I’m going to miss it and back down, Musk thought

Elon Musk announced that he is suspending preparations for the acquisition of Twitter. The reason is that the billionaire wants to wait for the results of verification – he needs to make sure that fake accounts account for less than 5% of users of the popular social network.

At least, that’s the reason Musk himself gave:

The Twitter deal is temporarily on hold pending detailed confirmation of calculations that fake accounts are indeed less than 5% of users.

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 billionaire explained that his team would check a “random sample of 100 followers” on Twitter to identify bots.

After the tweets were published, Twitter’s stock plummeted, and cryptos started talking about Musk repeating his favorite joke – to publicize an asset and then flush it down the toilet with one tweet. As a reaction to the news, shares of the service plummeted 25.11% to $33.76. By the end of the day, however, they slightly won back the fall, but only thanks to Musk’s assurances that he would buy the social network anyway.

On Saturday, Musk wrote that Twitter Inc’s legal team accused him of violating a non-disclosure agreement over a report that the sample size (aka ‘sample size’) for testing the social media platform of automated users was 100 people.

Those who are somewhat familiar with the billionaire’s habits know that such jokes are quite Musk’s thing. Last year he literally launched bitcoin to the moon. All because Tesla began accepting payment in cryptocurrency for its electric cars. Also in early 2021, the company revealed its $1.5 billion investment in bitcoin.

However, Musk’s love is – like May weather – fickle. And after just a couple of months, he seriously thought about the harm that miners are doing to the environment, after which he hastily abandoned bitcoin and literally collapsed the cryptocurrency market with one tweet, causing a real panic.