Elon Musk tweets,'My team will do ‘random sampling’ of 100 followers of Twitter'

Washington, May 14: In a continuation of his announcement from a day ago that his $US44 billion ($A64 billion) cash deal for Twitter is "temporarily on hold", Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Saturday announced that his team will do 'random sampling' of 100 followers of Twitter's account on the social media giant's own platform.

"To find out, my team will do a random sample of 100 followers of @twitter. I invite others to repeat the same process and see what they discover...," Musk, who has nearly 93 million followers, informed.

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

On Friday, Musk, the world's richest person, dropped a bombshell as he announced that the biggest tech deals of recent times would be on hold. "Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users (sic)".

"Still committed to acquisition," the 50-year-old Tesla boss said.

Under the terms of Musk's contract with Twitter, he is entitled to ask the company for information on its operations following the signing of the deal. But this is meant to help him prepare for his ownership of Twitter, not to carry out due diligence and reopen negotiations.