Elon Musk’s plan to buy Twitter has been put on hold

Last month, Tesla CEO Elon Musk made a surprising announcement that he would be acquiring Twitter. The deal was said to be worth $44 billion, and while we expect it might be a while before the deal is closed, Musk has since tweeted that it has since been put on hold.

Now, given Musk’s reputation, it’s not surprising that many eyeballs are on this deal, both from the public and regulatory bodies, but it seems that this isn’t the reason why the deal has been put on hold.

Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of usershttps://t.co/Y2t0QMuuyn

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 13, 2022

In Musk’s tweet, he shares a Reuters article which reports that Twitter claims that bots and spam accounts account for less than 5% of Twitter’s users. Musk’s tweet suggests that until that amount can be verified, the deal will be temporarily halted. We suppose that makes sense because what Musk is buying are essentially actual human users.

If Twitter’s user base was filled with more bots than humans, then it would be hard to monetize the platform through ads and other means like subscriptions. We’re not sure how long it would take for this verification process to go through, but for now, the deal is on hold.

For those who might be speculating that this could be Musk’s way of backing out of the deal, he has since tweeted that he is still committed to the acquisition, so for now it looks like it’s just a waiting game.