He recently called Twitter's rules "very bot friendly." Twitter has stood by its tally. "We don't believe that this specific estimation can be performed externally, given the critical need to use both public and private information (which we can't share)," Twitter's chief executive, Parag Agrawal, tweeted last month in response to Mr. Musk's remarks about putting the deal on hold due to doubts about the company's bot estimates. Mr. Musk responded by tweeting a poop emoji. "Anyone who uses Twitter is well aware that the comment threads are full of spam, scam and just a lot of fake accounts," Mr. Musk said at a mid-May tech conference called the All-In Summit. Marketing executives have said advertisers are aware of the presence of automated and spam accounts on social media—not just Twitter—and factor that into their strategies and measurements.