In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission , Elon Musk formally proposed to suspend plans to buy Twitter for $44 billion. According to Musk’s attorneys, the reason for the suspension was Twitter’s “false and misleading representations.” On the Twitter side, the board of directors issued a statement that it still intends to complete the merger transaction and will go to court with Musk for this. The board also said it was confident it would prevail in a Delaware court.

The key to Twitter and Musk’s disagreement for months is how many users on Twitter are “bots.” Twitter has long claimed that bot accounts account for less than 5% of its total daily users, and has even transcribed internal data streams and forwarded them to Musk for analysis. But according to the document, after an initial analysis by Musk’s consultants, Musk has strong reasons to believe that the proportion of fake and spam accounts among daily users is well above 5%. 

The document further asserts that Twitter has not provided Musk with enough information to conduct a complete and comprehensive analysis, but at the moment it appears Twitter is vastly underestimating the number of fake and spam accounts. However, there is no concrete evidence provided in the document.

It’s unclear what will happen next, but according to the Financial Times , Twitter is willing to “declare war on Musk” in order to complete the deal, so it looks like the two sides are going to court and fighting a protracted legal battle is the most likely outcome. . 

This may not be good news for Twitter, which is already in a bit of a bad state , and it’s hard to say whether Musk will be able to take advantage of the platform and treat its employees well if it forces Musk to buy a company he doesn’t want. .