Elon Musk continued to sound off about the actual number of automated bots and fake accounts on Twitter Inc. over the weekend, and said Twitter’s legal team accused him of breaking a nondisclosure agreement.
On Friday, Musk tweeted that his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter was “temporarily on hold” while he investigated whether bots, spam and fake accounts actually make up less than 5% of the service’s accounts, as Twitter has claimed. That sent Twitter shares TWTR, -9.67% sinking nearly 10% on the day.
Read: Opinion: Elon Musk is likely trying to get a lower price for Twitter
Later Friday, Musk tweeted that he was conducting a random sampling of 100 accounts to check how many were not legitimate, noting he used that number because “that is what Twitter uses to calculate
On Saturday, he tweeted: “Twitter legal just called to complain that I violated their NDA by revealing the bot check sample size is 100! This actually happened.”
The Tesla Inc. TSLA, +5.71% chief executive again questioned Twitter’s numbers in a tweet Saturday, saying “I have yet to see *any* analysis that has fake/spam/duplicates at later added “There is some chance it might be over 90% of daily active users, which is the metric that matters to advertisers.”