, with others like Larry Ellison, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity, the crypto exchange Binance, and the state investment firm of Qatar are among those pitching in a few billion as a part of the effort, citing the report, The Verge reported.
The idea that a "drastic" change of direction on the deal is close to happening is supposedly due to concerns that Twitter's data regarding spam and bots on the platform is not verifiable, the report said.
The report comes just hours after Twitter had a conference call with media outlets to explain that its spam account data and technology for blocking bots are just fine, setting up a showdown between the company and its would-be new owner.
Last month, Musk stated that if Twitter fails to give data on spam and fake accounts, he may walk out of his $44 billion acquisition agreement.
In an SEC filing, Twitter had shared a letter it received from Musk's legal team indicating displeasure with the company's offered information regarding the level of "spam and fake accounts" on its service.
The letter said that more data (and not just an explanation of how the existing data was gathered) on Twitter's non-human users, both natural and spam, is important for helping close the transaction from a financing perspective.
The platform reportedly claimed that it blocks 1 million spammers every day.
What are spam bots again?
Bots are basically programs that post automated tweets, either for information — like the US government's "quakebot," which tweets the details of seismic events — or entertainment. Musk, however, has focused his ire on the "spam bots" used to blast out sales pitches or to inflate the influence of a person or cause.
That problem is highly visible to Musk, one of Twitter’s most active celebrity users, whose name and likeness are often mimicked by fake accounts promoting cryptocurrency scams. Musk says it’s also a problem for advertisers who take out ads on the platform based on how many real people they expect to reach.
So now such bots — and the way Twitter counts them — have become a sticking point in the deal. Twitter has long disclosed it has a "number of false or spam accounts" but estimates that they comprise fewer than 5% of its more than 200 million daily active users.
Musk insists the company has been undercounting them and has demanded that Twitter turn over its internal data for him to examine. It's not clear whether he can legally demand such information after declining his right to conduct "due diligence" on Twitter's internal accounting and operations. Some experts say a court will have to decide that.
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