Elon Musk Says Deal To Buy Twitter 'Temporarily On Hold'

Elon Musk said on Friday he was putting a temporary halt on his much-anticipated deal to buy Twitter, sending shares in the social media giant plunging. 

"Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users," he wrote on Twitter.

Shares of the social media company fell 20 percent in premarket trading.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters.

Earlier this month, Twitter estimated that false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5 percent of its monetizable daily active users during the first quarter.

It also said it faced several risks until the deal with Musk was closed, including whether advertisers would continue to spend on Twitter.

Musk, the world's richest man and founder of automaker Tesla, had made the eradication of spam accounts and bots one of the centerpieces of his proposed $44 billion takeover of Twitter.

When the deal was announced in late April, he said he wanted to make Twitter "better than ever" by "defeating the spam bots and authenticating all humans."