Elon Musk says his Twitter deal cannot "move forward" without the CEO publicly showing proof that less than five per cent of its users are spam bots.

The Tesla and SpaceX has made it clear that his $44 billion (£35 billion) takeover of the micro-blogging platform will be on hold until the issue of bots is cleared up.

He tweeted: "My offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate. Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of 5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does.”

The world's richest man has even suggested reducing his agreed $54.20 a share offer because of the number of fake accounts plaguing the app.

He said: “It really depends on a lot of factors here.

“I’m still waiting for some sort of logical explanation for the number of sort of fake or spam accounts on Twitter. And Twitter is refusing to tell us. This seems like a strange thing.”

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal has insisted: “Our actual internal estimates for the last four quarters were all well under 5 percent."

He insisted: “We shared an overview of the estimation process with Elon a week ago and look forward to continuing the conversation with him, and all of you.”