The exchange played out in tweets as Musk's $44 billion buy
of Twitter remained "temporarily on hold," pending questions over the
social media company's estimates of the number of fake accounts, or
"bots."
"It appears the spam/bot issue is cascading and clearly
making the Twitter deal a confusing one," Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said in
a note to investors.
"The bot issue at the end of the day was known by the
New York City cab driver and feels more to us like the 'dog ate the homework'
excuse to bail on the Twitter deal or talk down a lower price."
Twitter chief executive Parag Agrawal said the platform
suspends more than a half-million seemingly bogus accounts daily, usually
before they are even seen, and locks millions more weekly that fail checks to
make sure they are controlled by humans and not by software.
Internal measures show that fewer than five percent of
accounts active on any given day at Twitter are spam, but that analysis can't
be replicated externally due to the need to keep user data private, Agrawal
contended.
Musk, who has said bots plague Twitter and that he would
make getting rid of them a priority if he owned the platform, responded to that
tweet by Agrawal with a poo emoji.
"So how do advertisers know what they're getting for
their money?" Musk tweeted in a subsequent response about the need to
prove Twitter users are real people.
"This is fundamental to the financial health of
Twitter."
The process used to estimate how many accounts are bots has
been shared with Musk, Agrawal said.
The chief of SpaceX as well as Tesla, Musk is currently
listed by Forbes as the world's wealthiest person, with a fortune of some $230
billion, much of it in Tesla stock.
Seen by his champions as an iconoclastic genius and by his
critics as an erratic megalomaniac, Musk surprised many investors in April with
his pursuit of Twitter.
Musk has described his motivation as stemming from a desire
to ensure freedom of speech on the platform and to boost monetisation of an
Internet site that is influential in media and political circles but has
struggled to attain profitable growth.
Musk said he favoured lifting the ban on Donald Trump, who
was kicked off the platform in January 2021 shortly after the former US
president's efforts to overturn his election defeat led to the January 6
assault on the US Capitol.