Image: Elon Musk. Source: Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr
Continuing his long-standing habit of provocative tweets, Elon Musk spooked Twitter (TWTR) investors Friday morning, tweeting that his announced acquisition of the social media company was "temporarily on hold."
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, 2022
The mercurial billionaire cited a Reuters article from May 2, 2022, that stated Twitter had estimated that false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5% of its monetizable daily active users during the first quarter.
Susannah Streeter, an analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, said, "This 5% metric has been out for some time [and Musk] clearly would have already seen it."
"So it may well be more part of the strategy to lower the price."
Twitter shares are trading at $39.31, down 12.8%, as of 8:35am ET Friday.
We see no reason for investors to play guessing games with Twitter stock at this point. A deal is likely to happen, but the price as well as Elon Musk's maneuvers to negotiate in the public eye, remains a question.
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Sources: Reuters, Equities News
