Published , by Sam Chandler
Published , by Sam Chandler
Twitter is now suing Elon Musk after the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has attempted to pull out of the $44 billion contract to buy the social media company. The filing by the plaintiff details a laundry list of problems the company has experienced after Musk has attempted to end the contract.
Reported on by Lauren Feiner of CNBC on July 12, 2022, Twitter has officially filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk. The filing, which you can read in full on Scribd, pulls no punches when it comes to detailing the purported reasons why Musk is refusing to honor the deal.
According to the filing, Musk refuses to honor the deal because the “deal he signed no longer serves his personal interests”. It goes on to state, “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’s filing also goes into the actions Musk has taken to openly criticize the social media platform and the effect it has had on the company and its shareholders. “Musk has repeatedly disparaged Twitter and the deal, creating business risk for Twitter and downward pressure on its share price,” writes the plaintiff.
One of the key reasons Musk states he wants to terminate the deal is based on Twitter bot numbers. Musk wants Twitter to show proof that <5% of users are bots. This is also mentioned in the filing, offering some insight into Twitter’s spam estimation process. Twitter does a daily sampling of “approximately 9,000 accounts per quarter that are manually reviewed”.
The entire filing is basically a playback of the last three months of events. Feiner of CNBC reports that Twitter wants a 4-day trial in September, so we’re still a couple of months out from seeing how all of this unfolds. In the meantime, we can at least rely on Musk continuing to tweet.