Twitter Deal ‘Temporarily on Hold,’ Says Elon Musk

variety.com:

Naman Ramachandran The Twitter deal is temporarily on hold, billionaire Elon Musk posted on Friday.“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” Musk posted on Twitter.Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of usershttps://t.co/Y2t0QMuuyn— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 13, 2022In the tweet, Musk provided a link to a May 2 Reuters article quoting Twitter’s filing on Monday. “Twitter Inc estimated in a filing on Monday that false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5% of its monetizable daily active users during the first quarter,” the Reuters piece said.Musk has been vocal about cleaning the platform of spam bots.

Twitter shares fell 17% after Musk’s post. In late April, Musk clinched a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion. In the first earnings report posted after the sale was announced, Twitter’s daily average monetizable daily active usage — its proprietary metric it calls “mDAU” — rose to 229.0 million for Q1, up 16% versus Q1 in the prior year and a sequential net gain of 14.3 million.

Average U.S. mDAUs were 39.6 million for Q1, up 6.4% compared to Q1 of the prior year (and up from 37.5 million in Q4).Q1 revenue was $1.20 billion, up 16% year-over-year, reflecting “headwinds associated with the war in Ukraine,” according to Twitter.

Net income came in at $513 million, representing diluted earnings per share of 61 cents.Musk recently said that Twitter’s permanent ban on Donald Trump was a “morally bad decision” and “flat-out wrong,” which “was a mistake because it alienated a large part of the county and did not ultimately result in.