Billionaire Elon Musk said on Tuesday, excitement It won’t be until we’re reassured about the plague of fake accounts that are rampant on the platform and complicating this tense takeover bid by the social media giant.

Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, is currently the richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $230 billion, according to Forbes magazine.

Considered an iconoclastic genius by his supporters and a ragged megalomaniac by his critics, the businessman shocked the financial world in April when he announced he wanted to buy Twitter.

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But its $44 billion bid is on hold until the estimated number of fake accounts known as “bots” is resolved.

“Twitter’s CEO refused to prove on Monday that less than 5% of accounts are fake,” said Musk, who has nearly 94 million followers on the social network.

“Unless it happens, the deal cannot go on,” he added.

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal said the platform suspends more than half a million apparently fake accounts multiple times each day before they go public, blocking millions of suspicious users each week on suspicion that they are accounts managed by a computer application.

Agrawal said internal analysis shows that on an average day, less than 5% of active accounts qualify as spam, but these accounts cannot be copied by third parties due to privacy requirements.

a plague

Saying that “bots” are a plague on Twitter and making it a priority to get rid of them if they take control of the platform, Musk responded to Agrawal’s statement with a poop-shaped icon in a tweet.

In another dialogue about the need to prove Twitter users are fully human, Musk said, “So the advertisers know what they’re getting for their money?” he added.

Musk decided that “this is critical to Twitter’s financial health.”

Agrawal emphasized that the procedure for estimating how many accounts are “bots” was shared with Musk.

Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said in a note to investors that the fake account issue has made the deal confusing.

“After all, the ‘bots’ thing is familiar even to taxi drivers in New York, and it seems more like an excuse of the ‘dog ate my homework’ kind of way to get out of the deal on Twitter or to get the price lower,” said the expert.

Musk claimed that his motivation for the purchase stemmed from his desire to provide free speech on the platform and earn money for a page that is highly effective but struggling to grow profitably.

The businessman also announced that his supporters, who were angry with the tweets he sent on March 6, 2021, claiming that the US Congress was cheated in the election, were in favor of removing the veto on the platform against the former US President Donald Trump.