Elon Musk’s deal with Twitter, which was agreed upon on April 25 for $44 billion, is not on hold and will move forward, company executives told employees on Thursday. Musk, who said the deal was on hold pending proof of Twitter’s estimation of bots among its active users, has been backtracking the deal for several days and announced he would seek a lower price. Twitter does not plan to oblige.
A new report from Bloomberg on Thursday indicates Musk’s deal with Twitter will not be renegotiated after the Tesla CEO stated he could not be given concrete proof of the platform’s population of scam/spam accounts. Twitter estimated less than 5 percent of its user accounts were “fake” or “bot” accounts, while Musk challenged the figures.
“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” Musk said last Friday. He would late reiterate his discontent for the deal, stating that his offer was based on SEC filings being accurate. If Twitter did not accurately portray the number of human accounts in its filing, Musk would have a case.
“20% fake/spam accounts, while 4 times what Twitter claims, could be *much* higher,” Musk said to Teslarati. “My offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate. Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does.”
However, Twitter executives are having no part of Musk’s controversy. Yesterday, Twitter said in a statement to the New York Times that, “The board and Mr. Musk agreed to a transaction at $54.20 per share. We believe this agreement is in the best interest of all shareholders. We intend to close the transaction and enforce the merger agreement.”
Twitter is uploading this mindset moving forward. According to the Bloomberg report, Twitter’s top legal professionals are reassuring employees that the deal is still set to go through despite Musk’s comments.
Vijaya Gadde, the platform’s top lawyer, said there is “no such thing as a deal being on hold,” according to people in attendance. She also stated Musk must “do everything he can” to line up his financing, which has been a story in itself. Additionally, Gadde said that Twitter could try and “enforce” the terms of the deal, but it was not likely to happen.
At the time of writing, Twitter shares were trading at $38.10, well below Musk’s offered price of $54.20.
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