Elon Musk, the billionaire, announced on Friday that the USD 44 billion plan to buy Twitter has been put on hold indefinitely due to pending specifics on spam and fraudulent accounts.
Musk, the world’s richest man and CEO of Tesla, announced on Friday that the agreement to buy the microblogging site had been placed on hold.
“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5 per cent of users,” he tweeted. 
Along with his tweet, Musk also shared a Reuters piece. According to a report published by Reuters on May 2, Twitter estimated in a filing that fraudulent or spam accounts accounted for less than 5% of its monetizable daily active users in the first quarter.
In the first quarter, the social media business served advertising to 229 million users.
It also stated that until the deal with Musk is finalised, it faces various risks, including whether advertisers will continue to spend money on Twitter.
The news comes just days after Musk announced that one of his top priorities will be to eliminate “spam bots” from Twitter, which he purchased for USD 44 billion.
In premarket trade, shares of the social networking business plummeted 20%. Twitter has yet to comment on the situation.
Musk previously stated that removing “spam bots” from the network will be one of his top goals.
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