As we reported in late April, Twitter accepted Elon Musk's proposal to buy the social media platform for $44 billion, thus becoming the company's sole owner. Early Friday morning (May 13), Musk provided an update on the deal, tweeting that it is "temporarily put on hold." Musk continued to tweet that spam and fake accounts represent less than 5% of Twitter users.
When the deal was first discussed, Musk said one of his priorities was to remove fake users and spambots from the platform. The Tesla CEO also vocalized his plans to monetize the platform– and monetization results from real and active users, which explains why Musk would want to ensure that the platform isn’t overrun with bots.
According to the Twitters first-quarter results, “Twitter defines monetizable daily active usage or users (mDAU) as people, organizations, or other accounts who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given day through twitter.com, Twitter applications that are able to show ads or paid Twitter products, including subscriptions.”
The presence of fake accounts skews the active user numbers, resulting in an inaccurate revenue estimate.
Musk followed up his tweet by saying, “Still committed to acquisition.”
According to Twitter's former CEO, Jack Dorsey, Musk's goal is to make the platform “maximally trusted and broadly inclusive.” The presence of spam accounts would also interfere with Musk’s goal of trust.