Another Noisy Twitter Acquisition Battle... Musk "Received Complaint for Breach of Confidentiality Agreement"

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla. Photo by AP, Yonhap News

[Asia Economy Intern Reporter Kim Se-eun] Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, reported that he received a complaint for violating the confidentiality agreement related to the acquisition contract from Twitter.

On the 14th (local time), Musk stated on his social media, "Twitter's legal team just called me," and added, "They complained that my disclosure of the sample size of 100 for bot (spam automatic posting software) verification was a violation of the Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA)."

Last month, Musk announced the agreement to acquire Twitter, but on the 13th, he declared, "I will temporarily pause the acquisition deal while waiting for specific evidence supporting the calculation that spam and fake accounts on Twitter are less than 5% of the total users."

He also proposed, "My team will randomly sample 100 followers from Twitter's official account to check the status of spam and fake accounts," and suggested, "Others should do the same and let's see what results come out."

When a netizen asked about the procedure for analyzing the results, he replied, "Anything is fine as long as it is a reasonable random sampling."

Musk explained, "I set the sample size to 100 because this was the method used when estimating that Twitter's fake, spam, and duplicate accounts are less than 5% of the total users."

However, Twitter judged this as a 'violation of the confidentiality agreement.'

Since 2013, Twitter has estimated spam accounts to be less than 5% of users, but Musk argues that this estimate could be incorrect.

In the industry, there is speculation that Musk, who agreed to acquire Twitter for $44 billion (approximately 56.5 trillion KRW), may have raised this issue late to renegotiate the acquisition price.

Musk agreed to buy Twitter shares at $54.20 per share, but since then, Twitter's stock price has steadily declined, closing at $40.72 on the 13th (local time).

On the 13th, he stated on his Twitter account, "I am still committed to acquiring Twitter."

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