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Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk seeks to have a lawsuit that Twitter shareholders brought against him dismissed following his cancellation of plans to purchase the social media company.
Twitter shareholders sued Musk for losses over his cancellation and his reportedly “lame rationale” for backing out, according to The Hill.
Musk’s legal team called the losses “purely hypothetical” and asked that the case be dismissed.
Musk announced in late April that he had secured a deal to purchase Twitter for $44 billion. This promoted a lot of speculation about the potential change in the platform’s censorship policies. Musk had been heavily critical of the company’s alleged censorship of conservatives and those with controversial viewpoints.
Then a few weeks later, he announced he was putting the deal on hold due to concerns about bot accounts on the app and the company’s alleged lack of transparency on data related to the issue.
The cancellation of his bid to purchase the company prompted Twitter to sue him to complete the deal in a separate lawsuit.
Musk then counter-sued Twitter and subpoenaed former CEO and founder Jack Dorsey.
This is interesting because Dorsey supported Musk buying Twitter.
“In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company,” Dorsey said on Twitter in April.
“Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.”
Bloomberg reported:
Elon Musk asked a judge to throw out a Twitter Inc. shareholder’s lawsuit over the billionaire’s effort to cancel his $44 billion buyout of the company, already the subject of a high-profile legal battle.
The suit is flawed because it casts the Tesla Inc. chief executive officer as controlling Twitter and seeks to recover “purely hypothetical” losses on behalf of all Twitter investors, Musk’s lawyers argued.
“Musk owns less than 10% of Twitter with no board representation or influence — hardly indicative of control over Twitter’s board,” they told Delaware Chancery Judge Kathaleen St. J. McCormick in an Aug. 18 motion to dismiss the case.
The suit, filed July 29 by an investor who holds 5,500 Twitter shares, targets Musk’s “lame rationales for reneging on his contract,” accusing Musk of inventing excuses to get out of the deal.
Twitter’s lawyers say they will need only four days in court to prove that Musk is using questions about spam and not accounts among the platform’s base to walk away from the deal.
The company said it has turned over all its information about those accounts.
The suit, Crispo v. Musk will be overseen by the Sam judge presiding over Twitter v. Musk, according to Bloomberg.
