Elon Musk says he has put the brakes on his highly-publicized deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion until he gets more information about fake accounts on the platform.

Tweeting early on Friday, May 13, the SpaceX and Telsa billionaire said: "Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users."

Musk cited a Reuters news article from May 2 showing that up to 5 percent of Twitter's monetizable daily active users are false or spam accounts. Musk has previously said that eradicating "spam bots" from the platform would be one of his main priorities if the deal were to go ahead.