Twitter in its lawsuit against Tesla CEO Elon Musk for pulling out of the $44 billion acquisition deal used the infamous poop emoji as evidence he had “disparaged” the company.
Twitter sued Musk in an attempt to force him to complete his $44 billion takeover of the social media company by accusing him of “outlandish” and “bad faith” actions that have caused the platform irreparable harm and “wreaked havoc” on its stock price.
On May 16 Musk used the emoji in response to a tweet from Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal’s statement about bot accounts.
Musk’s lawyer had cited Twitter’s non-disclosure of information about bot accounts as the main reason for backing out of the deal.
In a Twitter thread, Agrawal said rooting out bot accounts was in the company’s and well as 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.”
“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.),” he added.
Musk replied to Agrawal’s tweets with a single, smiling poop emoji.
💩
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 16, 2022
In a separate Tweet, he wrote: “So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money? This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter.”
The tweet was one of several that Twitter used as evidence to prove he had repeatedly disparaged the company.
“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,” a complaint reads.
Ifunanya Ikueze is an Engineer, Safety Professional, Writer, Investor, Entrepreneur and Educator.
