“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” Musk tweeted.
The price of shares in the social media company dipped double digits in premarket trading after the Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s tweet.
In his tweet announcing the snag in the deal, Musk shared a news article from earlier this month about a Twitter disclosure in which the company estimated that fake or spam accounts represent fewer than 5% of its 229 million monetizable daily active users in the first quarter.
Last month, Twitter agreed to sell the company to Musk for $44 billion in cash. Musk plans to take the social media company private and focus on making the platform more friendly toward free speech.
Musk has said that addressing the number of spam and bot accounts on Twitter would be one of his key priorities, but he now appears to be making sure there aren’t too many of these non-monetizable accounts before the deal goes through.
The tweet is the first public hesitation Musk has shown over his purchase of Twitter and references data from May 2, released a week after his offer of $44 billion was accepted, which claimed fewer than 5% of its monetizable daily users were fake accounts.
However, in a subsequent tweet, Musk made clear that he is “still committed to acquisition.”
Musk didn’t say the deal would be cancelled if more than 5% of accounts do turn out to be fake but putting the deal on hold at all is in fairly significant contrast to his (and Twitter’s) previous attitude towards the buyout.
The social media giant’s founder Jack Dorsey called Musk “the singular solution I trust” in a series of tweets celebrating the sale.
Story still developing, more to come.
Political | Process 
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