As expected, Twitter has made good on its threat and sued Elon Musk –CEO of Tesla and SpaceXamong other companies- for breaking the purchase agreement of the social network that they had signed last April and for which they were going to disburse 44,000 million dollars.
Twitter assures that a public scandal has been mounted to lower its price
The company has had no other option to defend its interests than to file a lawsuit against the manager, who after weeks of comings and goings, including threats of abandoning the process, while commenting with the employees how he wanted the future of the company to be social network, last Friday unilaterally broke the purchase agreement.
The richest man in the world – who has assets of approximately 215,000 million euros, that is, more than eight times what he intended to pay for Twitter – has backed down, arguing that the company has more than 5% of users who are fake accounts or bots and that, therefore, its price would be inflated. Among other reasons, he also pointed out that having fired managers or freezing hiring was devaluing the price of the company he was going to buy.
Musk intends with this movement to lower the price of Twitter shares, but the company is not willing to go through this. As he has pointed out in the lawsuit document, “the name of Twitter has been played with and its value is being publicly depreciated for interested purposes”, or phrases such as “A public scandal has been mounted so that Twitter was put up for sale«. The lawsuit has even included the tweets that Elon Musk has published during these weeks in which the company or its managers were despised. For example, he came to reply a “poop” emoji to the current CEO of Twitter.
According to the company, its price cannot be allowed to be devalued and someone can acquire the social network at a lower price. He could also face lawsuit from his own shareholders if this were to happen, so he has no choice but to take Elon Musk to court.
According to the lawyers of Twitter, which has filed the lawsuit in the courts of Delaware (United States), where it has its headquarters, the case can be seen for sentencing in two months.
Musk has it tough. In fact, the Delaware courts have only accepted once in history the arguments of someone who has backed out of a purchase process with a signed contract. We will have to see what happens. What is certain is that there will be two months in which Elon Musk will not remain silent and will continue to seek headlines and media coverage.
