Elon Musk doesn’t want to buyTwitter, according to a new report.
TheTeslaCEO is officially backing out of his$44 billion agreementto purchaseTwitter,The Washington Posthas said.In a filing earlier this weekwith the Securities and Exchange Commission, Musk declared he is terminating the deal because Twitter is in a “material breach” after making “false and misleading” statements during negotiations.
“For nearly two months, Mr Musk has sought the data and information necessary to ‘make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on Twitter’s platform’,” Musk’s legal team said. “Twitter has failed or refused to provide this information”. Keep in mind, weeks after he signed an agreement with Twitter, Musk claimed Twitter gave misleading statics about the number of spam bots on its platform. Now, Twitter’s board chairman,Bret Taylor, has said his company will “pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement”.
It’s unknown if Musk can legally abandon his agreement due to thepresence of spam on Twitter- something he could have looked into before making an agreement. Twitter seems to be very transparent about the issue, too. In June,Twitter even gave Muskthe ability to analyse tweets, and itrecently announcedit is blocking over a million spam accounts per day.
Nevertheless, Musk thinks that Twitter has breached its agreement - and on top of that, Twitterrecently laid off two top executivesand instituted a hiring freeze.
Still, Musk must prove that Twitter has breached its agreement - because he can’t just pull out the signed agreement whenever he feels like it. Twitter will likely want to keep the deal, as it offers Twitter shareholders $54.20 per share versus the $36.81 it closed at today. (And don’t forget the $1 billion breakup fee by the party at fault.) Twitter and Musk will need to plead their case before a judge, and that judge will ultimately decide if anything was breached. Pocket-lint will keep you posted about the latest decision.
Twitter is still confident the deal will proceed. In an internal meeting, as reported byBloomberg, a senior executive at Twitter told employees the deal was proceeding normally.
