Elon Musk said on Friday he was putting a temporary halt on his much-anticipated deal to buy Twitter, sending shares in the social media giant plunging.
“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” he wrote on Twitter.
Musk, the world’s richest man and founder of automaker Tesla, had made the eradication of spam accounts and bots one of the centerpieces of his proposed $44 billion takeover of Twitter.
When the deal was announced in late April he said he wanted to make Twitter “better than ever” by “defeating the spam bots and authenticating all humans”
