At a conference in Miami on Monday, Musk said a lower price was not “out of the question,” the latest indication that he may be distancing himself from his initial $44 billion offer, which was announced April 25.

The terms of the deal carry a $1 billion termination fee, and his withdrawal could trigger a messy legal battle, some experts have said.

Musk says he might try to renegotiate $44B Twitter deal for less

The issue of bots — accounts that often peddle cryptocurrency scams or other schemes — prompted Musk to declare the deal on hold last week.

In a thread on Twitter’s methodology, CEO Parag Agrawal said Monday that the site suspends more than half a million spam accounts daily. He said its estimate of bots is based on reviews, conducted by people quarterly, of thousands of accounts that it counts as active and that are randomly sampled.