Musk's team now gets busy counting fake, spammy accounts on Twitter

Annoyed at the presence of fake users on Twitter after putting the $44 billion takeover deal on hold, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Saturday that his team was busy finding out the presence of fake/spam accounts with the random sampling process.

Musk on Friday stunned the world by saying that he was putting the Twitetr take over on hold because he does not believe in Twitter findings which say that false or spam accounts represent fewer than 5 per cent of its monetisable daily active users (229 million).

He tweeted: "To find out, my team will do a random sample of 100 followers of @twitter. I invite others to repeat the same process and see what they discover".

"The bots are angry at being counted," he added.

According to Musk, he is still committed to the $44 billion acquisition of Twitter.

"Any sensible random sampling process is fine. If many people independently get similar results for per cent of fake/spam/duplicate accounts, that will be telling. I picked 100 as the sample size number, because that is what Twitter uses to calculate <5 per cent fake/spam/duplicate," he explained the random sampling process to his nearly 93 million followers.

A user pointed to him that why didn't he think about this before offering $44 billion for Twitter.

The Tesla CEO replied: "I relied upon the accuracy of Twitter's public filings".

Amid the high-voltage drama happening ever since Musk's $44 billion acquisition deal announcement, CEO Parag Agrawal said that he expects the deal to close, but "we need to be prepared for all scenarios".

--IANS

na/