Elon Musk Halts Twitter takeover Due To Fake Accounts

That would be a plot twist, at least if the deal actually cracks. Because it has been clear for weeks that Elon Musk is going to take over Twitter. But now the boss of Tesla and SpaceX has announced that the deal is on hold. In concrete terms, it concerns the number of spam and bot accounts. Elon Musk caused a quake in the sector a while ago. The billionaire has announced that he plans to take over Twitter via a hostile takeover. The social network also initially resisted but gave up the resistance relatively quickly. Since then it is no longer a matter of if, but only of when. Or so it seemed. Infographic for offer Musk: Twitter increases sales and profit

Musk demands “details”

Because now Musk has surprisingly announced that the company has to wait until further notice. The 50-year-old tweeted: “The Twitter deal has been temporarily suspended pending details that support the calculation that spam/fake accounts actually account for less than five percent of users.” The basis for Musk’s sudden hesitation is a report from the Reuters news agency: Twitter currently has 226 million daily active users, according to its own statements, but only less than five percent of them are said to be fake.

The social network speaks of estimates, but some experts and active users may doubt whether this is really true. Because fake accounts are common on Twitter, created by troll farms and similar entities to conduct political campaigns or to make people and businesses appear more popular than they actually are. It’s not the first time Twitter has had problems with its internal math: it was only recently that it had to admit that it assumed too many users for three years. Twitter spoke of a technical error that resulted in people with multiple accounts being counted as multiple users.