Elon Musk says Twitter deal ‘temporarily on hold over spam’
Elon Musk said Friday that his plan to buy Twitter for $44 billion is “temporarily on hold,” a change in plans as the billionaire entrepreneur attempts to pinpoint the exact number of spam and fake accounts on the social media platform.
Musk, who has been actively seeking ways to reduce Twitter’s problem with spambots that mimic real users, appeared to question whether the company was underreporting the bots.
In a tweet, inventor and Tesla CEO Elon Musk linked to a Reuters story from May 2 about Twitter’s first-quarter report on user engagement, which said fewer than 5% of the company’s monetizable daily active users were false or spam accounts.
Musk, who had earlier this month proposed taking Tesla Inc. private, said a Twitter Inc. buyout deal was “on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.”
It wasn’t clear whether the issue could derail the deal.
Twitter did not provide comment early Friday.
