Twitter deal temporarily on hold: Elon Musk
Following a filing by Twitter that less than 5 percent of their monetisable daily users were bots, Elon Musk tweeted that the deal to purchase the company was temporarily on hold.
Elon Musk has announced that his offer to purchase social media giant is "temporarily on hold" following a filing by the social media platform that less than 5 percent of their monetisable daily active users were spam accounts or bots.
In the past, Musk said that he wants to clean up the "spam bots" on Twitter, and that he plans to verify all humans on the platform as soon as his $43 billion purchase goes through.
However, with this new information in the filing with the US Securities Exchange Board, Twitter claims that the issue of spam bots is not as large as it would seem to the general public. However, Musk has decided to verify the numbers first.
In the filing, Twitter said that it faced several risks before the purchase was finalised, including uncertainty among advertisers on the platform as well as "potential uncertainty regarding our future plans and strategy."
This was also indicated by CEO Parag Agrawal in an earlier tweet announcing that the Tesla and SpaceX founder and CEO would not be joining the board of the social media giant — just a few days after the world's richest man said that he would.
"There will be distractions ahead, but our goals and priorities remain unchanged. The decision we make and how we execute is in our hands, no one else's," he had said in the statement.
Update: In a later tweet, Musk made clear that this incident has not deterred him to purchase Twitter, making his intentions clear that he was "still committed to acquisition."
Edited by Kanishk Singh