Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Friday that he is still committed to the $44 billion Twitter acquisition after putting it on hold until he learns how many fake or spam accounts are present 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,” Musk said in a tweet to his over 92 million followers.
The news that the deal had been put on hold caused a drop in Twitter’s stock price.
“Still committed to acquisition,” he later tweeted.
Still committed to acquisition
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 13, 2022
His followers slammed the tweet, claiming he had harmed the platform, “pushing senior staff to resign and through doubts on its users”.
“If Twitter collapses, it is on you,” said one of his followers.
“Do something for actual people instead of buying Twitter,” another posted.
In a filing earlier this week, Twitter estimated that false or spam accounts accounted for less than 5% of its monetisable daily active users during the first quarter.
In the first quarter, the microblogging platform had 229 million users.
Musk has signed a $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, with Musk paying $21 billion out of his own pocket and the rest coming from a consortium of banks.
