Beautiful Virgin Islands

Friday, May 15, 2026

Musk puts Twitter takeover on hold

Musk puts Twitter takeover on hold

The businessman says he’s waiting for information on spam and fake accounts on the microblogging platform.
Billionaire Elon Musk said on Friday that his deal to buy Twitter is “temporarily on hold” after the social network reported that false or spam accounts comprised less than 5% of its almost 230 million monetizable daily active users. The Tesla CEO, who has offered to buy the company for $44 billion, said he now wants Twitter to confirm those calculations before he continues with the deal.

“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” Musk tweeted.

Twitter shares nosedived 19% following Musk’s announcement. Its market value had earlier fallen to $9 billion beneath the offer price amid concerns about the deal.

Last month, a Twitter earnings report said that it had overcounted its daily users for three years straight. The company blamed a technical error, which had resulted in counting multiple accounts as active, despite them being tied to a single user. That, in turn, had led to the platform miscounting its user numbers by as much as 1.9 million each quarter.

Earlier this month, Twitter estimated in a filing that fewer than 5% of its monetizable daily active users during the first quarter were bots or spam accounts. The company, however, noted that the actual number “could be higher.”

Musk, who announced last month his intention to buy Twitter, said previously that one of his main priorities would be to remove “spam bots” from the platform.
Newsletter

Related Articles

Beautiful Virgin Islands
0:00
0:00
Close
The Great Western Exit: Why Best Citizens Are Fleeing the Rich World [PODCAST]
The New Robber Barons of Intelligence: Are AI Bosses More Powerful Than Rockefeller?
The End of the Old Order [Podcast]
Britain’s Democracy Is Now a Costume
The AI Gold Rush Is Coming for America’s Last Open Spaces [Podcast]
The Pentagon’s AI Squeeze: Eight Tech Giants Get In, Anthropic Gets Shut Out [Podcast]
The War Map: Professor Jiang’s Dark Theory of Iran, Trump, China, Russia, Israel, and the Coming Global Shock [Podcast]
Labour Is No Longer a National Party [Podcast]
AI Isn’t Stealing Your Job. It’s Dismantling It Piece by Piece.
Lawyers vs Engineers: Why China Builds While America Litigates [Podcast]
Churchill’s Glass: The Drunk, the Doctor, and the Myth Britain Refuses to Sober Up From
Apple issues an unusual warning: this is how your iPhone can be hacked without you doing anything
The Met Gala Meets the Age of Billionaire Backlash
Russian Oligarch’s Superyacht Crosses Hormuz via Iran-Controlled Route
Gunfire Disrupts White House Correspondents’ Dinner as Trump Is Evacuated
A Leak, a King, and a Fracturing Alliance
Inside the Gates Foundation Turmoil: Layoffs, Scrutiny, and the Cost of Reputational Risk
UK Biobank Breach Exposes Health Data of 500,000, Listed for Sale on Chinese Platform
KPMG Cuts Around 10% of US Audit Partners After Failed Exit Push
French Police Probe Suspected Weather-Data Tampering After Unusual Polymarket Bets on Paris Temperatures
News Roundup
Microsoft lost 2.5 millions users (French government) to Linux
Privacy Problems in Microsoft Windows OS
News roundup
Péter András Magyar and the Strategic Reset of Hungary
Hungary After the Landslide — A Strategic Reset in Europe
×