Twitter will heed Elon Musk’s request to provide internal data as part of an impasse over the mogul’s disputed $44 billion bid to buy the platform, US media reported on Wednesday.
The news comes just days after the Tesla CEO threatened to back out of the deal to buy Twitter, accusing the social network of failing to provide data on fake accounts.
The Washington Post and The New York Times and the website Axios cited anonymous sources close to the negotiations according to which the Twitter board decided to give Musk full access to internal data with the hundreds of millions of tweets that are published daily on the platform.
“This would end the biggest standoff between Musk and the board over this crucial issue that put the deal on hold,” Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush, wrote in a tweet.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal stated that less than 5% of active Twitter accounts are bots (robots), without this analysis being able to be replicated externally due to the data protection policy.
About two dozen companies already pay to access Twitter’s massive archive of internal data, which includes the log of tweets and information about accounts and devices from which messages are sent, the Post said.
Twitter declined to comment on the information, but defended its response to Musk’s suggestions, promising to complete the deal on the original terms.
Twitter’s chief legal officer told employees that a special shareholder vote to approve the acquisition could take place in late July or early August, according to Bloomberg.
Musk started making considerable noise around the fake accounts in mid-May, when he said he would back out of the transaction if his concerns weren’t addressed.
Some analysts saw Musk’s questioning of Twitter as a means to end the purchase process or as a method of pressuring Twitter to lower the acquisition price.
Twitter shares closed slightly above $40 on Wednesday, down considerably from the $54.20 that Musk agreed to pay when he signed the purchase agreement.
