Elon Musk, Parag Agrawal.Photo: Maja Hitij/Getty; Kevin Dietsch/Getty
BeforeElon Muskand Twitter head to court, the billionaire wants to meet on the debate stage.
In atweeton Saturday, the 51-year-old entrepreneur challenged Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, 38, to a public debate about the number of bot accounts on its platform. Bots, or fake accounts, are one of the reasons Musk’s legal team claims he canback out of his agreement to purchase Twitterfor $44 billion.
“Let him prove to the public that Twitter has <5% fake or spam daily users!” he added.
Later that day, Muskopened a Twitter pollasking his 102 million followers to vote whether bot accounts on the platform were less than 5 percent of its user base. With the only two choices being “Yes” and “Lmaooo no,” the latter won with nearly 65 percent of the vote and 822,000 users participating.
“Twitter has spoken…” Musk said of the results.
Twitter has defended itself from Musk’s accusations in court filings ahead of their October trial in the Delaware Court of Chancery.
The documents stated that the company believed Musk is focusing on the fake accounts to “escape a merger agreement that Musk no longer found attractive.”
In a counterclaim, Musk’s legal team accused Twitter of holding back information about its business after the Tesla and SpaceX CEO agreed to the acquisition.
“[Twitter] has dragged its feet in responding to the Musk Parties' data requests and has repeatedly provided sanitized, incomplete information that it admits does not answer the Musk Parties' most basic questions,” reads the counterclaim.
“Twitter filed a response to Mr. Musk’s counterclaims. His claims are factually inaccurate, legally insufficient, and commercially irrelevant,” Taylorwrotein his statement. “We look forward to the trial in the Delaware Court of Chancery.”
source: people.com
