Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition is not complete just yet. The CEO of Tesla Motors finalized the deal to purchase Twitter for $44 billion more than two weeks ago, but Musk is yet to fully acquire the social media giant.
In a recent update to this saga, Musk has said that the Twitter deal is “temporarily on hold”, pending “details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users”.
This has to do with a report from Reuters earlier this month which claimed that Twitter itself estimates spam and fake accounts make up less than 5% of its total userbase. Elon Musk seems to disagree that it’s only 5% of the users.
If a higher percentage of Twitter users is made up of spam and fake accounts, then the value of the company would decrease, making it cheaper for any buyer. This would mean that Musk would offer less than $44 billion to acquire the social network.
It is unclear what is going on behind the scenes, but the news has unsurprisingly decreased Twitter’s share price.
Elon Musk says that he is still committed to the deal, which means that it’s only a very late-stage negotiation tactic. In any case, we will update this space as soon as there is a new development.