By The FirstElon Musk confirmed Friday morning that his bid to purchase takeover was “on hold” as he struggled to verify details behind the social media platform’s user base and other key statistics.
“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” Musk said.
From the Associated Press:
Neither Twitter nor Musk responded early Friday to requests for comment.
The issue of fake accounts on Twitter is not secret.
In its quarterly filing with the SEC, even 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.
