Tesla Chief Executive Officer, Elon Musk has said that his $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter is now on hold. This came as Twitter estimated in a filing that false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5 per cent of its monetisable daily active users during the first quarter.
Issues surrounding the actual number of monetisable Twitter users have been generating concerns over the actual value of the company after the $44 billion agreement between the company and Musk.
Reacting to the filing, Musk said via a tweet: “Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.”
Musk had earlier tweeted that one of his priorities would be to remove “spam bots” from the platform.
What you should know
- The social media company had in its Q1 2022 financial report admitted to overstating the figure of the platform’s users by 1.9 million in the last three years.
- The revelation came days after the board of the company accepted a $44 billion offer by Elon Musk to take over Twitter.
- Twitter said an “error” introduced in Q1 2019, resulted in the overstatement of its monetizable daily active usage or users (mDAU). According to the company, this went on undiscovered for three years.
Twitter said in the filing it faced several risks until the deal with Musk is closed, such as whether advertisers would continue to spend on Twitter and “potential uncertainty regarding our future plans and strategy.” The social media company had 229 million users who were served advertising in the first quarter.
