Elon Musk says Twitter deal on hold pending details of spam and fake accounts

Elon Musk on Friday said his deal with microblogging platform Twitter worth $44 billion was temporarily on hold.

The Tesla chief executive officer said the deal was put on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam and fake accounts indeed represented less than five per cent of users.

Last month, Musk had clinched a deal to buy Twitter Inc for $44 billion cash in a transaction. Musk, the world’s richest man, had recently said that one of his priorities would be to remove “spam bots” from the platform.

The company had earlier this month estimated that false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5 per cent of its monetisable daily active users during the first quarter.

According reports, stock in both Twitter and Tesla swung sharply in opposite directions, with Twitter’s stock tumbling 18 per cent and Tesla, which Musk had proposed using to help fund the Twitter deal, jumped 5 per cent.