Elon Musk said Friday that his plan to purchase Twitter for $44 billion is “temporarily on hold” pending details on spam and fake accounts on the social media platform.
Musk linked to a Reuters story about fake accounts on the platform making up about 5% of the company’s “monetizable daily active users” in the first quarter.
“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” Musk said.
Musk later added that he was “still committed to the acquisition.”
However, experts believe that this is an attempt by Musk to try and renegotiate the deal due to a steep decline in Tesla’s stock where some of the money to buy Twitter comes from or he might decide to back out of the deal entirely.
“If Musk does decide to still go down the deal path a clear renegotiation is likely on the table which calls into question a number of topics (financing path, leverage of Tesla stock, prior financing partners, employee reaction),” Dan Ives and John Katsingris, analysts at investment firm Wedbush Securities said. “Many will view this as Musk using this Twitter filing/spam accounts as a way to get out of this deal in a vastly changing market.”
Musk’s tweet comes one day after Twitter fired two of its top managers and instituted a hiring freeze except for critical roles, and is “pulling back on non-labor costs to ensure we are being responsible and efficient,” CBS reports.
