Elon Musk Cancels 44 Billion Dollar Deal with Twitter

By: Chase Liu

On July 8th, 2022, Elon Musk announced that he would not be buying Twitter and would suspend the 44 billion dollar deal because, allegedly, Twitter failed to tell Mr. Musk about all the bot accounts. Mr. Musk’s lawyer has confirmed this.

"The Twitter Board is committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk," said the Twitter Chairman.

Mr. Musk had asked Twitter for a count of how many bot accounts were on Twitter before he bought the 40-billion-dollar company in May because Twitter claims that less than 5% of the userbase is bot accounts.

Mr. Musk believes that 20% of the Twitter user base is bot accounts. However, Twitter claims to remove 1 million a day.

The letter released by his lawyer says, “[s]ometimes Twitter has ignored Mr. Musk’s requests, sometimes it has rejected them for reasons that appear to be unjustified, and sometimes it has claimed to comply while giving Mr. Musk incomplete or unusable information.”

The multi-billionaire would like to cancel the agreement because he claims that Twitter has denied telling him how many bots accounts are on the platform. Because Mr. Musk already agreed to the deal, he will have to prove that Twitter has not fulfilled its part of the deal and has breached their agreement. If Elon Musk doesn’t buy Twitter, then the source code to the company’s website won’t be public, the company’s revenue might not go up to 26.4 billion, and the userbase might not go up to 931 million users.