Elon Musk’s $44 Billion Deal For Twitter Temporarily On Hold

New Delhi: In a stunning development, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has put the $44 billion Twitter deal temporarily on hold. He cited pending details on the number of fake or spam accounts present on the micro-blogging platform.

Musk tweeted, “Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.”

Shares of the social media company fell 20% in premarket trading. The company had earlier this month estimated that false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5% of its monetizable daily active users during the first quarter.

According reports, stock in both Twitter and Tesla swung sharply in opposite directions, with Twitter’s stock tumbling 18 per cent and Tesla, which Musk had proposed using to help fund the Twitter deal, jumped 5 per cent, stated reports in HT.

The world’s richest man and the had said that one of his priorities would be to remove “spambots” from the platform.