Twitter Deal On Hold Cos Elon Musk Wants Clarity on Fake Accounts

Elon Musk said his $44 billion bid for Twitter Inc. TWTR -8.18%▼ can’t move forward until the company is clearer about how many of its accounts are fake.

In a tweet early Tuesday, Mr. Musk said, “Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%.”

“This deal cannot move forward until he does,” he said.

He added: “20% fake/spam accounts, while 4 times what Twitter claims, could be *much* higher.”

He said his offer “was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate.”

On Monday, Twitter Chief Executive Parag Agrawal defended his company’s efforts to fight spam, after Mr. Musk last week put his bid on hold over concerns about fake accounts on the platform.

“First, let me state the obvious: spam harms the experience for real people on Twitter, and therefore can harm our business,” Mr. Agrawal said as part of a series of posts on Monday. “As such, we are strongly incentivized to detect and remove as much spam as we possibly can, every single day. Anyone who suggests otherwise is just wrong.”

He said Twitter suspends more than half a million spam accounts a day and locks millions of accounts suspected of being fake weekly if they can’t be verified by humans.

Last week, Mr. Musk, the CEO of Tesla Inc., said he would try to verify Twitter’s numbers and said others should do the same. Mr. Agrawal suggested that external estimates of spam accounts wouldn’t be accurate.

“Unfortunately, we don’t believe that this specific estimation can be performed externally, given the critical need to use both public and private information (which we can’t share),” Mr. Agrawal said Monday. “Externally, it’s not even possible to know which accounts are counted as mDAUs on any given day,” he added, referring to monetizable daily active users.

Mr. Musk responded with a number of tweets, with one showing a poop emoji.