Elon Musk announces deal to buy Twitter is ‘temporarily on hold’

Elon Musk’s $44 billion hostile take-over bid of Twitter remains contingent on the deal going through and the Tesla CEO took to Twitter on Thursday with an attention-grabbing update on that progress.

The world’s richest man informed all that the deal for the social media platform is now on hold: “Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.”

Musk linked to a report from Reuters that said Twitter Inc. “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.”

News of the deal being put on hold resulted in Twitter shares dropping 18% in premarket trading, according to Fox Business.

The Reuters article noted that Musk tweeted that one of his priorities would be to remove “spam bots” from the platform, which has 229 million users.

On April 21, Musk tweeted: “If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!”

Musk also commented on the issue last week at the Met Gala he attended with his mother, according to The Washington Post, saying, “If someone is operating a bot and troll army, then I am definitely their enemy.”

The newspaper defined bots as “automated accounts that are programmed to do pre-defined tasks, often at speeds faster than a person could manage.”

When and IF the deal eventually goes through, Musk has stated that his plan is to take Twitter private amid a focus on free speech, having compared the social media platform to a “town square.”

Tom Tillison

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