Elon Musk Says 'Twitter Deal Temporarily On Hold'

On Friday morning, Elon Musk tweeted that the deal to own Twitter is “temporarily on hold.”

Last month, the Tesla CEO and the Twitter board of directors reached a deal that allowed Musk to buy the company for $44 billion dollars after he had texted Twitter board chair, Bret Taylor, with his desire to buy the social media giant for $54.20 per share.

On Friday morning, Musk tweeted, “Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.”

He attached a link to a Reuters article that cited a recent Twitter regulatory finding on the revenue generated by active accounts. The filing estimates how many of its “monetizable daily active users” were bot or spam amounts. 229 million Twitter users had some kind of advertising pop up on their feed in Twitter’s first quarter. Therefore, five percent of those users would amount to 11.45 million.

Notably, the article is talking about how many users receive advertising, not the total body of active Twitter users, estimated at around 400 million.

The deal quickly caused many people to question the Space X founder and his motives, as many theorized that Musk was attempting to back out of the deal which was estimated to be closed in two to three months. It’s possible that Musk is simply trying to lower the price he has to pay for the streaming service, but many users think that Musk is trying to back out of the deal before it hits the point of no return.

Chief Economist and Global Strategist Peter Schiff commented on Musk's post, writing, "It looks like I was right all along. You never actually intended to buy #Twitter. You were bluffing the entire time. How many Twitter shares did you sell before tweeting this announcement?"

Andrea Junker commented, "Translation: Twitter deal on hold because Elon Musk never really wanted to buy it, and is now looking for reasons to avoid the $1 billion fine."

One user noted, "OK I read this twice and it literally sounds like, you aren't buying Twitter because it makes less money off of bots [than] expected. So were you hoping to remove them or profit off them? WHICH was it? Just say the deal is on hold cause [the] price [is] bad."

Another user replied, "He said he wants to remove bots, bots don’t click or comment on ads. This is just him backing out. Over 5% are bots imo. The thing I find most astounding is there are only 229 million Twitter accounts compared with 3 billion Facebook."

As The Blast previously noted, there are estimated to be around 400 million active Twitter users currently using the social media service. The article estimated how many of the “monetizable daily active users” were bot or spam accounts, which, as the user noted, are unlikely to click on ads. 229 million users out of the 400 million active Twitter users were shown advertising; therefore, the five percent of 229 million is actually only 11.45 million bot or spam accounts, at least according to the article.

But that still doesn't answer the question of whether or not Musk really plans to back out of his deal to buy Twitter.