Elon Musk Puts on Hold $44B Twitter Deal, Citing Spam and Fake Accounts Issue

Elon Musk announced that his Twitter deal was on hold until he gets more information about how many fake accounts were on the social media platform.

Source: Twitter

Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of usershttps://t.co/Y2t0QMuuyn

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 13, 2022

TWTR down 9.36%, TSLA up +5.22%

In a follow-up tweet, Musk noted that he was “still committed to the acquisition.”

Twitter’s stock plunged 18% in premarket trading after the initial announcement but cut some losses after the second tweet.

Tesla CEO Musk announced last month that he was looking to acquire Twitter for $44B, and he had initially tweeted that one of his main priorities was to remove spam bots from the platform.

Musk, who is set to serve as Twitter’s temporary CEO if the deal is finalized, would have to pay a $1B breakup fee should he chooses to discontinue the deal.

Twitter estimated that fewer than 5% of its monetizable daily active users during Q1 were bots or spam accounts.