Musk met with Twitter executives for three days before making the offer

Elon Musk said he would not proceed with Twitter's $44 billion acquisition until he received more details about the platform's fake accounts but held a three-day meeting with the company's top executives to discuss the deal before publicly announcing his offer of a new securities filing.

The Securities and Exchange Commission document did not specify what was discussed or whether Musk raised concerns about bots during the meeting.

Musk held meetings with Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey, current CEO Parag Agrawal, Twitter CEO Brett Taylor, and board member Egon Durban, among other company executives, in late March and early April.

The meeting came after Musk invested in Twitter and before he announced on April 14 that he would be making a formal offer for the company. Twitter's board finally approved a sale to Musk for $44 billion late last month.

Investors dumped Twitter shares, fearing Musk would abandon a deal to buy Twitter at the agreed price of $54.20 per share. Instead, the stock was up more than 2% on Tuesday to $38.54, below its close of $39.31 on April 1, the last trading session before Musk announced his minority stake.

On Tuesday, Musk doubled down on his belief that the Twitter deal "cannot go ahead" until the company proves that bots make up less than 5 percent of the platform's users. Bots are automated accounts that can be useful or harmful. Neither Musk nor Twitter said precisely how they identified the bots or fake accounts.

"My offer is based on the accuracy of the SEC's Twitter documents," Musk tweeted Tuesday morning. "Yesterday, the Twitter CEO publicly refused to show <5% evidence. So this deal can't move forward until he does."

After going public in 2013, the company estimated in financial documents that fake or spam accounts accounted for less than 5% of monthly users. In its 2018 annual report, Twitter added that the figures also apply to monetizable daily active users (MDA).