Elon Musk, during an event at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, USA, on Thursday, October 10, 2019.
Bloomberg / Getty
In the midst of his Twitter acquisition, Elon Musk called on the US Securities and Exchange Commission to look into social media user numbers.
Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, wrote in an informal Twitter poll on Tuesday: “Twitter claims that> 95% of active daily users are real, unique people. Does anyone have such experience? ”He then said in response to a follower who suggested that the SEC launch an investigation:“ Hello @SECGov, is anyone home? ”
The SEC has been aware of Twitter’s murky performance for years.
Musk agreed to buy Twitter last month for $ 44 billion, but has since said the deal is on hold as he looks at bots, spam and counterfeits. Twitter said it still expects the deal to move to the agreed price of $ 54.20 per share.
Investors are dumping the stock on fears that Musk will withdraw from the deal, which will force him to pay a $ 1 billion fee. Shares of Twitter have given up all their profits since Musk first revealed his 9% stake in the company early last month.
Shares of Twitter rose 2.5% to $ 38.33 on Tuesday, closing at $ 39.31 on April 1, the last trading session before Musk unveiled his minority stake.
In its financial report for the first quarter of this year, Twitter acknowledged that it had a number of “fake or spam accounts” on its platform, along with legitimate monetized daily active users or users (mDAUs). The company said it estimated that the average value of fake or spam accounts was less than 5% of mDAU during this period.
Twitter also admitted that it has overestimated the number of users by 1.4 million to 1.9 million users in the last 3 years.
“In March 2019, we launched a feature that allowed people to link several separate accounts together to conveniently switch between accounts,” Twitter revealed. “An error was made at that time, so the actions taken through the primary account resulted in all linked accounts being reported as mDAU.”
Musk has repeatedly expressed his contempt for the SEC, including on Twitter in October 2018, when he called the agency a “commission for enriching short sales” and in July 2020, when he wrote: “SEC, a three-letter acronym, the middle word is Elon “.
The SEC previously accused Musk of securities fraud in 2018 after he tweeted that he was considering making a private car company at $ 420 a share and had “secured financing”. They reached an agreement to resolve the issue. But Musk said the financial regulator’s ongoing investigations were harassment.
WATCH: Elon Musk doesn’t seem to have any evidence for his claims about bots
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