Tesla CEO Elon Musk and his team are preparing their own audit of 100 Twitter followers to check how many are bots and spam accounts.
Earlier, citing a week-old regulatory filing from Twitter, Musk claimed that he wanted to pause the deal to verify that false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5 per cent of the company's 229 million users during the first quarter.
Musk tweeted Thursday his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter was on hold as he investigates the company's internal audit.