Billionaire Elon Musk announced that his deal to buy Twitter is “temporarily on hold” over questions about whether fake and spam accounts really do represent less than 5 per cent of users.
“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” Musk tweeted.
Despite Musk last week securing $7 billion from new investors for his $44billion takeover, Twitter shares fell 20 per cent in premarket trading in response to the news.
The Tesla founder has made it one of his priorities to eliminate “spam bots” form the platform, which Twitter claims represent fewer than 5% of its monetisable daily active users.
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
Media reports circulated earlier in the week suggesting Musk could still pull out of the deal and pay a $1 billion dollar compensation fee, but that may be waived if Twitter hasn’t been honest about the scale of its bot problem.
Blue checkmarks on Twitter are likely to welcome the news that the deal is on hold given that they have been panicking for the last several weeks about being unable to further entrench their censorship agenda if Musk takes over the platform.
Earlier this week, Musk asserted that the decision to permanently suspend President Donald Trump was “foolish” and that Trump would be allowed to re-instate his account after Musk’s takeover.
The billionaire added that under his stewardship, permanent bans would become a thing of the past, aside from when they’re applied to fake accounts.
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