The Twitter deal is temporarily on hold pending details supporting the calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users, Musk said in a tweet.
Here are 10 things we know about the Elon Musk-Twitter deal:
1. On April 25, Twitter accepted Elon Musk's $44 billion takeover deal.
2. Twitter has agreed to sell itself to an entity "wholly owned" by Musk. No co-investors were named in the statement by the social media company.
3. Musk currently owns a 9.1 percent stake in Twitter and is the social media company's second-biggest shareholder. Twitter had previously invited Elon Musk to join its board of directors, but the SpaceX head declined.
4. This is a giant leveraged buyout. Musk has raised $25.5 billion of fully committed debt and margin loan financing from a dozen banks to back the bid.
5. The social media company had said it faced several risks until the deal with Musk is closed, including whether advertisers would continue to spend on Twitter amid "potential uncertainty regarding future plans and strategy."
6. If Musk walks away from the deal, he is contractually obligated to pay a $1 billion break-up fee.
7. Shares of Twitter fell 17.7% to $37.10 in premarket trading today, their lowest level since Musk disclosed his stake in the company in early April.
8. Elon Musk has been critical of Twitter's policies and has said that the social media company needs to be taken private to grow and become a genuine platform for free speech.
9. He had also said that one of his priorities would be to remove "spam-bots" from the platform.
10. In an interview, Elon Musk also said he would reverse Twitter's ban on former US President Donald Trump.
We have performed an internal review of a sample of accounts and estimate that the average of false or spam accounts during the first quarter of 2022 represented fewer than 5% of our mDAU during the quarter. The false or spam accounts for a period represents the average of false or spam accounts in the samples during each monthly analysis period during the quarter. In making this determination, we applied significant judgment, so our estimation of false or spam accounts may not accurately represent the actual number of such accounts, and the actual number of false or spam accounts could be higher than we have estimated.
Twitter has had problems with math in the past. A few weeks ago it said in an earnings report that it had overcounted its daily users for three years straight. The company said a technical error led to it counting multiple accounts as active, despite them being tied to a single user, and that this led to it miscounting its user numbers by as much as 1.9 million each quarter.
Musk has made cutting down on the amount of “spam and scam bots” and “bot armies” on Twitter a key part of his pitch for improving the service, alongside prioritizing free speech and open sourcing the platform’s ranking algorithms.
Putting the deal on hold represents the latest speedbump to hit Musk’s attempted takeover of the social media network.
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