Elon Musk says $44-billion Twitter deal on hold

Chennai: Elon Musk on Friday said the deal to take over Twitter is 'on hold' till there's some clarity on whether spam or fake accounts represent less than 5% of the microblogging site.

"Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users," Musk tweeted.



Twitter shares plummeted 20% in pre-market trading following Musk's tweet on Friday that the deal had been halted for details on a recent filing from Twitter.

The microblogging site said in its latest quarterly results "that the average of false or spam accounts during the first quarter of 2022 represented fewer than 5% of our monthly daily active users during the quarter."

Illustration: Rahul Awasthi

Musk's effort to reform Twitter has included fighting fake accounts. He said in a statement announcing his deal to buy Twitter last month that he wanted to fight spam bots, authenticate all humans, and open source the company's algorithms.

On April 25, the Tesla CEO and Twitter reached an agreement to buy Twitter.

Musk's latest tweet came against the backdrop of Twitter freezing hiring as part of its pre-deal cost-cutting measures.

Kayvon Beykpour, head of consumer product, and Bruce Falck, in charge of revenue product, were both asked to leave the microblogging site by chief executive Parag Agrawal.


Beykpour said in a tweet on Thursday that he had been ‘asked’ to leave by Agrawal, while he was on paternity leave. He said Agrawal wanted to 'take the team in a new direction'.

Bloomberg contributed to this story.