Elon Musk Puts Twitter Deal Temporarily on Hold The deal is off till it is established if spam or fake accounts represent less than five percent of total users

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has put the deal to acquire Twitter "temporarily put on hold". Last month, the billionaire BIZ Experiences bought a 100 per cent stake in Twitter for approx $44 billion, all of it in cash. It was one of the biggest buyout deals so far.

"Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated," Musk had said in a statement earlier.

However, today Elon Musk sent out a tweet, saying, "Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users."

However, the decision to put the deal on hold comes days after Musk said that one of his priorities would be to remove "spam bots" from the platform.

Musk has also been recently talking about reducing the operational costs of Twitter. He even tweeted about eliminating the salaries of the company's board directors, which according to him, could result in about $3 million in savings.

According to news reports, Twitter had earlier estimated in a filing that false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5 per cent of its monetizable daily active users during the first quarter. The social media company had also said in its earlier filing that it faced several risks until the deal with Musk is closed, including whether advertisers would continue to spend on Twitter. The micro-blogging company had 229 million users who were served advertising in the January-March quarter.