The Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk who entered a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion and later tried to back out of the agreement on the ground that there lot of bots which are spam accounts on the on Twitter platform which the shareholders failed to disclose, used an online software to estimate the number of bots on the platform.
Unfortunately, the online tool Musk used once flagged his own account as a bot, Twitter alleged in its rebuttal against him.
The Washington Post reported on Friday that Twitter argued Musk used a public internet service called the "Botometer" to estimate the number of bots on the platform. Twitter's lawyers alleged that the Botometer "earlier this year designated Musk himself as highly likely to be a bot."
The Botometer uses a method different from that which Twitter uses to determine and estimate bots. Botometer, which was developed Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University, states on its website that it is a machine learning algorithm trained to calculate a score of how likely it is an account is a bot based on its Twitter activity.
Musk had indicated his intention to pull out of the deal, which he entered in April citing number of bots and spam accounts on Twitter as his major reason before quickly sowing doubt about the agreement and officially attempting to back out in July. Twitter sued Musk on July 12 over his attempt to exit the deal, and Musk countersued, arguing that the social-media giant lied to him.
Musk in his lawsuit argued that the company intentionally misled investors about the number of spam accounts and bots on the platform, as part of a "scheme to mislead investors about the company's prospects," as Insider previously reported.
Musk claimed that Twitter has 65 million fewer users than the company claimed, and said only 16 million people each day see advertisements on the platform. Twitter says it has about 238 million monetizable daily active users (mDAU), up 16% from the second quarter of last year. It maintains that just about 5% of accounts are bots.
"That has been Twitter's strategy all along: to distract from and obfuscate the truth about its disclosures — first from its investors and then from the Musk Parties when they began to discern the truth," Musk's lawsuit claims.
Twitter in its rebuttal filed shortly after Musk's lawsuit called Musk's accusations "a story" to "escape a merger agreement that Musk no longer found attractive once the stock market — and along with it, his massive personal wealth — declined in value."
A Delaware court has fixed October to decide whether Musk can back out of his deal to acquire the platform. The agreement included a $1 billion breakup fee should either party back out of the deal, though Musk doesn't believe he should have to pay that cost.