The saga of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter continues.

Ever since Tesla CEO and prominent billionaire Elon Musk announced that he would be acquiring social media platform Twitter in its entirety for a massive price tag, the site has been caught up in a whirlwind of intrigue. Stock prices have soared as everyone tries to get a last-minute purchase in before Musk buys the whole thing, while Musk himself has been vocal about the changes he wants to make to the platform.

However, in another surprising twist to what has proven to be an altogether surprising saga, Musk announced today that the Twitter acquisition deal has been temporarily shelved.

“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” Musk wrote on his own Twitter. He followed up with another tweet shortly after reaffirming his intent to make the deal.

Musk had previously noted that corralling and curbing the trend of fake and bot-run accounts on Twitter is one of his major priorities for the platform. In his tweet, he refers to a Reuters report regarding the actual number of bot accounts versus actual Twitter users. Neither Twitter nor Musk have followed up on this statement as of writing.

Twitter shares dropped after Elon Musk tweeted he was putting his $44 billion bid to acquire Twitter on hold. Watch @crampell weigh in on what Musk's motivation could be: https://t.co/oBtiKTGOzi

— CNN (@CNN) May 13, 2022

Following Musk’s announcement Twitter stock values dipped by about 13% as the buy/sell fervor cooled. Some business analysts suspect that Musk may be considering an attempt to renegotiate his buying price, if not back out of the acquisition altogether.

“If Musk does decide to still go down the deal path a clear renegotiation is likely on the table which calls into question a number of topics (financing path, leverage of Tesla stock, prior financing partners, employee reaction),” Wedbush Securities analysts Dan Ives and John Katsingris wrote in a note to investors. “Many will view this as Musk using this Twitter filing/spam accounts as a way to get out of this deal in a vastly changing market.”