'This continues to be a circus show that really puts the deal in uncertainty,' he said. Ives, the analyst at Wedbush, said the announcement from Musk on Friday puts the outcome of the acquisition in question. Likewise, the Federal Trade Commission is reviewing the acquisition over the possible violation of an antitrust reporting rule. The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Musk over a delay in notifying regulators of a 9.2% stake in Twitter he took earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
Last month, Musk reached a deal to buy Twitter at $54.20 a share, which amounted to a 38% premium above where the share price stood before it was made public that Musk had been purchasing company stock. In the public filing this month in which it stated that fake accounts make up less than 5% of users, Twitter added a note of caution about the figure: 'In making this determination, we applied significant judgment, so our estimation of false or spam accounts may not accurately represent the actual number of such accounts, and the actual number of false or spam accounts could be higher than we have estimated.' For its part, Twitter has acknowledged the challenge of accurately estimating the number of fake accounts on the platform.
