Elon Musk announced early Friday morning that his bid to purchase Twitter is on hold pending more information about how many accounts on the platforms are bots.
Twitter shares plunged 24 percent in premarket after his announcement.
“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” Musk tweeted.
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
The eccentric billionaire included a link to a Reuters article that said Twitter “estimated in a filing on Monday that false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5% of its monetizable daily active users during the first quarter.”
Twitter has made a deal with Musk to buy Twitter for $44 billion, but he has said that handling bots on the platform will be a top priority.
According to the report, “Twitter said in the filing it faced several risks until the deal with Musk is closed, such as whether advertisers would continue to spend on Twitter and ‘potential uncertainty regarding our future plans and strategy.’”