Elon Musk has announced that he will be putting his $44 billion dollar Twitter acquisition deal on hold.
In a tweet on Wednesday, Musk said he took the decision pending when he’s able to confirm Twitter’s claim that spam and fake accounts indeed represent less than 5% of total users of the microblogging platform.
“Twitter deals are temporarily on hold pending details supporting the calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users, “he tweeted.
Following the pause, Twitter shares fell by 17.7% to $37.10 in premarket trading.
This is the lowest price the shares have fallen to since Musk announced that he had purchased a large stake in the company back in April.
This means that the likelihood that the deal will close at the agreed price of $54.20 per share may fall below 50%.
It was reported that Twitter had earlier estimated that fake or spam accounts on the platform represented less than 5% of its monetizable daily active users during the first quarter of 2022 when it recorded 229 million users.
The Tesla CEO has earlier pledged to remove “spambots” and authenticate all humans on Twitter.
Earlier this week, Musk had revealed that when the deal closes, he would reverse Donald Trump’s Twitter ban, calling the decision to ban him in the first place “a morally bad decision”.
“I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump. I think that was a mistake. It alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice.
“It was a morally bad decision, to be clear, and foolish in the extreme”, he said.
Trump’s account was ‘permanently suspended’ from the microblogging app in January 2021, after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the United States Capitol building on January 6th, due to the ‘risk of inciting further violence.
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