TWITTER SAYS A DEAL IS A DEAL
Twitter board chair Bret Taylor tweeted Friday that the company would pursue legal action against Musk.
“The Twitter Board is committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement,” he wrote. “We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery.”
Legal experts have said Musk can’t just walk away from the deal. His April agreement to buy the company included a commitment to go through with the acquisition unless there’s a major change to the business, and legal experts say nothing has happened to meet that threshold. Musk has previously threatened to scuttle the deal if Twitter didn’tgive him more data to run his own analysis on how many spam bots it has, while Twitter has said it can’t give up personal information on its users like their names, emails and IP addresses, which it uses to come up with its own bot numbers.
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(Reuters) – Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said on Friday he was terminating his $44 billion deal for Twitter Inc, citing material breach of multiple provisions of the agreement.
Shares of Twitter fell 6% in extended trading.
The announcement brings to an end a will-he-won’t-he saga after the world’s richest person clinched a deal for Twitter in April but then put the buyout on hold until the social media company proved that spam bots accounted for less than 5% of its total users.
The Tesla CEO said in a filing Friday afternoon that he believed Twitter was in material breach of multiple provisions of the April 25 sale agreement — including Musk’s request that the company share information about the number of fake and spam accounts on the social media platform.
“Twitter has not provided information that Mr. Musk has requested for nearly two months notwithstanding his repeated, detailed clarifications intended to simplify Twitter’s identification, collection, and disclosure of the most relevant information sought in Mr. Musk’s original requests,” the filing states.