Elon Musk has now put his $44 billion USD deal to acquire Twitter on hold.
The Tesla, SpaceX, and Boring Company CEO took to his favorite social media platform to reveal that he has now put the deal on hold pending verification of some figures relating to fake accounts on Twitter. In particular, he says he’s looking into whether the number of fake accounts on the platform actually does represent less than 5% of the entire user base.
Interestingly, the 5% statistic was provided to him almost two weeks ago, and Musk hadn’t flagged it as an issue up until now. The filing at the time also said that 229 million users were shown advertisements on the service and that Musk’s takeover could pose a potential threat to the business in that advertisers may refrain from spending on Twitter after the buyout.
Musk’s announcement to suspend the deal subsequently caused Twitter’s stock price to plummet by 20% during pre-market trading.
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
In other related news, the social media platform has just laid off some of its top staff in order to reduce costs.
wazup.