The $44 billion Twitter deal is temporarily on hold, reveals Elon Musk.

Musk blames the spam account crisis of Twitter for this decision.

Elon was very vocal about tackling the spam account problem plaguing the platform at the time of signing the deal.

elon shocks the market yet again with his announcement that the Twitter deal is put on hold for the time being. He disclosed this on Twitter while pointing to a Reuters post on the Twitter spam account situation. He basically said, “Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.”

With his Twitter purchase, one of the changes Musk wanted to bring about was trimming the spam/fake accounts on the platform. Now, he has decided to put the Twitter deal on hold temporarily till he has a better picture of the actual spam situation.

For the unversed, a spam account is a type of platform manipulation to artificially raise the performance of a post but it in a way, adversely affect the user experience. 

Along with this tweet, Musk enclosed a Reuters article dated May 02, that reported that “false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5% of its monetizable daily active users during the first quarter”.

Also, Susannah Streeter, an analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown notes, “This 5% metric has been out for some time. He clearly would have already seen it... So it may well be more part of the strategy to lower the price”.

Twitter has filed the spam quotient to be below 5-percent since 2013 and it has said this is an estimate and the actual value may be higher too.