The Musk-Twitter deal stumbles its way onto the next potentially horrendous stage. To tell you the truth, this is beginning to look more like a competitive argument between two 3-year-olds, rather than a multi-billion industry deal. So now, Twitter is supposedly set to fire back at Musk by supplying him with a ‘Full Firehose’ of Tweets to let him determine the validity of their 5% fake accounts claim.

If you recall, earlier this week, Musk’s legal filed an official statement to the SEC, explaining why Musk chooses to no longer push through with his $44 billion takeover due to Twitter not being able to provide enough supporting details to back up its claim on bots and fake accounts.

Is A Firehose Enough? 

Musk’s team asserts that such information is critical, as Twitter relies on its reach data to maximize its core ads business. They argue that if a significant proportion of its users are not really people, then that drastically alters the deal. So far, Twitter has stood by its claim, which it says has been measured via SEC processes and has been accepted in the past, on top of remaining at a static amount since 2013. Now, it’s looking to hand over all information to Musk’s team.

“After a weeks-long impasse, Twitter’s board plans to comply with Elon Musk’s demands for internal data by offering access to its full “firehose,” the massive stream of data comprising more than 500 million tweets posted each day, according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking.”

What Musk does with all that info is up to him, but this is what Twitter’s legal team advises is the ‘best course of action’ to appeal to Musk’s demands and hopefully have the deal go through. With that data, Musk and Co. should be able to determine the accuracy of Twitter’s fake accounts claim. What happens after that is up to chance; like with everything related to this deal, it’s all but easy. What if it was actually 10 or 15%? Wouldn’t that only reinforce Musk’s decision to back out?

While some have noted that Musk won’t b able to exit the deal due to him waiving various due diligence to speed up the transaction, he believes that it won’t really hold up in that respect. While he’s likely right, the real challenge would be proving that Twitter ‘intentionally’ misreported its numbers to gain a more favorable market position. Even if Musk and his team were able to create a detection process to determine the validity of Twitter’s claim, the latter would only respond as if they were oblivious to the fact, hence ruling out suspicions of ‘acting with ill-intent.

There’s another argument – if Musk can prove that a ‘Major Event’ has significantly altered Twitter’s value, then that would change the initial parameters of the deal. If he does create a process that detects a real value more than Twitter’s 5%, perhaps that could be considered a significant event, giving him the legal right to back out. Again, it’s a terribly hot mess. If it were us, we’d simply save everyone the hassle and stress and just outright cancel everything.

The Wrap

Twitter also has other headaches to deal with, including a committee request dated back to January 6th asking for internal communications regarding Tweet moderation messages about the Capitol attack. However, such issues don’t seem to bother Musk that much – you can hardly even tell if the events of his deal faze him because he’s too busy using the very platform he’s being so iffy with.

We’ll he still be the next owner of Twitter? Everything considered, that still seems the likely outcome, though whether that’s a good thing, given what we’ve seen so far, is up for debate.

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Sources 

https://bit.ly/398iyM5