Elon Musk says his use of a poop emoji in reaction to Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal's statement about bot accounts was to call "bull----" on Agrawal's claim.
Musk made the comment on Thursday in reply to a post that Twitter submitted the emoji response in its lawsuit against Musk as evidence of "disparaging behavior" toward the company in violation of the merger agreement.
Twitter has sued Musk to force him to complete his $44 billion takeover of the social media giant.
"Since signing the merger agreement, Musk has repeatedly disparaged Twitter and the deal, creating business risk for Twitter and downward pressure on its share price," Twitter's attorneys argue in the complaint filed on Tuesday.
Musk backed out of the deal last week, citing concerns about spam accounts.
Agrawal on May 16 had been discussing the method Twitter uses to detect its bot accounts when Musk responded with a poop emoji. His lawyers argued last week that Twitter had failed to comply with requests for information needed to verify the number of fake accounts.
Agrawal said rooting out bot accounts was in the company's and users' best interest.
"As such, we are strongly incentivized to detect and remove as much spam as we possibly can, every single day," the statement began. "Anyone who suggests otherwise is just wrong."
He added: "We suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before any of you even see them on Twitter. We also lock millions of accounts each week that we suspect may be spam — if they can't pass human verification challenges (captchas, phone verification, etc.)"
Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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