Tesla billionaire Elon Musk has challenged Twitter's CEO to a debate about the number of spam accounts on the social media platform.
The Telsa billionaire also started a Twitter poll which he pinned to his profile, asking his 102 million followers whether or not they believed "Less than 5 % of Twitter daily users are fake/spam".
In what can be best described as a very modern age duel, Musk tweeted Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal on Saturday, August 6, saying: “I hereby challenge @paraga to a public debate about the Twitter bot percentage.
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“Let him prove to the public that Twitter has <5 percent fake or spam users!”
He then pinned his poll, which at the time of writing, out of 733,768 votes, 34.8% voted yes, while 65.2% voted no.
This comes amid of the legal battle embroiling the South African businessman and the social media giant, following Musk's withdrawal from a deal to take over Twitter worth $44billion (£36.5billion).
The social media giant is suing Musk for bailing on the deal. Meanwhile, Musk is is counter suing Twitter.
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The SpaceX founder agreed to by Twitter for $52.20 (£43.24) per share in April but then bailed on the deal on July 8, reasoning Twitter did not provide enough information on the number of spam and fake accounts, which makes the number of active users unclear.
Mr Musk further claims this was done as part of a “scheme to mislead investors about the company’s prospects”, and alleges Twitter's recent redundancies are at odds with Twitter's responsibility to continue running the company normally during the buyout as well, reports The Express.
Twitter claims bot accounts make up less than 5% of the platform's 238 million users.
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Musk argues that this number stand 10%, therefore reducing the number of users seeing advertisements by 65million.
Bret Taylor, Twitter’s Chairman of the Board tweeted that Elon Musk claims are “factually inaccurate, legally insufficient and commercially irrelevant. We look forward to the trial in Delaware Court.”
The case goes to court on October 17 in Delaware and will determine whether or not Elon Musk will have to go through with his deal to buy Twitter.
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