Elon Musk failed to find many robots and he hid the information

• Twitter says Elon Musk was presented weeks ago with its own analysis of “bots” or fake accounts.
• His selected data firms found bots to be about 5% to 11%, Twitter’s legal team said.
• Musk has previously claimed that at least 20% of Twitter accounts are bots.

Elon Musk’s own data scientists failed to find many “bots” on Twitter, and certainly well below the billionaire’s public estimates, according to lawyers for the social media company.

The day before Musk sent his first letter to Twitter executives reneging on his deal to buy the company for $44 billion, two firms he hired to analyze massive Twitter user data reported their own estimates of bots on Twitter. The firm Cyabra told Musk it estimated that Twitter may have 11% bots or fake accounts. The second firm, CounterAction, said its analysis showed 5.3% bots, lawyers for Twitter said at a hearing Tuesday.

That’s very different from Musk’s estimates. He said in May on Twitter that fake accounts or spam accounts on the platform could be “much” higher than 20%. In his resignation letter, Musk said he pulled out of the deal because bots on the platform were “wildly higher” than Twitter’s 5% estimate disclosed publicly. Twitter has sued to force him to complete the acquisition, and the case will go to court in Delaware in October.

Both findings from Musk’s selected firms are “very much in line with Twitter’s claims,” ​​a lawyer for the company said. “None of these analyzes remotely supported what Mr. Musk told the Twitter parties and told the world in the resignation letter he delivered on July 8.”

Twitter’s lawyer went on to accuse Musk’s legal team of intentionally withholding the data during the legal battle, saying they had only been able to see the documents as of Tuesday, despite searching for them since the early days of the lawsuit.

“If there is any analysis that actually supports what Mr. Musk said on Twitter and told the world, it certainly has not been produced in discovery in this case,” the lawyer added at the hearing.

This can be a difficult argument because 11% bots is still significantly higher than Twitter’s own estimates. Musk’s legal team declined to comment.

Musk’s primary argument for ditching the deal has centered on his claims that Twitter intentionally misled him, investors and the public about the number of authentic accounts on the platform, or those run by a single human user. Musk claims this constitutes fraud and allows him to walk away from the acquisition for free. Earlier this month, the billionaire amended his countersuit against Twitter to include new allegations based on whistleblower disclosures by a former security chief at the social media company, Pieter “Mudge” Zatko.

Among the new allegations are that Twitter has not complied with a 2011 consent decree with the FTC regarding its data security, and that it does not have the proper intellectual property licenses for some important machine learning work. Musk now says those issues also allow him to pull out of the deal entirely. Legal experts are not convinced that any of Musk’s claims are strong enough to win this case.

Twitter has said it investigated and addressed all of Zatko’s allegations when he raised them during his year at the company, and it is now looking into any connection between Zatko and Musk or his advisers.

While speculation continues that an out-of-court settlement could happen between the two sides, the case is still scheduled for a five-day trial beginning on October 17.

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