Twitter deal can't move forward until CEO Parag Agrawal does: Elon Musk

Elon Musk on Tuesday said his $44 billion offer to acquire Twitter was based on the microblogging platform's SEC filings being accurate.

"20% fake/spam accounts, while 4 times what Twitter claims, could be *much* higher... Yesterday, Twitter's CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does," Musk tweeted.

This comes a day after the company's chief executive Parag Agrawal posted a long thread on Twitter, saying the firm estimates that less than 5% of reported monetisable daily active users (mDAU) for the quarter are spam accounts.

Agrawal, however, rejected any external validation of the company's claims. Twitter doesn'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)", he said. "Externally, it's not even possible to know which accounts are counted as mDAUs on any given day."

Responding to the Twitter CEO, Musk said that the company should welcome external validation if their claims are true.

At a technology conference in Miami on Monday, Musk said that a lower price for his $44 billion Twitter bid was "not out of the question", fuelling rumours that the world's richest man is reconsidering the deal to acquire the social media platform.

These comments come days after Musk tweeted that the acquisition deal to take over Twitter has been temporarily put on hold amid concerns over fake accounts on the microblogging platform.

"Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users (sic)," Musk said in a tweet on Friday.

Earlier in a filing, Twitter had claimed that spam or fake accounts represent less than 5% of its monetisable daily active users during the quarter ended March. The company overstated the number of daily active users for three years due to an error caused by its account linking feature.

Twitter's average daily active users stood at 229 million in the first quarter of 2022, up 15.9% compared to Q1 of the prior year. This includes 39.6 million DAUs in the US.

The Twitter CEO claims that the company's actual internal estimates for the last four quarters were all well under 5%. "Our estimate is based on multiple human reviews of thousands of accounts, that are sampled at random, consistently over time, from *accounts we count as mDAUs*. We do this every quarter, and we have been doing this for many years," he tweeted.

Agrawal further said Twitter suspends over half a million spam accounts every day. "We also lock millions of accounts each week that we suspect may be spam – if they can’t pass human verification challenges (captchas, phone verification, etc)," he added.