After Elon Musk indicated that he intends to pull out of his bid to acquire Twitter for a whopping $44 billion (citing an alarming pervasiveness of bots and spam accounts), the general consensus was that this breakup of sorts would play out in the courts.
That prognostication is now a reality. Twitter filed a lawsuit against Musk in the Delaware Court of Chancery. Here’s a little taste of the general sentiment from Twitter’s lawyers:
“Musk’s exit strategy is a model of hypocrisy... In his press release announcing the deal on April 25, 2022, Musk raised a clarion call to ‘defeat the spam bots.’ But when the market declined and the fixed-price deal became less attractive Musk shifted his narrative, suddenly demanding ‘verification’ that span was not a serious problem on Twitter’s platform.”
The lawsuit touches on Musk’s continued efforts to weasel out of the deal by using a “bad-faith pursuit of spam-related evidence to assert a baseless claim of breach.” Twitter, meanwhile, contends that it removes over a million spam accounts per day.
The shift in attitude from the world’s richest man has been drastic, and with a $1 billion fee on the line for backing out of the deal, Musk hasn’t pulled any punches over airing his perceived grievances with the platform.
If what we’ve seen from the saga between Musk and Twitter is any indication, tensions between the two aren’t going anywhere but up. Buckle in, folks. The Technoking’s wild ride toward social media infamy isn’t over yet.
