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Elon Musk is striking back at Twitter.
He will file a counter-lawsuit against Twitter in the next few days, as he tries to end his $44 billion agreement to buy the company.
Less than a week ago, Twitter sued Musk. Twitter accused Musk of agreeing to buy the company to “trash the company, disrupt its operations, destroy stockholder value, and walk away.”
Twitter wants Musk to purchase Twitter for the agreed-upon $54.20 per share, but Musk has said that he’s allowed to end the deal because Twitter failed to provide adequate information about fake accounts on the site.
“For nearly two months, Mr. Musk has sought the data and information necessary to ‘make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on Twitter’s platform,’” Musk’s legal team writes. “Twitter has failed or refused to provide this information.”
The New York Post reported:
Twitter’s lawyers are pushing for a four-day trial starting in September, while Musk wants the trial to open no earlier than February 2023.
“The core dispute over false and spam accounts is fundamental to Twitter’s value,” Musk’s lawyers wrote in a filing on Friday in response to Twitter’s suit. “It is also extremely fact and expert intensive, requiring substantial time for discovery.”
Musk’s countersuit would also be heard by McCormick.
The chancellor is “likely to grant” Twitter’s request for a quick trial, University Of Iowa law corporate and finance law professor Robert T. Miller said in a Monday Wells Fargo investor note obtained by The Post.
Musk then filing a countersuit would make sense because “if he doesn’t do that, he’s surrendering,” Miller added in an interview with The Post.
Miller — who used to work at Wachtell, Lipton, the law firm representing Twitter — doesn’t expect a countersuit to turn the tide in Musk’s favor if he reiterates the same claims about Twitter bots without new evidence.
But if Musk embraces new arguments, he could potentially win additional time or discovery power, Miller said.
Some legal analysts predict that the Court of Chancery will not order Musk to buy Twitter. They cite that the deal is too large and that refusal to comply by Musk could be detrimental to corporate courts.
“You’ve got to show that there was something pretty egregious on the other side that wouldn’t allow the agreement to go forward, and I don’t know that he’s going to succeed in convincing judges that that was the case,” says Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law.
“We believe the market may still be underestimating the Court’s power/inclination to enforce [force the deal to close], as well as its broad enforcement powers,” Wells Fargo analysts wrote in Monday’s note.
