Last week, Elon Musk revealed on Twitter that his US$44 billion deal with Twitter has been “temporarily put on hold” while he waits for the social media giant to provide data on its fake accounts.

Twitter’s share price fell 9.67% as a result of the tweet, closing at $40.72 on Friday.

“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting estimate that spam/fake accounts indeed represent less than 5% of users,” Mr Musk tweeted on Friday.

He then confirmed that he remained "committed to the acquisition" in a follow-up post, while also revealing that he would appoint his own team to evaluate Twitter's valuation.

"To find out, my team will take a random sample of 100 @twitter followers," Mr Musk said. "I invite others to repeat the same process and see what they find."

"If we try to figure out the bot/duplicate user rate together, we can probably crowdsource a good answer."

However, it was this latest tweet that broke Twitter's patience.

Namely, returning to the social media platform over the weekend, Mr Musk sensationally revealed that he had been sued by Twitter for allegedly breaching their NDA by revealing that the sample size for their automated user checks was 100.

“Twitter's legal department just called to complain that I violated their NDA by revealing that the sample size for a bot check is 100! It really happened,” Mr Musk tweeted.

Mr Musk initially bought a 9.2 per cent stake in Twitter last month, but soon followed that up with an offer to buy the company in its entirety.

Analysts have speculated that Tesla's CEO may be considering price talks after a series of events weakened the company's position, including a broad rout in tech stocks and Twitter's weak quarterly financial results, which revealed an ongoing problem with fake accounts.

Last week, forensic financial research firm Hindenburg Research explained that Twitter's recently reported performance represents an additional downside that hasn't been priced into the stock price. The social media company also admitted it overstated its daily active users just four months after the $809 million securities fraud settlement over a similar issue.

"We suspect that Twitter continues to overestimate its true daily active users despite the revision." As Musk pointed out, the platform is flooded with bots, spam and fraudulent accounts, which likely inflate its true user metrics even more,” the researcher said.

Mr Musk has been very vocal about "defeating the spambots" in an effort to "increase trust" after his planned takeover.

"I also want to make Twitter better than ever by improving the product with new features, open-sourcing the algorithms to increase trust, defeat spambots and authenticate all people," he was quoted as saying in a statement released by Twitter , announcing that the deal in April.

Maja Garatsa Djurdjevic

Maya's career in journalism spans more than a decade in finance, business and politics. Already an experienced editor and reporter in all elements of the financial services sector, before joining Momentum Media, Maya reported for several established news outlets in South East Europe, looking at key processes in post-conflict societies.