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Twitter Files Lawsuit To Force Elon Musk To Fulfill Original Acquisition Agreement

âœȘ Twitter filed suit against Elon Musk in the Delaware Court of Chancery on Tuesday after the billionaire said he was terminating his $44 billion deal to buy the company...

On Tuesday, Twitter filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk in an attempt to force the entrepreneur to continue with & complete his $44 billion purchase of the company.

Twitter said Musk, after entering a binding merger agreement, “now refuses to honor his obligations to Twitter and its stockholders because the deal he signed no longer serves his personal interests,” the company said in the lawsuit. “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 is seeking a four-day trial in September, according to the court filing.

Musk decided that he wanted to terminate the deal because he claims that the company was not disclosing accurate information about how many spam accounts are on the platform.

The lawsuit filed on Tuesday marks the beginning of what could be a protracted legal battle as Twitter seeks to hold Musk to his deal to pay $54.20 per share for the company, and as Musk seeks to be let out of the agreement.

Legal experts say the outcome of the dispute could be unpredictable and could involve a judge forcing Musk to complete the deal or force him to pay a $1 billion breakup & cancellation fee; or, other scenarios may include a settlement amount, renegotiation of the purchase price, or even Musk walking away without paying anything.

“This repudiation follows a long list of material contractual breaches by Musk that have cast a pall over Twitter and its business,” Twitter wrote in its suit.

The suit claims that what Musk says about why he wants to terminate the deal, including the prevalence of bots on the service, are “pretexts.”

Twitter attributes the decline partially to Musk’s actions, although other social media companies have also seen their share prices slide during the same period.

“Since signing the merger agreement, Musk has repeatedly disparaged Twitter and the deal, creating business risk for Twitter and downward pressure on its share price,” Twitter said in its suit.

Musk responded to news that Twitter would sue him by trolling the company with a meme at the start of the week. “They said I couldn’t buy Twitter,” the meme begins. “Then they wouldn’t disclose bot info.”

“Now they want to force me to buy Twitter in court,” the meme continues. “Now they have to disclose bot info in court.”

The New York Times reported that Musk’s attempts to terminate the deal could force Twitter to offer him the company at a discounted rate. The report added that if Musk successfully terminates the deal that it would be catastrophic for the company as the value of its stock has already declined 35% from the $54.20 per share that Musk offered.

Musk purchased the company back in April, saying that he wanted to buy the social media platform—which has been accused of censoring conservatives and promoting wokeism—because his “strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.”

Regarding the financial aspect of acquiring the company, Musk said, “I don’t care about the economics at all.”

Musk further noted that one of his top priorities at Twitter would be “eliminating the spam and scam bots and the bot armies” on the platform.

“It’s important to the function of democracy, it’s important to the function of the United States as a free country and many other countries, and to help freedom in the world more broadly than in the U.S.,” Musk said. “Civilizational risk is decreased the more we can increase the trust of Twitter as a public platform, and so I do think this will be somewhat painful.” âœȘ

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