Billionaire Elon Musk has announced that he has suspended his $ 44 billion offer to buy Twitter after inquiring about the number of fake accounts on the social network.
"The Twitter deal is temporarily pending due to details in the calculation of fake profiles, which make up 5% of users," Musk said on Twitter.
Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam / fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users https://t.co/Y2t0QMuuyn
- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 13, 2022
The news initially caused the digital company's shares to fall by over 20% in the financial markets, before a modest recovery was achieved.
Two hours after his first post, Musk announced in another post the message that he was "still determined to make the purchase."
In the financial report for the first quarter of the year, published on April 28, Twitter estimated that fake profiles were less than 5 percent of active platform users.
The social network has had these problems for years and the company has stated that reducing such accounts would play a key role in its ability to expand.