Elon Musk Sister Tosca Speaks About on-Hold Twitter Deal

• Elon Musk terminated his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter on Friday.
• His sister Tosca talked about her family in an interview that was published on Saturday.
• Tosca said she has high hopes for her brother’s business ventures.

Elon Musk terminated the Twitter deal on Friday alleging that the company was in “breach of multiple provisions” of the original agreement.

Tosca Musk has high hopes for her brother’s business endeavours.

Elon Musk’s sister Tosca talked about her family and her thoughts on Elon’s Twitter agreement in an interview that was published on Saturday.

Elon, 51, appeared at the Allen & Co. Sun Valley Conference on Saturday. The businessman spoke a variety of topics during the exclusive conference, but Insider notes that his Twitter deal wasn’t one of them.

In fact, Elon made a point of avoiding the subject altogether in his interview with Sam Altman, the CEO of the artificial intelligence company OpenAI, which Musk co-founded.

Elon was more concerned with creating a society on Mars and his conviction that the birth rate on Earth needed to be increased, a source told Reuters.

“It just seems like an absolute mess,” said one senior media executive to the outlet. “The guy makes his own rules … I’d hate to be Twitter, where you have to take this guy seriously.”

Musk said that Twitter had violated “several clauses” of the original agreement in a court filing on Friday, citing his desire to end the $44 billion arrangement.

In the complaint, Musk complains that Twitter didn’t offer his team enough data to conduct their own analysis and didn’t provide enough information on the number of bogus accounts and bots on the social media network.

“Sometimes Twitter has ignored Mr. Musk’s requests, sometimes it has rejected them for reasons that appear to be unjustified, and sometimes it has claimed to comply while giving Mr. Musk incomplete or unusable information,” reads the filing.

A third of Twitter’s talent acquisition staff was laid off, a general recruiting freeze was put in place, “two key, high-ranking employees” were fired, and more, according to the document, all without Musk’s approval.

The Twitter Board has announced that it will now sue Musk to guarantee that the purchase closes.

“We are committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plan to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement. We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery,” the Twitter Board said in a statement on Friday.

The announcement followed the CEO of SpaceX’s statement that the $44 billion acquisition was “temporarily on hold” for over two months.

During the first quarter of 2018, less than 5% of the social media platform’s monetizable daily active users were made up of fraudulent or spam accounts, according to a Reuters piece Musk shared on April 13.

At the time, Musk — who said he was “still committed to acquisition” — shared that his purchase was “temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5 percent of users.”

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Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of usershttps://t.co/Y2t0QMuuyn

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 13, 2022

He went on to note that in order to get to the bottom of the issue, “my team will do a random sample of 100 followers of @twitter,” and invited other social media users to do the same to “see what they discover.”

Musk responded in response to a question about why he chose 100 followers: “I choose 100 as the sample size number, because that is what Twitter uses to compute.

Tensions between Twitter and Musk seemed to be simmering in the days that followed.

The billionaire posted on Twitter on May 14 that “Twitter legal just called to complain that I broke their NDA by exposing the bot check sample size is 100!”

Musk stated that he had “yet to see *any* analysis that has that has fake/spam/duplicates at 5 percent” in another message over the weekend.

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The company’s guesstimate of spam accounts was then detailed in a lengthy thread released by Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal on May 16. Agrawal stood by this estimate.

“Our estimate is based on multiple human reviews (in replicate) of thousands of accounts, that are sampled at random, consistently over time,” Agrawal wrote. “We do this every quarter, and we have been doing this for many years.”The CEO went on to share that each review utilized “both public and private data (eg, IP address, phone number, geolocation, client/browser signatures, what the account does when it’s active…) to make a determination on each account.”

“Unfortunately, we don’t believe that this specific estimation can be performed externally, given the critical need to use both public and private information (which we can’t share),” Agrawal wrote. “Externally, it’s not even possible to know which accounts are counted as mDAUs on any given day.”

Our actual internal estimates for the last four quarters were all well under 5% – based on the methodology outlined above. The error margins on our estimates give us confidence in our public statements each quarter.

— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022

This tweet in particular got a rise out of Musk, who responded with a poop emoji.

“So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money?” he added. “This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter.”

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The following day, Elon Musk said that he would need “proof” that less than 5 percent of Twitter’s accounts are fake in order to proceed.

“My offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate,” Musk wrote on Twitter. “Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does.”

However, on the same day, Twitter shared that they remained “committed to completing the transaction on the agreed price and terms as promptly as practicable.”