Instead of facing each other in court, the richest man in the world wants to have a public debate with the Twitter CEO about the number of fake accounts on this social network.
When unilaterally announcing the cancellation of the Twitter acquisition, Elon Musk announced that the number of fake accounts on the platform exceeded 5% according to previous records. Now, instead of waiting for the court to arbitrate, he wants to directly argue with the Twitter CEO about this.
"I challenge Parag Agrawal to a public debate about Twitter's bot rate. Let him prove to the public that Twitter has less than 5% of its users fake or spam," Elon Musk announced on 6/ 8 on a personal Twitter account.
Parag Agrawal is the current CEO of Twitter, who has vowed to take Elon Musk to court, force him to continue the deal as well as be responsible for previous contradictory statements.
Elon Musk also pinned this tweet on his personal page, then created a fan poll about less than 5% of fake / spam accounts on Twitter.
As of the morning of August 7, there were more than 645,000 votes, 65.8% of them agree with Musk's views, do not believe in the data published by Twitter.
Elon Musk's reaction comes after the Court of Delaware (USA) made public a 165-page dossier submitted by his team of lawyers, presenting his views in the lawsuit with Twitter.
According to the document, the lawyers allege Twitter engaged in a deception strategy, giving false statistics about the rate of fake, spam accounts. Although there are 238 million users on Twitter, only 65 million of them see ads on the platform. The vast majority of ads are shown to only 16 million accounts, 7% less than Twitter's figure when reporting the potential for ad revenue.
Therefore, the Tesla CEO considered the results of the investigation into the virtual social network account to be a "serious adverse event", affecting the value and a reasonable reason for him to leave this deal.
According to the plan announced by Ms. Kathaleen McCormick, Judge of the Delaware Court of Justice at the end of July, the Elon Musk lawsuit against Twitter will take place on October 17 and last for 5 days.
Twitter reportedly wants to take Musk to court as soon as possible. According to Bloomberg , this social network wants to hear the lawsuit from October 10. However, Musk's lawyers argued that the timeline was given "unreasonably fast", asking to move to early next year.