Speaking at an employee meeting, Twitter’s top lawyer Vijaya Gadde on Wednesday said that the company anticipates holding a shareholder vote before August to vote on Elon Musk’s $44 billion proposal to buy the company.
During the internal meeting, the company also discussed its ongoing improvements in its defence against fake accounts and accounts that spread cryptocurrency spam, according to Reuters.
Musk’s interest in the microblogging platform became public in early April when he announced that he had purchased over 9 percent of the company’s stock on the open market. Soon after, Musk announced his bid to buy Twitter, with financing from various entities such as Oracle Co-founder Larry Ellison, California-based VC firm Sequoia and Chinese cryptocurrency exchange Binance.
In recent days, Musk has been threatening to withdraw his bid for the company over a quarterly report that stated that only 5 percent of all monetisable daily users were spam bots. Musk is convinced that the number is much larger than that, and has said that the deal can’t be completed without access to the data set and independent verification of the analysis.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal publicly defended the analysis, saying that a third party could not conduct it since it includes confidential private company information. Additionally, Twitter has made clear that its spam bot analysis numbers were available to Musk before he made his deal.
Elon Musk will have to pay a termination fee of $1 billion if he withdraws his bid unilaterally.
Despite the public nature of the disagreements between Musk and Twitter’s current executives, former CEO and Co-founder Jack Dorsey has openly supported both Musk’s purchase and Agrawal’s abilities to run Twitter.
