Twitter hits back at Elon Musk, suing to complete US$44 billion deal
- Twitter asked a US court to order the world’s richest person to go through with the merger at the agreed price of US$54.20
- The lawsuit sets in motion what promises to be one of the biggest legal showdowns in Wall Street history
Twitter sued Elon Musk over his abandoned US$44 billion takeover bid, accusing the billionaire of having buyer’s remorse after his fortune declined.
Lawyers for Twitter told a Delaware judge that the world’s richest man should be forced to honour his agreement to pay US$54.20 a share for the San Francisco-based social-media platform. Musk abandoned the deal Friday, citing in part concerns about the number of fake accounts among users.
The filing sets up what will be a closely watched court battle between Musk and Twitter, a communications tool that the billionaire favours but where his missives have previously got him in legal trouble.
The lawsuit hit back at a number of Musk’s claims, saying that it “has bent over backwards” to provide Musk with the information he’s requested.
“Having mounted a public spectacle to put Twitter in play, and having proposed and then signed a seller-friendly merger agreement, Musk apparently believes that he – unlike every other party subject to Delaware contract law – is free to change his mind, trash the company, disrupt its operations, destroy stockholder value, and walk away,” Twitter said in the lawsuit.
Musk backed out of the deal to buy the platform on July 8 saying in a regulatory filing that the company has made “misleading representations” over the number of so-called spam bots on the service. Twitter hasn’t “complied with its contractual obligations” to provide information about how to assess how prevalent the bots are on the social media service,” Musk said in a letter to Twitter.
