Despite the hot takes about freedom of speech and democracy made in his public proclamations, privately it appeared that Musk was starting to get cold feet. On May 13, Musk publicly announced, on Twitter of course, that he would be putting the buyout deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting the calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.
Just over three weeks later on June 6, a letter was sent to Twitter HQ from Musk’s attorney threatening to terminate his agreement. It cited Twitter’s refusal to comply with requests for data on the number of spam accounts as a reason to kill the deal. Twitter would comply by agreeing to provide him with a “firehose” data stream of tweets, however, Mr. Musk would continue to cry foul.
