Musk’s $44 billion Twitter deal in serious trouble: report

San Fran­cis­co, July 8 (IANS) — Tech bil­lion­aire Elon Musk’s bid to buy microblog­ging plat­form Twit­ter for $44 bil­lion has run into seri­ous trou­ble, accord­ing to media reports. 

Accord­ing to The Wash­ing­ton Post, Musk’s deal to buy the plat­form is “in jeop­ardy” — based on three anony­mous sources who told the paper that the bil­lion­aire’s camp “has stopped engag­ing in cer­tain dis­cus­sions about fund­ing” for the deal. 

Musk isn’t going it alone in his bid to buy Twit­ter, with oth­ers like Lar­ry Elli­son, ven­ture cap­i­tal firm Andreessen Horowitz, Fideli­ty, cryp­to exchange Binance and Qatar state invest­ment firm pitch­ing in a few bil­lion as a part of the effort, cit­ing the report, report­ed The Verge. 

The idea that a “dras­tic” change in direc­tion on the deal is immi­nent alleged­ly stems from con­cerns that Twit­ter’s data on spam and bots on the plat­form is unver­i­fi­able, the report said. 

The report comes just hours after Twit­ter held a con­fer­ence call with media com­pa­nies that said the spam account data and bot-block­ing tech­nol­o­gy are in order, prompt­ing a show­down between the com­pa­ny and its poten­tial new owner . 

The plat­form report­ed­ly claims that it blocks 1 mil­lion spam­mers every day.

Last month, Musk said he could end his $44 bil­lion acqui­si­tion deal if Twit­ter did­n’t release data on spam and fake accounts. 

In an SEC fil­ing, Twit­ter shared a let­ter it received from Musk’s legal team express­ing dis­plea­sure with the com­pa­ny’s offered infor­ma­tion regard­ing the lev­el of “spam and fake accounts” on its service. 

The let­ter states that more data (rather than just an expla­na­tion of how the exist­ing data was col­lect­ed) about the non-human Twit­ter users, both nat­ur­al and spam, is impor­tant to com­plet­ing the trans­ac­tion from a finan­cial perspective.