Since Musk announced he was putting in a $44 billion deal bid for Twitter, to allow everyone a voice, the share price of the social notworking outfit has tanked.

But that is not the reason that Musk is putting forward for losing interest in the idea, according to the Washington Post he is worried that Twitter's figures on spam accounts are not verifiable.

In fact, Twitter has been pretty consistent and open about five per cent of its accounts being fake, but suddenly Musk is outraged by that figure.

Musk's team has stopped engaging in certain discussions around funding for the $44 billion deal, including with a party named as a likely backer, the Post said.

The Post, which has a history of typing in big corporate press releases as news, seems to be backing Musk’s line, in fact some cynics say that its source is Musk’s team which would explain why the story is so one sided.

According to the Post Musk has been given a "fire hose" [what ever the hell that means] of data from Twitter to try and establish how many accounts were real or fake and said that the data might have torpedoed the deal.

This seems a little odd given that one of the reasons Musk said he wanted to buy Twitter was to remove all the spam bots. It would appear that Musk has gone from wanting to buy Twitter in part because of bots to not wanting to buy Twitter because of bots.

So what is really happening here?

It is possible that Musk is holding out for a renegotiated price of between $42-$45 per share, or he just wants to forget that he ever made the deal. To do that he would have to win a court battle as Musk might have to pay a $1 billion fee to Twitter to walk away. Wall Street can’t see any reason the deal wouldn’t close, other than that Musk wants out and has either the financial might to make it happen. The current share price is lower than Musk's bid and does not appear to be rising.