Musk to address Twitter employees for 1st time this week

Elon Musk will address Twitter employees Thursday for the first time since the billionaire and Tesla CEO offered $44 billion to buy the social media platform, the company said Tuesday.

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal announced an all-hands meeting to employees in an email on Monday, saying they’d be able to submit questions in advance, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Musk reached a deal to acquire Twitter in April, but he has clashed with the company repeatedly since then over the number of bots, or fake accounts, that exist on the social media platform. Musk said he was putting the deal on hold on May 13, saying he needed more data from the company about those bot accounts.

It was not clear if this week’s meeting means that the two sides have come closer together on resolving that issue. Shares of Twitter have been trading well below the $54.20 per share that Musk has offered amid on Wall Street that the deal will be consummated.

Shares of Twitter Inc. rose almost 3% before the opening bell Tuesday to $38.02.

Multiple outlets reported last week that Twitter planned to offer Musk access to its “firehose” of raw data on hundreds of millions of daily tweets.