.png)
Elongate: Elon Musk challenges Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal to a debate on bots
Billionaire Elon Musk took shots at Twitter on Saturday, and dared CEO Parag Agrawal to debate him in the midst of a legal battle over a $44 billion acquisition gone awry.
Elon Musk filed a bid with the Securities and Exchange to acquire Twitter back in April this year. After the companies agreed to move ahead with a take-private deal, Musk said he was terminating his acquisition, and accused Twitter of presenting false numbers, including in its SEC filings, pertaining to the amount of monetizable daily active users, and the number of spam and bot accounts on the social network.
On July 29th, Twitter sued Musk to ensure the deal would go through as promised. While replying to a fan on Twitter on Saturday morning, Musk said, "Good summary of the problem. 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.”
Elon also wrote, "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!”
However, according to CNBC, a source close to the company said that the debate is not going to happen outside of a pending trial. Attorneys for Musk did not respond to requests to comment on Saturday.
On August 4th annual shareholders meeting for Tesla, when Musk was asked to speak about Twitter, he said, I obviously have to be a little careful what I say about Twitter because there's this lawsuit and stuff."