Elon Musk threatens to cancel Twitter deal entirely as he asks for more information on spam and fake accounts

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk arrives at Westhafen Event & Convention Center on 2 September, 2020 in Berlin, Germany (Getty Images)

Elon Musk has suggested he could pull his deal to buy Twitter entirely, in a letter asking for more information on the platform.

Mr Musk has repeatedly suggested that the site has more spam and fake accounts than Twitter has publicly admitted.

Now he has written to Twitter, through its chief legal officer, asking for more information on how many of the accounts on the platform are actually real.

Twitter has offered to provide more detailed information on its own testing methodologies, either in writing or by speaking to the billionaire. But Mr Musk said that he wanted to do the testing himself, calling Twitter’s testing methodologies “lax”.

He demanded that he is instead given private Twitter data to allow him to conduct that analysis. And he indicated that if he is not satisfied he could cancel the deal entirely, walking away from his purchase of Twitter.

If the company does not provide the information Mr Musk has asked for, he will consider the company to be “actively resisting and thwarting his information rights”, his representatives wrote.

He would consider the refusal to hand over the data to be a “clear material breach of Twitter’s obligations under the merger agreement”, the letter reads, and so would reserve the right to terminate the agreement.

Many analysts have suggested that Mr Musk’s motivations in asking for further information about fake accounts is in either walking away from the deal, or renegotiating the price down.

Since Mr Musk’s initial offer, a variety of tech companies – including Twitter, and Mr Musk’s own SpaceX and Tesla – have seen turbulent stock market conditions that have pulled down their value.

While Mr Musk has gestured towards a potential change of price, he has publicly focused on the estimates of spam or fake accounts specifically. Likewise, the new letter only points to the spam and fake account estimates.