A tweet from Tesla TSLA +4.60% CEO Elon Musk sent Twitter TWTR –10.45% shares sharply lower. Another sent the stock in the other direction.
The Tesla (ticker: TSLA) CEO said Friday his deal to buy Twitter (TWTR) was “temporarily on hold” pending a calculation related to the number of fake accounts on Twitter.
Hours later, Musk tweeted again saying “Still committed to acquisition.”
Twitter stock was down more than 18% in premarket trading. Shortly after the second tweet, the shares were off 12.1% at $39.64. That is very close to the level Twitter traded at before Musk’s initial 9%-plus stake in Twitter was disclosed.
The original tweet was attached to a Reuters article from May 2 about the number of accounts on the social media platform that were bots and spam accounts. Twitter, in its first-quarter financial filing, said that those type of accounts represented less than 5% of what it calls its mDAU, or monetizable daily active usage.
Twitter and Musk didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Holding the deal because of bots is a little surprising, given that bots aren’t a new issue. Musk has said several times that removing spammers and bots are important to increasing Twitter’s value. He hit the theme again this week when he spoke at the Financial Times Car of the Future conference.
Twitter “is the least bad public square, a forum for the exchange of ideas,” said Musk Tuesday. “It could be a lot better … in order to be better it needs to really get rid of the bots and the scams, scammers. Anyone trying to create fake influence on the site.”
If fake accounts represent more of Twitter’s registered users than he originally believed, Musk may not want to pay his original offer price of $54.20 a share. Future Fund Active ETF (FFND) cofounder Gary Black suggested Friday that Musk might want to renegotiate terms after the latest decline in Tesla stock.
Coming into Friday trading, Tesla stock is down about 36% since Musk’s stake in Twitter emerged. The Nasdaq Composite is down about 22% over the same span. It’s hard to say exactly how much of the excess decline in Tesla stock, relative to the index, is Twitter-related. Tesla is typically more volatile than the Nasdaq, rising more in good times and falling more in bad times.