Musk puts Twitter buy 'on hold,' casting doubt on $44B deal

He has been vocal about his desire to clean up Twitter’s problem with “spam bots” that mimic real people, and he appeared to question whether Twitter was underreporting them.But the company has disclosed in regulatory filings that its bot estimates might be low for at least two years, leading some analysts to believe that Musk could be raising the issue as a reason to back out of the purchase.“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” Musk tweeted Friday morning, indicating he’s skeptical that the number of inauthentic accounts is that low.On Friday, Musk subsequently tweeted that he’s “still committed to acquisition.” Neither Twitter nor Musk responded Friday to requests for comment. Tesla shares have lost a quarter of their value in the last month, and have fallen from about $1,150 in early April when Musk confirmed he had taken a huge stake in Twitter, to $769.59 Friday.“It’s become much more expensive for him to buy this company using his Tesla shares,” Silver said.Musk’s net worth, estimated by Forbes earlier this week at $240 billion, was $232 billion as of Friday.Academic researchers in 2017 attempted a census of all of Twitter’s active English-language accounts and estimated that up to 15% were bots of some kind.