After a discovery of spam and false accounts, Elon Musk says the Twitter deal is on hold.

                                                                                                 

Elon Musk says his proposal to buy Twitter has been put on hold "temporarily" after the social media platform revealed that fraudulent or spam accou nts accounted for fewer than 5% of its 226 million monetizable daily active users. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who bid $44 billion for Twitter, tweeted a link to a Reuters piece on Twitter's filing on May 2nd, adding he wants to see the company's calculations.

Musk tweeted, "Twitter transaction on hold temporarily for details supporting computation that spam/fake accounts do actually comprise less than 5% of users." In a follow-up tweet, he said he's "still committed to [the] acquisition," implying that it'll go forward once Twitter produces adequate financial details.

Still committed to acquisition

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 13, 2022

On hearing of the hold, Twitter's stock dropped as much as 20%, while Tesla's stock is up 6% as of this writing.

The relevant section of Twitter's submission is shown below. It states that the number of fraudulent or spam accounts it calculates is a "estimate," and that the actual number "may be larger than we have estimated": 

We have performed an internal review of a sample of accounts and estimate that the average of false or spam accounts during the first quarter of 2022 represented fewer than 5% of our mDAU during the quarter. The false or spam accounts for a period represents the average of false or spam accounts in the samples during each monthly analysis period during the quarter. In making this determination, we applied significant judgment, so our estimation of false or spam accounts may not accurately represent the actual number of such accounts, and the actual number of false or spam accounts could be higher than we have estimated.

In the past, Twitter has had issues with math. It recently admitted in an earnings report that it has been overcounting daily users for three years in a row. According to the corporation, a technical fault caused it to identify several accounts as active even though they were all linked to a single user, resulting in a quarterly user count miscalculation of up to 1.9 million.

Musk has put reducing the quantity of "spam and scam bots" and "bot armies" on Twitter, as well as prioritising free speech and open-sourcing the platform's ranking algorithms, a prominent component of his case for upgrading the site. 

The decision to put the purchase on hold is the latest setback in Musk's attempt to take control the social media network. Before accepting the buyout in late April, the business had announced a so-called "poison pill" plan to thwart the takeover.

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