Lagatar24 Desk
New Delhi, May 13: Elon Musk placed his $44 billion purchase for Twitter Inc on hold on Friday, claiming a lack of evidence in support of his calculation that spam and bogus accounts account for fewer than 5% of users.
In premarket trading, shares of the social networking firm plunged 17.7% to $37.10, the lowest since Musk revealed his ownership in the company in early April and made a best and last bid to take it private for $54.20 per share.
On Tuesday, when Twitter shares dipped below $46.75, the implied probability of the deal closing at the agreed price fell below 50% for the first time.
Twitter estimated earlier this month that fraudulent or spam accounts accounted for less than 5% of its monetizable daily active users in the first quarter, when it had 229 million users shown advertisements.
“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” Musk tweeted on Friday.
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
Musk, the world’s richest man and self-proclaimed free speech absolutist, has stated that removing spam bots from the site would be one of his top goals.
