Elon Musk has placed the Twitter acquisition on hold due to bogus account information.

Elon Musk has put his $44 billion (£35 billion) proposal to buy Twitter on hold while he investigates the number of false or spam accounts on the platform.

He stated that he was awaiting facts "to support [the] calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed comprise less than 5% of users."

Twitter's stock dropped 25% in pre-market trading after the announcement.

Mr. Musk has been outspoken about the need to eliminate spam accounts.

Fake accounts accounted for less than 5% of Twitter's daily active users in the first three months of this year, according to a report released more than two weeks ago.

However, the corporation admitted that it "used significant judgment" in calculating the number of spam accounts, thus "our estimation of fraudulent or spam accounts may not precisely represent the real number of such accounts."

"It's possible that the number of fake or spam accounts is bigger than we thought. We're always looking for ways to increase our capacity to estimate the total number of spam accounts "it said.

Mr. Musk, who according to Forbes magazine is the richest person on the planet, is now looking into that statistic.

If either Twitter or Mr. Musk decides to leave, they must pay the other side a $1 billion termination fee.

Twitter has long had a problem with automated, phony accounts posting content incessantly.

Mr. Musk has called for "fighting the spam bots" on Twitter, as well as a slew of other improvements, including the reinstatement of certain banned accounts, including former US President Donald Trump's.

Mr. Musk's remark, according to Dan Ives, a tech analyst at investment company Wedbush Securities, will "turn this Twitter circus act into a Friday the 13th horror show."

He predicted that Wall Street would now "see this deal as 1) likely breaking apart, 2) Musk negotiating a lower deal price, or 3) Musk simply walking away with a $1 billion breakup fee."

If Mr. Musk decides to go ahead with the agreement, Mr. Ives says an "obvious renegotiation is certainly on the table."

Many people would see his bringing up the number of spam accounts "as a way out of this deal in a rapidly changing industry," he said.

"Musk's habit of creating so much ambiguity via a tweet (rather than a file) is highly disturbing to us... and now turns this whole agreement into a circus show with numerous questions and no firm answers as to the deal's future ahead."

The Tesla CEO's latest move comes after two Twitter execs announced their departure from the firm.

On Thursday, Kayvon Beykpour, who handled Twitter's consumer division, and Bruce Falck, who supervised revenue, both posted that the departures were not their choices.

Except for "business vital tasks," the firm has suspended most hiring as of this week.