Elon Musk will directly answer questions from Twitter employees during all-hands meeting this week

Elon Musk will speak to Twitter employees this week for the first time since launching his $44 billion bid for the company in April, Twitter Chief Executive Parag Agrawal told staff on Monday. 

The company’s virtual all-hands meeting is scheduled for Thursday, and Musk will take questions directly from Twitter employees, Insider reported. 

It comes after Twitter said last week that it anticipated a shareholder vote on the sale by early August. 

Twitter confirmed that Musk would attend the company all-hands meeting this week. Twitter’s chief marketing officer and head of people Leslie Berland will moderate the call. 

Earlier this month, Musk warned Twitter that he might walk away from his deal to acquire Twitter if it fails to provide data on spam and fake accounts that he has been seeking. 

Back in April, during an all-hands meeting with employees, Agrawal was seen quelling employee anger after workers demanded answers to how managers planned to handle an anticipated mass exodus prompted by Musk. 

Last week, Twitter anticipated holding a shareholder vote on its $44 billion sale to Musk as soon as early August, top executives told employees.

Musk’s lawyers warned Twitter that he might walk away from the acquisition if the company fails to provide the data he seeks on spam and fake accounts.

But the social media firm appears to be intent on executing the sale – even promising to give Musk direct access to its “firehose” of real-time data in order to determine himself the number of ‘bots’ on the platform.

A Twitter spokesperson referred DailyMail.com to an earlier company statement saying that the company plans to fully enforce the terms of the April 25 contract Musk signed to buy the company at $54.20 per share.

‘We believe this agreement is in the best interest of all shareholders. We intend to close the transaction and enforce the merger agreement at the agreed price and terms,’ the statement said. 

Despite Musk’s threats to walk away, Twitter has the option of taking him to court if he refuses to follow through on his agreement to buy the company. 

The outcome of such a move is unclear, as Musk could make various arguments about why he is not bound to carry out the agreement. 

‘Twitter has and will continue to cooperatively share information with Mr. Musk to consummate the transaction in accordance with the terms of the merger agreement,’ the company said. 

Part of that data is the so-called ‘firehose,’ a data set comprising all tweets on the platform analyzed by different parameters, such as devices of users or profiles of accounts that publish tweets, according to people familiar with the matter.

Twitter sells this data to social media monitoring companies as part of its licensing business but plans to furnish it to Musk for free as part of the information exchange, the sources said. 

The firehose does not contain confidential information, such personal details of Twitter users that are not public or how often they verify their accounts, the sources added.

The firehose, which is currently available to a handful of companies for an undisclosed subscription fee, could be released to Musk as soon as this week, the Washington Post reported. 

Meanwhile, a new study suggests that about 10 percent of Twitter ‘s active accounts are posting ‘spam content’.

London-based data analytics firm GlobalData said in a report on Wednesday that its mathematical model found that spam accounts are roughly double the 5 percent share claimed by Twitter.

Musk has been threatening to walk away from his agreement to buy the company unless Twitter backs up its estimate that false or spam accounts comprise less than 5 percent of its user base. 

‘The precise proportion of spam accounts is difficult to compute, as it is almost impossible to confirm the identity of the entity behind a tweet handle,’ said GlobalData senior data scientist Sidharth Kumar.