Another infantile tweet-assault from Elon Musk claims that his Twitter purchase “can’t move forward” because of the prevalence of fake accounts, but analysts suspect he’s trying to lower the price or refuse altogether.

When we last tested Ilona Mask’s attempt acquire Twitter and make the campaign privateMusk was himself suddenly claiming that the deal is “held” last Friday morning. What, I’m not an attorney for mergers and acquisitions, but I don’t think that’s something you can do after you’ve signed a contract. However, Musk is still stepping up his nonsense (quite literally, as seen below), saying the deal, which he has already agreed to, is more unfeasible as the Associated Press reports that Musk now says, “This deal can’t move forward.” because now he thinks there are too many fake accounts on the platform.

You should feel Twitter CEO Threshold Agraval trying to maintain his professionalism, while Elon is constantly cursing at his likes, like Agraval trying to maneuver between stone and anvil. Twitter consistently claims in its SEC documents that their best estimate of fake accounts is about 5% of the total number of daily active users. Musk responded on Twitter on Monday without any evidence that Twitter is made up of “20% fake / spam accounts” that “could be * much * higher”.

Then early this morning, on Twitter for a Tesla post, Musk said: “Yesterday the CEO of Twitter publicly refused to show evidence that <5%" of the site's users were bots, and "This deal can't move forward until it does." . Again, he says this after he already has agreed to pay $ 44 billion for the platform, and seemed to have done little due diligence.

An Associated Press report suggests that “Mask’s comments are likely to support analysts’ theories that the billionaire wants to either exit the deal or buy the company at a lower price.” In fact Musk came out and said it at a technology conference on Monday. The New York Times quotes Mask the downgrade of his proposal was “not ruled out”.

“The more questions I ask, the more my worries grow,” Musk told the audience on Monday. “So you know, after all, buying it needs to be fixed in a reasonable time and without reducing revenue.”

Meanwhile, revenues are falling. Twitter shares fell 8% on Monday alone.

The Times calls the case “public talks on tweet after tweet”, but also notes that Musk may have really interfered in it with his tweet without impulse control. In the above tweet, he is amused by the (very likely) claim that Twitter’s lawyers have revealed that his tweets violate non-disclosure agreements in his contract. The Times also adds that “Mr. Mask’s agreement with Twitter also has a non-humiliation clause that forbids him from writing negative tweets about the transaction. ” Obviously, Musk was doing nothing but a negative tweet about the deal, as it first appeared on Friday that he had caught a cold.

Well, maybe for me it’s a small blow if I insert the above tweet of Ilona Mask, where he very erroneously predicted that there would be no new cases of COVID-19 “until the end of April” in 2020 in the US. But I want to emphasize that this is still a person who can sometimes effectively miscalculate. He has lost a ton of wealth for the last six weeks. It could just be a bad time for the tech stock market, or it could be self-inflicting a mask of wounds from chaotic behavior.

There is a very good chance that he is trying to back down from this deal and save face. It will be interesting to see to what extent Twitter lawyers allow this. Of course, Twitter probably has a lot of fake accounts. But for Mask to claim that he has only now discovered that it seems to be also a fake.

Related: Surprise! Elon Musk is now hesitant to buy Twitter, the deal claims “temporarily suspended” [SFist]

Top photo: Musk visits the site of the future new giga factory Tesla near Grunheide, Germany, in September 2020. (Photo by Maja Hitij / Getty Images)