Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX CEO, has been locked in a legal battle with Twitter after the world’s richest man made an offer to buy the social media company for $44 billion and then backed out over the number of bots on the platform. Thus far, Twitter has maintained that there’s no way to track all bots on the platform, though Musk has claimed that the numbers are much higher than what the board made public.

Whistleblowers told The Washington Post how Twitter keeps track of spam and bots internally, across the services, and it is called “prevalence”. The number differs from the one shared with Wall Street and as per a memo The Post obtained, the report was shared with members of the board. 

The entrepreneur shared this, saying “So spam prevalence *was* shared with the board, but the board chose not disclose that to the public …” 

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Along with that, Musk posted an image of a rabbit in a top hat, saying “Give a little whistle”. 

Musk didn’t hold back in the comments either, replying to a now-deleted tweet that the author was “yet another” verified bot on the platform. Another individual pointed out how there are crypto scammers pretending to be Musk, on Twitter, and the social media platform locks accounts which change their display pictures to Musk’s, as a deterrent. To this, the innovator replied with a laughing emoticon. 

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One Twitter user even asked whether Musk’s post was about the Tesla cyberwhistle, which the 51-year-old has promoted before. 

Musk replied, “In case anyone feels like buying a fine whistle …”. Earlier, he’d shared an image of the whistle, captioning it “Blow the whistle on Tesla!”. Musk had also provided a link taking users to the Tesla site so they could get the $50 whistle.