Musk hits pause on Twitter purchase

Entrepreneur and Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he wants to nail down how many spam or fake accounts exist on the social media platform before moving forward with the $44 billion acquisition. Elon Musk tweeted Friday that his plan to buy Twitter is “temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.”

Will the deal go through? Twitter’s quarterly U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings have previously acknowledged that its estimate of how many bots run accounts on its platform was likely on the low end. Some analysts have speculated Musk is raising the question to give himself a way out of the deal. Musk tweeted later that he’s “still committed to acquisition.”

Dig deeper: Listen to Mary Reichard’s report on The World and Everything in It about some of the changes Musk has suggested he’ll make to Twitter’s platform.