The front and back between Twitter and Elon Musk continue as Twitter now in a turn of events has decided to give Elon Musk access to their ‘firehose’ of internal data.
This internal data consists of intimate and precise information about the number of bot accounts, fake accounts, and more. This ‘firehose’ also has data about the hundreds of millions of tweets that are made on the platform every day. The news came just a few days after the Tesla CEO’s warning of abandoning the deal if he doesn’t see more information about the bot accounts. As the $44 billion deal had a sword hanging over its head, Twitter came in with this offer.
Earlier in May, we saw Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and Mr. Musk exchanging a few words on Twitter about the bot issues. Some people saw the whole thing as just the Tesla Chief’s attempt to renegotiate the deal. In an SEC filing, Mr. Musk stated that he received insufficient information on automated accounts and accused Twitter of breaching their April agreement. It’s also interesting to know that Twitter prior to this deal only chose to share this data with social media monitoring companies, who used this data to understand the ads that should be fed to each user. The firehose does not include private user information such as IP addresses which is mainly important for Twitter to assess bot accounts.
Mr. Musk is still a huge skeptic of Parag Agrawal’s claim of there are less than 5% of bot or fake accounts on Twitter. This news, first reported by Washington Post also talks about how Musk’s lawyers wrote a letter to the Twitter legal chief. The letter talked about how Mr. Musk has still not got the information he has repeatedly been requesting since May 9. Twitter is still pretty confident in themselves that the deal will go as planned as they have already set for a shareholder vote in late July or early August. The social media giant finished its official trading day a little above 40 dollars as opposed to the $54.20 Musk agreed to pay when the deal was inked initially.
