Elon Musk says he's put the blockbuster Twitter deal on pause over fake accounts

May 13th, 2022

Elon Musk said he’s putting his $44 billion takeover of Twitter “temporarily on hold,” saying that he wants more details about how many of the social platform’s accounts are bogus or spam.

The Tesla and SpaceX mogul said he needs to make sure the fake accounts “do indeed represent less than 5%” of Twitter’s users, as the company has estimated.

Musk tweeted about putting the massive deal on hold early Friday, sharing a recent Reuters news story about the takeover.

The article cited a federal filing Twitter made shortly after the company reached a sales deal with Musk, stating that of the 229 million Twitter users who saw advertising in the first quarter of 2022, less than 5% were fake accounts.

Twitter announced the deal to sell to Musk on April 25, saying he would take the company private by paying $54.20 per share in cash, after a whirlwind courtship between the billionaire and the social media platform.

Earlier this week, Musk said that once he completes the deal, he would reverse Twitter’s permanent ban on former President Donald Trump. He called the ban “a morally bad decision, to be clear, and foolish in the extreme.”