Twitter wants to sue Elon Musk for bailing on the $44 billion acquisition deal

After weeks of speculation and rumors, Elon Musk has finally made his position clear on Twitter.

He said the deal was “temporarily on hold”, putting his decision down to there being too many fake users on the social platform.

As a result of his backflip, Twitter is now threatening legal action against the world’s richest man.

Here’s a quick summary of what happened

A few months ago Elon Musk said he wanted to buy Twitter and after going back and forth for weeks, the board eventually accepted Musk’s $44 billion offer.

Right from the outset, Musk made it clear that getting rid of spam/fake accounts was a top priority.

He said there was no way of verifying how many of Twitter’s 299m daily users were actually real because a significant number of accounts are bots.

This ended up being his reason for backing out of the deal.

Our actual internal estimates for the last four quarters were all well under 5% – based on the methodology outlined above. The error margins on our estimates give us confidence in our public statements each quarter.

— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022

Twitter’s CEO Parag Agrawal responded in a 13-tweet thread, essentially saying that “[the percentage of fake accounts is] all well under 5%”.

Although he had to admit that the platform needed to remove around one million fake accounts every single day.

What now in the ‘Twitter Elon Musk’ situation?

Twitter wants to sue Elon Musk and force him to go through with the deal or pay the difference between the social network’s current evaluation – $28 million – and the agreed price.

This is mostly due to the fact that Musk bailing on the deal made Twitter share price tank.

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.

— Bret Taylor (@btaylor) July 8, 2022

On the other hand, Musk said he specifically asked Twitter to disclose the number of fake accounts on multiple occasions, including in his filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Twitter reportedly failed to do that.

Legal experts are divided on this.

Some believe that Musk may have done this to negotiate a lower price in court, while others argue he may end up losing the lawsuit and be forced to pay up.

One thing’s for sure, there’s never a dull moment when it comes to Elon Musk.