Twitter Begins Legal Action Against Elon Musk

Tom Jowitt,
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Well…he was warned. Twitter sued Elon Musk on Tuesday to force him to complete his $44bn acquisition of social media platform

Twitter has begun what is likely to be a lengthy legal process, after it launched legal proceedings against former suitor Elon Musk.

Reuters, citing a court filing, reported that Twitter has asked a Delaware court to schedule a four-day trial in mid-September over Elon Musk’s attempt to terminate his agreed $44 billion deal to acquire the social media platform.

Twitter has repeatedly warned Elon Musk it will enforce the deal he signed, and insisted that his justifications of Twitter’s material breaches of the deal, were “false and misleading representations” statements.

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Twitter lawsuit

Elon Musk responded to Twitter’s warnings with a series of memes in which he openly mocked Twitter’s legal threats.

Now Twitter is suing Elon Musk over the matter, after Twitter chairman Bret Taylor took to Twitter to confirm the development, stating a lawsuit had been filed in the US Delaware Court of Chancery to force Musk to fulfil his ‘contractual obligations.’

Elon Musk however seemed to shrug off Twitter’s lawsuit, with a typical glib tweet.

Musk reasons

Musk said he was walking away because Twitter had fired high-ranking executives and one-third of the talent acquisition team, breaching Twitter’s obligation to “preserve substantially intact the material components of its current business organisation.”

Musk also cited the unknown number of fake accounts and bots.

Twitter has defended its spam policy and said it suspends more than 1 million spam accounts a day – up from it when CEO Parag Agrawal, said in May that spam account suspensions were running at 500,000 a day.

Twitter reportedly has a specialist team and automated processes dedicated to weeding out fake accounts, and last month it began providing access for Musk to the colossal firehose of public tweet data.

Twitter had in April this year said that less than 5 percent of Twitter users are spam or fake accounts.

Musk however believes the true figure of fake or bot accounts is closer to 20 percent or more.

In the agreement he signed with Twitter, Musk can only back out if something major happens to Twitter’s business, and there is doubt that Twitter’s bot issue may be enough of a justification.

Twitter can demand the $1 billion (£836m) contractual breakup fee from Musk, if he reneged on the agreement.

This huge amount of money however means that Musk is likely to vigorously contend the Twitter lawsuit.