Elon Musk’s Twitter plan could go ahead

If the details on the social media platform's actual user accounts can be confirmed, Elon Musk'sMusk's deal to buy Twitter may still go ahead.

Musk wants to know how many are spam bots and how many are real people.

The billionaire CEO of Tesla agreed to buy Twitter for $44 billion in April, but has been trying to back out of the deal since July, accusing Twitter of misleading his team about the true size of its user base and other problems he said amounted to fraud and breach of contract.

He was sued last month by Twitter to complete the acquisition and Musk countersuaded.

The two sides are going to a trial in a Delaware court in October.

Musk tweeted on Saturday that if Twitter simply provides their method of sampling 100 accounts and how they are confirmed to be real, the deal should proceed on original terms. If it turns out their SEC filings are materially false, then it should not. Musk, who has more than 100 million followers, went on to challenge CEO Parag Agrawal in a public debate about the Twitter bot percentage. Saturday, Twitter did not make a comment. The company has disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission an estimate that fewer than 5% of user accounts are fake or spam, with a disclaimer that it could be higher. Musk waived his right to further due diligence when he signed the merger agreement in April.

In details about Musk's countersuit, he accuses Twitter of intentionally miscounting the number of spam accounts it hosts in order to juice its user metrics, as part of its scheme to mislead investors about the company's prospects. He also claims that Twitter's reliance on the metric mDAU, or monetizable daily active Twitter users, is misleading in and of itself.

In a filing in Delaware Chancery Court, Twitter called Musk's reasoning a story, imagined in an effort to escape a merger agreement that Musk no longer found attractive.