Elon Musk's Poop Emoji Used Against Him by Twitter

By Tyler Fischer

On July 8, Elon Musk terminated his deal to buy Twitter after previously pledging to purchase the social media company for $44 billion, about a fifth of his net worth. Immediately after announcing this, Twitter responded by announcing that it was pursuing legal action, and now that legal action has begun, which in turn has provided court documents. Within these court documents, Twitter cites a "disparaging tweet" as a means to demonstrate that Musk backed out of the deal simply because it no longer "servers his personal interests." The tweet in question is a poop emoji.

The court documents specifically cite an interaction between Musk and Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal that happened back in May where the latter took to the social media platform to address Musk's concerns that Twitter wasn't being accurate and transparent about how many fake bot accounts there were on the platform. Using a very long Twitter thread, Agrawal explained Twitter can't divulge information about how many fake bot accounts there are on the platform due to the mixture of both public and private data that can't be shared. In other words, if Twitter does know how many fake accounts are active on the platform at any given time, it's not going to divulge this information. This part is what Musk replied to with a poop emoji, before raising the question of how are advertisers on the platform supposed to know what they are getting for their money.

This brings us to the aforementioned court documents. On Page 33, you can see a screenshot of the interaction above used as evidence of Musk's bad intentions. As for Musk, he's adamant he's backed out of the deal because of the uncertainty over the number of fake bot accounts.

"As set forth above, defendants materially breached their obligation to use their reasonable best efforts to complete the merger," reads the document. "[Musk] materially breached their obligations to seek Twitter consent to public comments about the deal and refrain from disparaging the company or its representatives in Tweets about the merger."

It remains to be seen what will come of this lawsuit. That said, and as always, we will keep you updated. In the meantime, feel free to leave a comment or two letting us know what you think or, alternatively, let me know over on Twitter @Tyler_Fischer_. 

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