Tesla CEO Elon Musk suggested early Saturday that his acquisition deal with Twitter could still go through if the social media platform provided information about how it confirms that sampled accounts are real.
“If Twitter simply provides their method of sampling 100 accounts and how they’re confirmed to be real, the deal should proceed on original terms,” Musk tweeted. “However, if it turns out that their SEC filings are materially false, then it should not.”
Later he tweeted he was challenging the CEO of Twitter to a debate.
“I hereby challenge@paraga to a public debate about the Twitter bot percentage. Let him prove to the public that Twitter has <5% fake or spam daily users!” Musk tweeted.
Musk also tweeted out a poll asking if less than 5 percent of daily users on Twitter were spam or fake.
The tweets from Musk are the latest in the drama between the SpaceX CEO and the social media platform following legal action over his bid to buy Twitter.
Earlier this year, Musk reached a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion, but less than three months later, he terminated the deal. His legal team argued at the time there was inadequate information provided about bots on Twitter’s site. The team also alleged that the social media company had fired several employees in violation of their agreement and that its statements regarding bots were not accurate.
The social media platform sued Musk to force him to complete the acquisition.
“Having mounted a public spectacle to put Twitter in play, and having proposed and then signed a seller-friendly merger agreement, Musk apparently believes that he—unlike every other party subject to Delaware contract law—is free to change his mind, trash the company, disrupt its operations, destroy stockholder value, and walk away,” the lawsuit against Musk said.
But Musk filed a countersuit earlier this month, with his lawyers alleging that he was not consulted on big decisions at the social media company and that the billionaire had entered into the agreement without knowing about the platform’s “misrepresentations or omissions,” which impacted his perception of the site’s value, according to The Associated Press.
Twitter hit back against the countersuit, saying that the argument was “imagined in an effort to escape a merger agreement that Musk no longer found attractive once the stock market—and along with it, his massive personal wealth—declined in value.”
— Updated at 3:26 pm
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