Shares of Twitter Inc drop 22% to $35.20 in pre-market trade after Tesla Inc CEO Elon Musk, who had inked a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion, said in a tweet “deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting the calculation that spam/fake accounts represent less than 5% of users”.
Twitter said in a filing on Monday that it estimates false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5% of its monetizable daily active users during Q1.
Shares of Tesla Inc rose 4.4% after Musk’s tweet.
At current premarket levels, Twitter is trading at a ~35% discount to Musk’s $54.20 per share offer price. Also, it is trading below where the stock was prior to Musk revealing an over 9% stake in early April.
Earlier this week, Twitter shares fell below $46.75, implying the probability of the deal closing at Musk’s offer price was below 50%.
Up to Thursday’s close, Twitter had gained %~15 since Musk disclosed his stake.