Elon Musk Exits Deal with Twitter

By: Jerry Wang

On April 10th, Elon Musk, who is widely accepted as the richest man in the world, refused to follow through with his offer of buying Twitter for 44 billion dollars. He did this because Twitter has not delivered adequate data on how many of their users are spam and fake accounts.

Musk's lawyer said, "[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." This impacted Musk's decision since this goes against their agreement. Specifically, section 6.4 of their agreement which "[r]equires Twitter to provide Mr. Musk and his advisors all data and information that Mr. Musk requests 'for any reasonable business purpose related to the consummation of the transaction.'"

After the news of Musk's decision became public, Twitter stock dropped by more than 11 percent. This was partially caused by shareholders no longer gaining the markup that Musk was buying Twitter at, which caused them to sell.

In response to Musk's decision, Twitter's chairman, Bret Taylor, has announced that they will take this case a court in Delaware. Twitter's board is still trying to "[close] the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk." In this, Twitter demonstrates that they agreed to the deal for the money.

However, Elon has a different motive. Outside of the monetary benefits to himself, Elon Musk had a bigger objective when making the deal. To give everyone the option of free speech. He described free speech as “[t]he bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.” This further solidifies Musk’s desire to be given data on fake and spam accounts. This is because they go against this idea of people debating topics since these accounts flood the platform with information to that reaches the largest audience possible and influence the reader.

With court on the horizon, the truth will be releaved soon.

article: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62102821