Elon Musk tweeted that Twitter deal is temporarily on hold

Elon Musk tweeted early Friday that his $44 billion bid to buy Twitter was temporarily on hold as he examined the number of spam accounts on the site, sending the company’s stock on a steep slide in premarket trading.

“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” he tweeted, linking to a Reuters article from last week citing a Twitter filing.

Roughly two hours later, he added: “Still committed to acquisition.”

It was not immediately clear how the Tesla CEO would...