Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images
Elon Musk says his deal to buy Twitter is “temporarily on hold” after the social network reported that false or spam accounts comprised less than 5 percent of its 226 million monetizable daily active users. The Tesla CEO, who offered to buy twitter for $44 billion, tweeted a link to a May 2nd Reuters report on Twitter’s filing, saying he wants to see the company’s calculations.
“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” Musk tweeted.
As of this writing, Twitter’s share price had plunged 19 percent on the news, while Tesla is up 5 percent.
Below is the relevant section of Twitter’s filing. It notes that its calculations about the number of…