Elon Musk lost his request to delay the trial against Twitter over the €42 billion acquisition. As a result, the Twitter-Musk trial is set to square off in court in October.
Elon Musk backs out from Twitter deal
The CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk, lost his fight to delay the lawsuit Twitter started, as the judge scheduled the trial in October.
Twitter demands that Musk fulfills his commitment to acquire the social media company for $44 billion (€42 billion).
Elon Musk, the world’s richest businessman, has withdrawn the agreement. He thinks that Twitter has a lot more spam accounts than Twitter claimed.
At the remote hearing after the judge, Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick, the attorney for Twitter, William Savitt, had said:
“The continued uncertainty inflicts harm to Twitter every hour of every day.”
Twitter’s lawyers prefer having the trial in September
The lawyers representing Musk plead for a trial delay later this week, claiming that Twitter was driving the trial at a ‘warp speed’ based on the claims that Musk had intentionally backed off from the acquisition. The Delaware Court of Chancery and Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick declined the request earlier today.
The lawyers of Twitter preferred the trial in September. The lawyers also agreed that the quick trial timeline was imperative to mitigate the continuous harm Twitter had endured from the unreliability of the deal.
In addition, Twitter’s lawyer further argued that Musk’s effort to delay the trial might have been an attempt to ‘run from the side’ by leaving no time for the appeals before the debt commitments to fulfill the deal expires.
Moreover, Musk’s lawyer had argued that the accelerated timeline was too hurried, considering the huge collection of spam data required to be reviewed. They further revealed that Twitter had still not provided Musk with the information he had asked for. During the argument, Twitter’s lawyer said the queries regarding the spam accounts and data were irrelevant to the case; they quote, “Nothing in the merger agreement turns on that question.”
Twitter filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk on 12 July to pressure him to act according to the agreed deal to take over the company. The suit claimed that Musk denied fulfilling his obligations to Twitter and its stockholders because ‘the deal he agreed to no longer favors his personal interests.’
The social media giant Twitter had said in the lawsuit that:
“Having mounted a public spectacle to put Twitter in play and having proposed and then signed a seller-friendly merger agreement, Musk believes that he — unlike every other party subject to Delaware contract law — is free to change his mind, trash the company, disrupt its operations, destroy stockholder value and walk away.”