NEW YORK – Elon Musk sent out mixed messages about his plan to buy Twitter on Friday, which put pressure on the shares of the microblogging site and raised doubts about whether the deal will go through.
In an early morning tweet, Musk said that the $44 billion takeover was “temporarily on hold” until questions were answered about how many fake accounts, or “bots,” the social media company thought it had.
That caused Twitter’s stock to drop by 25%.
Two hours later, Tesla’s CEO sent out a tweet that said, “Still committed to acquisition.”
Shares went up and down a little bit on Friday, but they ended the day down nearly 10 percent at $40.72.
Analysts usually saw Musk’s messages as an attempt to back out of the deal or try to get a lower price. This is because the reliability of user numbers is a key factor in figuring out how much money Twitter and other social media companies make.
In an analyst’s note, Angelo Zino of CFRA Research said, “From a financial point of view, we never doubted Musk’s ability to complete such a deal. However, we thought the biggest risk was Elon himself changing his mind.”
He said that the move gives Musk “leverage” and makes it more likely that Musk will either lower his offer price or just walk away.
While that was going on, CEO Parag Agrawal went to the stage to talk about the changes that were made to the company leadership and hiring earlier this week.
“I think the deal will go through, but we should be ready for anything and always do what’s best for Twitter,” Agrawal said. “I’m in charge of running and running Twitter, and our job every day is to make Twitter stronger.”
