By
Bena Ilyas
April 25th, 2024
Twitter has refused to Musk’s proposal calling it an “invitation to further mischief and delay” in closing the deal.
On Thursday, October 6, a Delaware Chancery Court judge stated that Elon Musk needs to complete his acquisition of Twitter by October 28 if he wants to avoid any trial.
Earlier this week, the Tesla CEO announced that he would ok with buying out Twitter for the original agreement of $54.20 a share. It means Musk is ready to pay a sum total of $44 billion for the Twitter acquisition. Musk also asked the social media company to drop all litigation to close the deal. However, Twitter has refused to oblige.
In their filing with Delaware’s Court of Chancery on Thursday, October 6, Musk’s side said:
“Twitter will not take yes for an answer. Astonishingly, they have insisted on proceeding with this litigation, recklessly putting the deal at risk and gambling with their stockholders’ interests.”
But Musk said that the trial would distract his team from securing the financing necessary to close the deal. The latest decision from Elon Musk is a complete turnaround from his previous stand of canceling the Twitter acquisition.
Over the last few months, Musk and his team have been arguing that Twitter holds a lot of bot accounts. They asked Twitter to furnish details of the spam accounts. Since then the two parties have been exchanging blows taking the matter to the court.
Twitter Fires Back
On Musk’s Thursday filing, Twitter responded by stating Musk and his team are being disingenuous. The Twitter team wrote that just days before the trial was to commence (October 17), Musk’s team suddenly declared “they intend to close after all”. The Twitter side stated:
″‘Trust us,’ they say, ‘we mean it this time,’ and so they ask to be relieved from a reckoning on the merits. To justify that relief, they propose an order that allows them an indefinite time to close on the basis of a conditional withdrawal of their unlawful notices of termination coupled with an explicit reservation of all ‘claims and defenses in the event a closing does not occur.’“
The Twitter lawyers call Musk’s recent proposal as an “invitation to further mischief and delay”. Twitter sued Musk in July 2022 to force him to stick to his purchase agreement. But after all that followed, Twitter now seems reluctant to walk away from the lawsuit without certainty of all the financing available to close the deal.
Earlier, banking giants like Bank of America and Morgan Stanley agreed to provide $12.5 billion in debt for Musk. However, over the last few months, tech stocks have been bleeding hard and the creditors might want to reconsider this. However, Musk’s attorneys said that “by far the most likely possibility is that the debt is funded in which case the deal will close on or around October 28″.