BILLIONAIRE Elon Musk today said his purchase of Twitter will not proceed unless he is assured that the platform has fewer than 5% fake accounts.

“Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of (less than) 5%,” tweeted Musk, who has almost 94 million followers on the social network.

“This deal cannot move forward until he does.”

The SpaceX and Tesla chief is currently listed as the wealthiest person in the world by Forbes, with a fortune of US$230 billion (RM1 trillion).

Seen by his champions as an iconoclastic genius and his critics as an erratic megalomaniac, Musk surprised many investors last month with news that he wanted to purchase Twitter.

But his US$44 billion buy of Twitter remains “temporarily on hold”, pending questions over the social media company’s estimates of the number of fake accounts, or “bots”.

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal said the platform suspends more than a half-million seemingly bogus accounts a day, usually before they are even seen, and locks millions more weekly that fail checks to make sure they are controlled by humans and not by software. – AFP, May 17, 2022.