Less than three months after agreeing to buy Twitter for $44 billion, Elon Musk says he wants to get out. That’s no surprise — Musk expressed buyer regret shortly after announcing the deal.
Lawyers representing Musk on Friday sent a letter to Vijaya Gade. Twitter’s chief legal officer, explaining why the Tesla CEO Elon Musk and the world’s richest man have no plans to go ahead with the merger agreement.
Echoing Musk’s argument, lawyers say Twitter underestimates the number of bots and spam accounts on the platform. Just weeks after Twitter received an unsolicited offer in late April. Musk began publicly expressing doubts about the number of fake also spam accounts at the company.
“In short, Twitter did not provide the information requested by Mr. Musk for nearly two months, despite repeated, detailed clarifications to facilitate the identification, collection, and disclosure of the most relevant information requested in Mr. Musk-n Musk’s original request,” the attorney wrote. Friday.
They added that inaccurate information provided by Twitter in the SEC filing “could provide additional grounds for terminating the merger agreement.”
In May, Musk said in a tweet, “The Twitter deal is temporarily suspended pending details supporting estimates that spam/fake accounts actually make up less than 5% of users.”
Meanwhile, the company’s shares plunged as investors feared the deal would fail. The day before Musk said the sale was on hold, Twitter’s market cap fell to $9 billion. Below Musk’s roughly $44 billion purchase price. It didn’t help that the broader market fell, led by losses in tech stocks.
Twitter shares fell another 5% to $35.04 after Friday’s close after falling more than 5% in regular trading. They are now 35% below the $54.20 price Musk is willing to pay.
Twitter isn’t ready to let Musk go yet. Brett Taylor, the company’s chief executive, said Friday that Twitter would take the case to court.