Elon Musk puts $44-billion acquisition of Twitter on hold
New Delhi, May 13: Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Friday said his $44-billion acquisition of Twitter Inc was temporarily on hold, citing pending details on spam and fake accounts.
"Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users," he said in a tweet.
Shares of the social media company fell 17% in premarket trading. Elon Musk said earlier this week that Twitter's decision to ban former US President Donald Trump was a mistake and he would reverse it if his acquisition of the social media company was successful.
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Twitter recently agreed to be acquired by Elon Musk in a deal worth $44 billion, although it is still subject to shareholder approval.
In a May 2 regulatory filing, Twitter said it had estimated that less than 5 per cent of its users were fake or spam, a figure it had disclosed previously. In the filing, Twitter cautioned that it had applied “significant judgment” in making the calculation and that “our estimation of false or spam accounts may not accurately represent the actual number.”
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The Tesla CEO in April this year had inked a deal to buy social media giant Twitter for $44 billion. He had said that one of his priorities would be to remove spam bots from the platform. "I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots and authenticating all humans," World's richest man Elon Musk had said.
Musk also had said, "Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated."
-PTC News with agency inputs
