UPDATED: 13 MAY 2022 02:35 PM EST
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Friday announced that his bid to buy Twitter is “temporarily on hold.”
Musk, who was Twitter’s biggest shareholder when he mounted his bid to buy the platform, tweeted that the deal is stalled “pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users” on the site. Musk has since been overtaken as Twitter's biggest shareholder by the Vanguard Group.
In a subsequent tweet, Musk said he is “still committed to acquisition” of the company. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Musk’s tweets.
Last month, Twitter’s board of directors accepted Musk’s proposal to purchase the company for roughly $44 billion.
Musk’s potential takeover of Twitter has rattled the company in recent weeks. Twitter’s top lawyer cried during a meeting with her teams last month as she expressed concerns about how the company could change under Musk’s leadership, POLITICO reported.
Human rights groups have also warned about Musk’s buying of Twitter, asserting that policy changes by the self-described “free-speech absolutist” could result in an increase in hate speech and other harmful rhetoric on the social media platform.
Meanwhile, Republican politicians and conservative commentators — who frequently claim that Twitter places “shadow bans” on their content by reducing the visibility of their accounts — have embraced Musk’s takeover attempt.
On Tuesday, Musk said he would end Twitter’s permanent ban of former President Donald Trump, who was booted from the platform last year after inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.
In assesing Musk’s tweets, regulators look at whether the statements are true — Musk landed in hot water with the SEC in 2018 when he falsely tweeted that he had the funding to take Tesla private — and what kind of market impact they have, according to Jill Fisch, business law professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
The tweet Friday is “not something that’s clearly unlawful,” Fisch said, but “if you’re Elon Musk and you know that the market reacts tremendously to everything you say about the Twitter merger, is it responsible to just make off-the-cuff musings into public statements?”
“It’s something I think the SEC is going to have to think about going forward,” she said.
Musk’s intent also matters: If he was trying to “spook Twitter stock to give him leverage to renegotiate the deal, that’s when it starts to slip into [market] manipulation,” Fisch said.
Twitter stock fell after the tweet was posted.
Rebecca Kern contributed to this report.
