Elon Musk's $44 Billion Twitter Deal on Temporarily Hold, Stock Tanks

Elon Musk is nothing if unpredictable, so he was true to form in a stunning announcement ... he's putting the brakes on the Twitter deal, and the reaction is telling.

Elon just said he's putting a temporary hold on his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, and the stock tanked in pre-market trading -- down 25%. The reaction is interesting ... if the prevailing view was against Elon buying Twitter, you'd think the stock might have gone up, or at least remained stable.

As for why Elon's putting the brakes on the deal ... he says he wants to make sure spam and other bogus accounts represent less than 5% of the 229 million users on the platform.

There are other theories ... this may be his way of pulling out of the deal entirely, but that's typically not the way he rolls. The other play would be to make the folks at Twitter nervous that he's pulling out and then he would swoop back in and offers less than the $44 billion.