The chairman of the board of the social media giant said on Saturday that Twitter would sue Elon Musk for implementing a $44 billion deal to buy the company the billionaire now wants to leave.
Brett Taylor tweeted, “The Twitter Board is committed to closing the transaction on the agreed price and terms with Mr. Musk and plans to take legal action to enforce the merger agreement. We are confident we will survive the Delaware Court.” Will prevail in the off chance.” ,
Elon Musk pulled the plug on his Friday $44 billion deal to buy Twitter and take it private, a regulatory filing revealed. Musk accused the social media giant of making “misleading” statements about the number of fake accounts.
Musk’s representatives said in a letter Friday that Twitter had made “misleading representations” on the number of spam bots on the social network, and that it was “in its contractual” order to provide information on how to assess how prevalent the bots are. obligations have not been complied with. Twitter as part of a regulatory filing.
Musk also said he was walking away because Twitter fired high-ranking executives and a third of the talent acquisition team, citing Twitter’s obligation to “substantially preserve the physical components of its current business organization”. Violated.
Tesla’s CEO previously threatened if the company could not show that less than 5% of its daily active users accounted for automated spam.
Previously, the world’s richest man expressed skepticism and even implied that he could get away with worrying about what he believed to be an abundance of fake accounts.
According to the Washington Post, despite being given access to internal data, Musk has been unable to pin down the percentage of Twitter accounts that are not genuine.
Meanwhile, Twitter said it removes 1 million spam accounts every day and refuted claims that bots account for less than 5% of total users.
Musk announced the termination of the $44 billion Twitter purchase deal in a letter sent by Musk’s team to Twitter earlier on Saturday. Musk decided to postpone the deal due to multiple breaches of the purchase agreement. According to the letter, the Tesla CEO’s team believes the proportion of spam and fake accounts is “extremely high” at 5 percent.
“As described below, Mr. Musk is terminating the merger agreement because Twitter is in material breach of several provisions of that agreement,” the letter said on Friday.
In April, Musk inked an acquisition agreement with Twitter for approximately US$44 billion at US$54.20 per share. However, Musk halted the deal in May to allow his team to review the veracity of Twitter’s claim that less than 5 percent of accounts on the platform are bots or spam.
Back in June, Musk openly accused the microblogging website of violating the merger agreement and threatened to shut down the acquisition of the social media company for not providing the data he requested on spam and fake accounts.
Against this backdrop, Twitter CEO Parag Agarwal last month stood by his company’s longstanding spam metrics. “Twitter continues to cooperatively share information with Mr. Musk to complete the transaction in accordance with the terms of the merger agreement,” the company said in a statement in June.
Musk’s deal with Twitter included a provision that if it fell apart, the party that broke the deal would pay a $1 billion termination fee under certain circumstances. Legal experts have debated whether the conflict over spam bots is enough to allow Musk to walk away from the deal.
But Musk can’t get away with just paying a termination fee. The merger agreement includes a specific performance provision that allows Twitter to force Musk to complete the deal, according to the original filing. That could mean that, if the deal ends up in court, Twitter could secure an order obliging Musk to complete the merger instead of winning monetary compensation for any violations. The company has repeatedly said that it will follow that legal path.
(with inputs from agencies)