London - Elon Musk on Friday said that his planned $44 billion purchase of Twitter is “temporarily on hold, pending details on spam and fake accounts on the social media platform.

Signs of internal turmoil are evident over the billionaire’s planned buyout of Twitter, including that the social media company fired two of its top managers Thursday.

Last month, a Twitter earnings report said that it had overcounted its daily users for three years straight. The company blamed a technical error, which had resulted in counting multiple accounts as active, despite them being tied to a single user. That, in turn, had led to the platform miscounting its user numbers by as much as 1.9 million each quarter.

Earlier this month, Twitter estimated in a filing that fewer than 5% of its monetizable daily active users during the first quarter were bots or spam accounts. The company, however, noted that the actual number “could be higher.”

Musk, who announced last month his intention to buy Twitter, said previously that one of his main priorities would be to remove “spam bots” from the platform.

Stock of both Twitter and Tesla swung sharply in opposite directions, with Twitter’s stock tumbling 18% and that of Tesla jumped 5%.

Investors have had to weigh legal troubles for Musk, as well as the possibility that acquiring Twitter could be a distraction from running the world’s most valuable automaker.

Twitter said on Thursday that the company is pausing most hiring and except for business critical roles. In addition, it said in a statement, “we are pulling back on non-labor costs to ensure we are being responsible and efficient.”

In a memo sent to employees and confirmed by Twitter, CEO Parag Agrawal said the company has not hit growth and revenue milestones after the company began to invest “aggressively” to expand its user base and revenue.
-AP/RT