It’s official: Twitter is taking Elon Musk to court
Twitter has done something that Elon Musk hasn’t: keep his promise to take him to court for breaching the announced and signed agreement to acquire the microblogging and social networking site.
Musk’s legal team sent a letter to Twitter last week stating their intentions to withdraw from the deal, and the response has been as expected. Twitter’s chairman of the board, Bret Taylor, then announced that the company was still “engaged” to close the deal in the terms that the two parties previously agreed and that otherwise “I would take legal action to enforce the merger agreement”.
Finally, the technological soap opera of the summer takes a new direction. Twitter has filed a lawsuit in a Delaware court specialized in commercial disputes for violating the agreement to buy the social network for 44,000 million dollars, after a significant premium that valued the share price at 54.20 dollars.
Twitter takes Elon Musk to court
The social network is very hard on Musk. “In April 2022, Elon Musk signed a binding merger agreement with Twitter, promising to do everything in his power to close the deal. Now, less than three months later, Musk is refusing to honor his obligations to Twitter and his shareholders because the deal he signed no longer serves his personal interests.”can be read on demand.
“Having put on a public show to put Twitter on the line, and proposed and then signed a vendor-friendly merger agreement, Musk apparently believes that he, unlike any other party subject to Delaware contract law , You’re free to change your mind, wreck the companydiscontinue operations, destroy shareholder value, and walk away.”they assure.
Twitter calls Musk’s withdrawal a “model of hypocrisy” and dismisses the argument that it was Twitter itself that violated the terms of the agreement by failing to prove that the number of fake accounts on the platform matched the company’s estimates. You already know that Twitter says that less than 5% of users are fake and spam accounts, something that the tycoon considers an underestimate.
Twitter denies it: “Musk made a wake-up call to ‘defeat the spam bots,’ but when the market dipped and the price deal became less attractive, Musk changed his narrative and suddenly demanded ‘verification’ that spam is not spam.” it was a serious problem on the platform»they indicate.
The lawsuit also includes another series of “material contractual breaches by Musk that have tarnished Twitter and its business” Like the Confidentiality agreements about internal estimates of spam counts and other data that Musk has unearthed with his tweets.
How will the soap opera end?
legal experts they believe that Twitter will end up “winning” the court case. The Delaware Court has rarely ruled in favor of the party trying to back out of a signed commitment. And Twitter seems to have a pretty strong case. Only Musk’s own tweets need to be exposed. But hey, in a case like this anything could happen. It will be difficult for a court to force Musk to buy a company, but it will be difficult for it to impose heavy damages for non-compliance that some sources put at 1,000 million dollars.
Small change for the richest guy in the world who for a while now he believes himself above good and evil. Elon Musk continues to be one of the most relevant voices in today’s technological entrepreneurship. And it is not for less, since the co-founder of PayPal is the CEO of the firm that has revolutionized the automotive industry, Tesla Motors, he is president of SolarCity (the largest supplier of solar energy systems in the United States), he is director of technology at SpaceX (in the top-3 of private space exploration) and has significant investments in other companies such as the biotechnology firm Halcyon Molecular.
But not even he can withdraw -without consequences- from a commercial agreement signed and announced to the four winds. Not without destroying Twitter and its shareholders along the way…
