Elon Musk signals he wants to pay less than $44bn for Twitter

Elon Musk has signaled that he wants to pay less than $44bn for Twitter after telling a tech conference he believes at least 20 per cent of the platform’s accounts are bots.

The Tesla boss, who announced last week that his deal to buy Twitter was “temporarily on hold”, told the All In Summit that a lower price agreement for the company was possible, according to the Associated Press.

Mr Musk said that the percentage of bots out of twitter’s 229m accounts was the low end of his assessment, reported Bloomberg News who watched a livestream of the event.

Twitter stock ended Monday down eight per cent at $37.39, while Mr Musk offered to buy the company at $54.20 on 14 April.

The world’s richest person has said he will use billions of dollars of Tesla stock to buy twitter, and the electric vehicle maker’s stocks have fallen in value by more than 27 per cent in the past month.

This has lead some observers to suggest that Mr Musk may try to back out of the deal, which would cost him a $1bn fee to exit.