Elon Musk halts Twitter takeover

Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, announced on Friday he has halted his $44 billion Twitter takeover.

Mr Musk said he needed to resolve concerns over the number of fake or spam accounts on the platform.

“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5 per cent of users,” Mr Musk said in a tweet on Friday.

Mr Musk’s tweet contained a link to a May 2 Reuters article on Twitter’s public filings, in which the company said fake or spam accounts only accounted for about 5 per cent of its overall user base.

“Twitter Inc estimated in a filing on Monday that false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5 per cent of its monetizable daily active users during the first quarter,” the Reuters article said.

Mr Musk currently owns 73,486,938 shares of Twitter, which represents a 9.2 per cent stake in the company, according to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)13G filing.

On April 14, Mr Musk said he had offered to buy 100 per cent of Twitter for $54.20 per share in cash.

Upon completion of Twitter’s sale, the company will become privately held.

It is the biggest social media acquisition, surpassing the $26.2 billion buyouts of Linkedin by Microsoft.

On May 5, Mr Musk announced he has secured $7 billion in new funding to fund the Twitter takeover.

Twitter’s share dropped by 20 per cent in early trading on the news of the hold.