Elon Musk Rescinds $44 Billion Deal to buy Twitter

By: Andrew Xiao

On July 8, Elon Musk’s lawyers sent a filing rescinding his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter,

alleging that the company failed to provide enough information on spam and fake accounts,

which would contradict the agreement that the two made in April.

In the letter, Elon Musk claimed that Twitter “sometimes… ignored Mr. Musk’s requests,

sometimes… rejected them for reasons that appear to be unjustified, and sometimes… claimed

to comply while giving Mr. Musk incomplete or unusable information.” But whether his lawyers

can convince the court that this breaks their deal remains to be seen.

Bret Taylor, Twitter chairman, wrote in a tweet, “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. We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery.” The two will likely enter a lengthy legal battle surrounding the issue.

On July 7, Twitter said that the company takes down approximately one million spam

accounts per day. Elon Musk suspects that spam and bot accounts could add up to at least 20% of the users on the platform. The extended shares in Twitter went down 7% after this

announcement.

But other shares have since dropped like the shares of major tech companies and Tesla,

which could have encouraged this decision. Others might see his idea and application of

absolute free speech on Twitter as simply naive.

Elon Musk – arguably the world’s richest person, founder of rocket company SpaceX,

and CEO of car company Tesla – describes himself as a “free speech absolutist.” His

acquisition of Twitter most likely stems from his criticism of the platform blocking former

President Donald Trump and its nontransparent process of promoting specific tweets by

showing them to a larger audience.

Link to article: Elon Musk pulls out of $44bn deal to buy Twitter - BBC News