Elon Musk on Friday said his deal with microblogging platform Twitter worth $44 billion was temporarily on hold. The Tesla chief executive officer said the deal was put on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam and fake accounts indeed represented less than five per cent of users.
Last month, Musk had clinched a deal to buy Twitter Inc for $44 billion cash in a transaction.
Musk, the world’s richest man, had recently that one of his priorities would be to remove “spam bots” from the platform.
According reports, shares of the social media company fell 20 per cent in premarket trading. The company had earlier this month estimated that false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5 per cent of its monetisable daily active users during the first quarter.
(With agency inputs)
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G7 ‘strongly united’ in backing Ukraine until victory, says France
France on Friday said the Group of Seven industrialised nations was committed to helping Ukraine win its war against Russia as the group’s top diplomats held talks in northern Germany. French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said the G7 countries were “very strongly united” in their will to “continue in the long term to support Ukraine’s fight for its sovereignty until Ukraine’s victory”.
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1 killed, 13 injured in Karachi blast, second in as many weeks
One person died and 13 were left injured in a blast inside a market area in Pakistan’s Karachi on late Thursday night, according to local media reports. The blast occurred two weeks after a suicide bombing in the Pakistani port city killed four people, including three Chinese nationals. The explosion occurred in the commercial locality of Saddar.
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UN holds emergency meeting on Taliban crackdown on women
The U.N. Security Council held emergency closed consultations Thursday on the Taliban’s latest crackdown on Afghan women as it considered a presidential statement that would express deep concern at the new ban by Afghanistan’s rulers on women leaving home “without necessity” and wearing head-to-toe clothing when they do go out in public. The Norwegian-drafted statement would also call for a reversal of policies that restrict the rights of women and girls.
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North Korea enveloped in health crisis: 10 global Covid updates
Often referred to as “the hermit state”, North Korea – after claiming to have zero Covid cases for nearly two years – on Thursday recorded its first patient and within a few hours the country seems to have been enveloped by a health crisis. Several other countries including China, Italy, and the United States have registered a surge in cases since March, with China going through one of its worst Covid outbreaks after 2020.