Musk holds Twitter deal pending bot calculations

DETROIT Elon Musk said Friday his plan to buy Twitter is “temporarily on hold,” raising fresh doubts about whether he’ll proceed with the $44-billion (U.S.) acquisition.

Musk tweeted he wanted to pinpoint the number of spam and fake accounts on the social media platform. Musk has been vocal about his desire to clean up Twitter’s problem with “spam bots” that mimic real people and appeared to question whether the company was underreporting them.

But Twitter has disclosed in regulatory filings that its bot estimates might be low for at least two years, leading some analysts to believe that Musk could be raising the issue as a reason to back out of the deal.

“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5 per cent of users,” Musk tweeted Friday morning, indicating he’s skeptical that the number of inauthentic accounts is that low.

Musk later tweeted that he’s “still committed to acquisition.” Neither Twitter nor Musk responded Friday to requests for comment.

The problem of fake accounts on Twitter is not a secret.

In its quarterly filing with the SEC, Twitter doubted that its count of bot accounts was correct, conceding that the estimate may be low. “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,” the filing says.