Elon Musk Challenges Twitter's CEO to Public Debate on Fake Accounts and Spam Bots

Tesla and Spacex CEO Elon Musk has challenged Twitter’s CEO to a public debate over the platform’s fake accounts and spam bots. A recent poll conducted by Musk showed that nearly 65% of respondents do not believe that less than 5% of Twitter daily users are fake or spam.

Musk Challenges Twitter’s CEO to Public Debate

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has challenged Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal to a public debate about fake and spam accounts on Twitter. “Let him prove to the public that Twitter has less than 5% fake or spam daily users,” Musk wrote Saturday.

The percentage of spam and fake accounts on Twitter has been material in the Tesla CEO terminating his $44 billion bid to buy the social media platform.

Twitter has sued Musk to force him to go through with the buyout deal. The Spacex boss subsequently filed a countersuit, accusing Twitter of fraud.

Musk’s Twitter Poll on Fake/Spam Users

Musk put up a 24-hour Twitter poll Saturday asking his 103 million followers if they think that less than 5% of Twitter daily users are fake or spam. A total of 822,766 votes were counted: 64.9% picked “no.”

While Twitter claims that less than 5% of its daily users are fake or spam accounts, Musk disagreed and has been trying to obtain data from the social media giant to conduct his own analysis with no success.

Musk explained: “All indications suggest that several of Twitter’s public disclosures regarding its mDAUs are either false or materially misleading … The proportion of false and spam accounts included in the reported mDAU count is wildly higher than 5%.”

Twitter defines mDAUs (monetizable daily active users) as “users who logged in and accessed Twitter on any given day through Twitter.com or Twitter applications that are able to show ads.” Twitter’s disclosures include those filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

‘Materially False’ SEC Filings

Musk claims that Twitter provided him with outdated data, offered a fake data set, and then provided a clean data set where they already suspended the malicious accounts.

The Tesla CEO tweeted Saturday:

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. However, if it turns out that their SEC filings are materially false, then it should not.

Musk detailed in his countersuit that three days after he signed the agreement to buy Twitter, the social media company “restated and publicly disclosed that the mDAU figures in the 2021 10-K were false and that Twitter had overcounted mDAU by up to 1.9 million in each quarter.”