Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s countersuit against Twitter was revealed on Friday, making aggressive new claims about the social media’s method for counting bot and spam accounts.
The Washington Post reports that Elon Musk’s countersuit to Twitter was revealed on Friday and contains aggressive claims about Twitter’s methods for counting bot and spam accounts. Musk has accused Twitter of misleading his team, and Wall Street, about its advertising base.
Musk is attempting to use these claims to justify backing out of the $44 billion buyout deal. Musk is arguing that as he learned more about Twitter’s process to determine the authenticity of accounts, he grew more concerned and decided that the deal was no longer viable.
Musk stated during the recent tesla annual shareholder meeting: “I do understand the product quite well so I think I’ve got a good sense of where to point the engineering team with Twitter to make it radically better. I think it’s something that will be very useful to the world.”
Musk’s countersuit makes it clear that he wants to be free from the deal he agreed to in April to purchase the site. Musk alleges that Twitter engaged in fraud, breach of contract, and violation of the Texas Securities Act. Musk’s attorney is arguing that while Twitter claims to have 238 million monetizable daily active users, the proportion that actually sees ads is 65 million lower.
Musk further alleges that the majority of ads are shown only to less than 16 million users, which is less than seven percent of the number of users Twitter claims can earn the company revenue by seeing ads.
“Twitter played a months-long game of hide-and-seek to attempt to run out the clock before the Musk Parties could discern the truth about these representations, which they needed to close,” the countersuit alleges. “The more Twitter evaded even simple inquiries, the more the Musk Parties grew to suspect that Twitter had misled them.”
Read more at the Washington Post here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan