Twitter drags Elon Musk to court, forces him to sign deal

Twitter filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk in a Delaware court on Tuesday to carry out its threat to compel him to acquire the company. 

The company's board increased its stance last week after Musk's legal team informed Twitter in a letter of his plan to back out of the agreement. Bret Taylor, the chairman of the Twitter board, indicated Twitter's plans to take legal action to uphold the merger and stated that the firm remained dedicated to complete the acquisition at the conditions originally agreed to by both parties.

The lawsuit puts Twitter and Musk in a high-stakes, costly fight where a once-reluctant seller will attempt to coerce a now-reluctant buyer.

In the complaint, Twitter is unrelenting in its condemnation of Musk and a summary of the mayhem he has sowed during the now-month-long saga:

·        Elon Musk pledged to utilize his best efforts to complete the merger when he signed a legally binding merger agreement with Twitter in April 2022. Because the agreement he signed no longer serves his personal interests, Musk is refusing to uphold his duties to Twitter and its investors less than three months after signing them.

·        Musk appears to believe that, unlike every other person or entity subject to the Delaware contract law, he is free to change his mind, disrupt Twitter's operations and walk away after mounting a public spectacle to put the company on the spot light and then signing a seller-friendly merger deal, according to TechCrunch.

This rejection comes after a lengthy number of significant contract violations by Musk that have soured Twitter's reputation and bottom line. Twitter files this lawsuit to stop Musk from breaking the law again, to make him comply with his legal commitments, and to force the merger to go through once the last few requirements are met.

Twitter calls attention to the glaring inconsistency between Musk's early promises to purge Twitter of spam bots and his later feigned dismay that the site still had a spam issue in the complaint.

Musk issued a stern warning to "defeat the spam bots" in his press statement confirming the agreement on April 25, 2022. But when the market fell and the fixed-priced agreement lost appeal, Musk changed his story and abruptly demanded "verification" that spam was not a significant issue on Twitter's platform. He also claimed a pressing need to do "diligence" something he had specifically sworn off doing.

According to Twitter, Musk tried to scuttle the purchase using pretexts, such as a query about the number of spam and fraudulent accounts on the site, when a market dip made it seem like he was receiving a terrible bargain. However, the lawsuit argues that he was bound by a contractual obligation at the time.

 

Musk desired a way out. However, the merger deal gave him limited check out, according to William Savitt and other attorneys working on behalf of the social media business.

By failing to ascertain that the percentage of fake accounts on the site matched Twitter's long-standing projections, according to Musk's claims last week, Twitter violated the conditions of the agreement. Musk started making a lot of fuss about the matter in May, after he had already decided to pay $44 billion to acquire the real-time social network.