Musk's $44 bn Twitter deal in serious trouble: Report

Tech billionaire Elon Musk's offer to buy the microblogging platform Twitter for $44 billion is in serious trouble, media reports say. According to The Washington Post, Musk's deal to buy the platform is "in peril" -- based on three anonymous sources who told the paper that the billionaire's camp has "stopped engaging in certain discussions around funding" for the agreement.

Musk is not going it alone in his attempt to buy Twitter, with others like Larry Ellison, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity, the crypto exchange Binance, and the state investment firm of Qatar are among those pitching in a few billion as a part of the effort, citing the report, The Verge reported.

The idea that a "drastic" change of direction on the deal is close to happening is supposedly due to concerns that Twitter's data regarding spam and bots on the platform is not verifiable, the report said.

The report comes just hours after Twitter had a conference call with media outlets to explain that its spam account data and technology for blocking bots are just fine, setting up a showdown between the company and its would-be new owner.

The platform reportedly claimed that it blocks 1 million spammers every day.

Last month, Musk stated that if Twitter fails to give data on spam and fake accounts, he may walk out of his $44 billion acquisition agreement.

In an SEC filing, Twitter had shared a letter it received from Musk's legal team indicating displeasure with the company's offered information regarding the level of "spam and fake accounts" on its service.

The letter said that more data (and not just an explanation of how the existing data was gathered) on Twitter's non-human users, both natural and spam, is important for helping close the transaction from a financing perspective.