The process of Elon Musk buying Twitter has taken a bizarre turn of late.

Despite the billionaire sending emoji responses to exhaustive threads from Twitter chief executive officer Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s board has advised shareholders that they vote to approve the deal.

This comes just eight days before shareholders are expected to vote on the deal according to a report by Bloomberg Law.

The board of directors took this position because it believes that that the competitive positioning and prospects will improve should it become an independent company. In contrast the board appears to think that should Twitter remain a public entity it will struggle with growth and profitability.

The vote by shareholders is just one more step in a long journey toward acquisition and this week Musk has been making that journey more tedious.

On Monday, Musk said that lowering his offer from $54.20 per share wasn’t out of the question and it seems that he is really trying to get that question answered.

On Tuesday Musk said that Agrawal had “publicly refused to show proof of <5%” fake/spam accounts on Twitter”. That’s not entirely true. Agrawal did explain how Twitter tracks bots, but didn’t share internal data. With that having been said, that’s not something we’d expect a CEO to just share online with the public.

Because of this, Musk claims that the percentage of Twitter users who are fake or spam accounts could be as high as 20 percent. We aren’t sure how he arrived at this number though because despite saying Agrawal hasn’t shared data, neither has Musk.

As such, Musk says the deal with Twitter is on hold until it can prove that less than five percent of users are fake or spam accounts.

From the outside, it does look like Musk is trying to acquire Twitter for a lower price given all the issues he’s suddenly uncovered.

We suspect there will be more developments in this sage before the shareholders meeting on 25th May.