Latest On Elon Musk's Twitter Deal Amid New Allegation

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A new report claiming Elon Musk paid a private settlement in relation to a 2016 sexual misconduct incident is unlikely to affect his Twitter takeover deal, experts in corporate acquisitions told NBC News on Friday (May 20).

On Thursday (May 19), Business Insider reported Musk's company SpaceX paid a flight attendant $250,000 in severance after she accused Musk of sexually harassing her while she worked on a private jet.

The report cited documents provided by a friend of the flight attendant, which stated that the compensation she received was contingent on her not taking additional legal action moving forward.

Musk shared a series of tweets denying the accusation late Thursday night and Friday morning, calling the article a "hit piece" that intended to "interfere with the Twitter acquisition."

Earlier this month, Musk revealed his deal to takeover Twitter is "temporarily on hold" while sharing a Reuters article on the social media platform estimating that spam and fake accounts comprise less than 5% of its users.

"Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users," Musk tweeted early Friday (May 13) morning.

Twitter accepted Musk's $44 billion buyout as part of a deal that is expected to close in 2022, the company confirmed in a news release obtained by CNN on April 25.

The entrepreneur has been vocal about his goal to clean up the social media platform's "spam bots," which mimic real people and appears to have questioned whether Twitter was underreporting such accounts, however, it was unclear what specifically led to the delay in the deal as the company didn't immediately respond to requests for comment made by the Associated Press following Musk's tweet.

Investigators have monitored Musk's legal issues, as well as whether acquiring Twitter would distract him from running Tesla, which is currently the world's most valuable automaker, after the company had previously dropped 16% earlier in the week.

Tesla's significant jump in its price of shares casted doubt that Musk's takeover of Twitter would take place.

The entrepreneur had sold more than $8 billion of his Tesla shares to finance his $44 billion buyout of the social media company, the AP reports.


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