Elon Musk’s announcement that his deal to buy Twitter was “temporarily on hold,” driving down the stock prices — and value — of the company he made a deal to buy, is triggering concerns about possible securities fraud. He insisted hours later he was “still committed to the acquisition.”With his enormous platform on Twitter, Musk can rattle the stock market with a single sentence. His tweet Friday that his $44 billion commitment to buy Twitter was “temporarily on hold” because there may be more fake accounts and bots on Twitter than he realized sent Twitter stock down as much as 25%. Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of usershttps://t.co/Y2t0QMuuyn — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 13, 2022AdvertisementMusk himself decided to forego due diligence before his offer. “That is what is usually called ‘securities fraud,’ or what I sometimes like to call ’lite securities fraud.’ Musk has a long history of lite securities fraud.”Musk settled a fraud lawsuit with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2018 because he tweeted that he had secured funding to take Tesla private but hadn’t.

Source: Huffington Post May 14, 2022 11:19 UTC