Elon Musk has officially backed out of the controversial $44 billion Twitter buyout.
The announcement, which was originally reported by Reuters, comes after two months of detailed investigations by Musk’s team that put the deal to buy the social media company on hold, just weeks after Musk made it.
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On April 4, Musk revealed that he purchased just over 9% of the company’s stock for $2.64 billion, becoming its largest shareholder. Ten days later, he proposed to purchase Twitter for $43 billion. On May 13, Musk announced the deal was “on hold” following reports that 5 percent of Twitter’s daily active users were spam accounts, causing Twitter stock to drop more than 10 percent as reported by The Verge.
“Mr. Musk has sought the data and information necessary to ‘make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on Twitter’s platform,'” Musk’s team told reporters. “Twitter has failed or refused to provide this information.”
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The Tesla CEO said on Friday that he would be terminating the deal because Twitter was in “material breach” of the agreement and made “false and misleading” statements during negotiations.
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Neither Musk nor his team offered any further insights into what may or may not have been uncovered during the investigation.
Given past statements, the SpaceX founder expressed concern over the number of spam bots on the site and wanted Twitter to prove that its total number of spam bots accounted for less than 5% of its total users.
At this time, it is unclear if the company was able or willing to provide that information. Musk is also facing a class-action lawsuit from Twitter investor William Heresniak, alleging Musk violated corporate laws in California by manipulating the market when he made misleading statements that caused Twitter stock prices to drop.
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