Elon Musk is in trouble with Twitter’s legal department

Elon Musk is not above making new headlines every week. Only recently we reported on the latest developments surrounding the Twitter purchase, which the Tesla boss is still vehemently pursuing according to his own statements. However, his ambitions to buy the short messaging service for $44 billion have softened a bit. As a reason for putting the purchase of Twitter on hold for the time being, he cited dubious information from the company regarding its users. Particularly with regard to the number of accounts, behind which there are no real users, doubts suddenly arose in the mind of the native South African, which he of course had to communicate publicly right away. This approach is now a huge thorn in the side of the lawyers at Twitter.

Did Elon Musk reveal confidential information?

In his tweets, the dazzling big-tech entrepreneur felt compelled to justify his temporary interruption of the purchase ambitions to Twitter. In doing so, he made clear hints about not quite believing the number of bot and fake accounts, which Twitter puts at under five percent. Twitter’s legal department doesn’t like this at all and summarily accuses Musk of breach of confidentiality. This has Musk, how should it be otherwise, communicated over the weekend at Twitter itself.

An expensive hesitation

About the action of the tech billionaire, however, is not only the legal department, but also chief executives and shareholders of Twitter annoyed. After all, Musk’s sudden hesitation caused Twitter’s stock prices to slide sharply. The Tesla CEO tried to counteract this effect a short time later by once again underlining his purchase ambitions under pressure from his lawyers. However, this did not really help much. You don’t have to be a stock market expert to understand why Twitter’s share prices took a real dive. After all, many investors now feel unsettled, who had assumed real further development with Elon Musk at the helm.

Furthermore, Musk’s hesitation already seems to violate the contract surrounding the takeover. This contract stipulates that the purchase process cannot be suddenly put on hold without further ado. However, the statement about the number of bot and fake accounts is particularly bad, because it can almost be described as defamation. After all, these are considered a serious malus on social networks, which severely damages the value. By the way, the value is not new for Twitter. For some time now, Twitter has always put the figure at under five percent. So why should anything have changed now?

Musk announces own investigation

After Elon Musk’s doubts, some experts immediately became alert. After all, there may be an attempt behind it to get out of the affair in a face-saving way. Maybe the South African-born CEO has gambled too high and can’t easily get the agreed 44 billion US dollars together? Or perhaps he simply wants to know that he has an ace up his sleeve that will give him a subsequent price reduction. What is certain is that Elon Musk now wants to check his alleged doubts himself. He announced that he would now commission “experts” from his own ranks to check the information from Twitter.

For this purpose, he wants to randomly select 100 users who follow him. These will then be used as examples to see how high the proportion of fake and bota accounts is. Statisticians will throw their hands up in horror at the way the experiment is set up. The whole thing is not really representative. Musk also knows that, which is why he felt compelled to justify himself again. This time, he revealed that the test setup is similar to that of Twitter. The short message service also only takes a close look at 100 followers. The disclosure of this secret did not please the lawyers at Twitter either.