Elon Musk Quits Twitter Deal

By: Jay Yi

On the day of April 14th, Elon Musk bought 9.1% of Twitter in stocks and proceeded to inform Twitter about his idea of buying it for 44billion dollars. Elon Musk declared that he could run Twitter better, and followed this up by pointing out every single problem that Twitter has. Because of this, the Twitter stock fell by 30%.

Elon Musk has left the deal because Twitter failed to provide information about bots and spam accounts. Twitter is not happy with this and has brought this matter into court stating that Musk has to buy Twitter. Twitter, who was a small social media company compared to Facebook and Instagram, leapt at the opportunity to sell for 44 billion dollars.

This was triggered after Elon Musk claimed that he didn’t get information and he assumed that Twitter was 20% fake accounts. Twitter responded by saying “it removed around 1 million such accounts each day.” This is worrying because this shows that Twitter has a problem with bots.

When Twitter brought Elon to court, he tweeted a meme of him laughing at how Twitter wouldn’t give him info, and now they are trying to force him to buy the company. His lawyers say that there were many material breaches in the agreement.

A Twitter employee posted the cartoon that “showed a shattered company that had been bumped off a shelf by Mr. Musk’s careless elbow. His caption: “You break it, you buy it!” If Twitter can’t get Elon Musk to buy it, they still want the one billion breakup money.

Not only this, Twitter’s legal team countered by saying that terminating the deal is invalid because Musk himself had also violated the deal. Twitter has stated, “In April 2022, Elon Musk entered into a binding merger agreement with Twitter, promising to use his best efforts to get the deal done. Now, less than three months later, Musk refuses to honor his obligations to Twitter and its stockholders because the deal he signed no longer serves his personal interests.”

The BBC thinks that there could be other possible reasons for the withdrawal. For example, Musk might have thought that he suggested too much money, or because Tesla stocks have decreased recently as well.

Links:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/12/tech/twitter-elon-musk-acquisition-lawsuit/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/11/tech/elon-musk-mocks-twitter/index.html

NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/11/technology/elon-musk-twitter-damaged.html