The president of Twitter says the social media platform will take legal action to enforce the deal.
Elon Musk has said he is finalizing a $ 44 billion deal to buy Twitter, saying the social media company did not provide information about fake or spam accounts on the platform.
In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Friday, Musk’s lawyers said Twitter had failed or refused to respond to several requests for information about those accounts, which is critical to the business performance of the company.
“Sometimes Twitter has ignored Mr. Musk’s requests, sometimes rejected them for seemingly unjustified reasons, and sometimes claimed to comply with them while giving Mr. Musk incomplete or unusable information,” he says. file.
“Twitter is materially violating several provisions of this agreement, it appears to have made false and misleading statements on which Mr Musk relied when he signed the merger agreement,” he also said.
Twitter did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press and Reuters news agencies.
The company’s president, Bret Taylor, tweeted on Friday evening that “the Twitter Board agrees to close the transaction according to the price and terms agreed with Mr. Musk and plans to initiate legal action to enforce the merger agreement “.
The terms of the deal require Musk, Tesla’s CEO, to pay a $ 1 billion breakout fee if he doesn’t complete the transaction.
The Twitter Board agrees to close the transaction according to the price and terms agreed with Mr. Musk and plans to take legal action to enforce the merger agreement. We are confident that we will prevail in the Delaware Chancellery Court.
– Bret Taylor (@btaylor) July 8, 2022
The board unanimously agreed to sell the platform to Musk for $ 44 billion in April, in a deal that sparked controversy and questions about freedom of speech and misinformation on the popular social media platform.
The possible outcome of the deal is just the latest twist in a saga between one of the richest men in the world and one of the most influential social media sites.
Much of the drama has unfolded on Twitter, with Musk having more than 95 million followers, lamenting that the company did not live up to its potential as a platform for free speech.
Last month, Twitter allowed Musk access to his “fire sleeve,” a raw data repository on hundreds of millions of tweets daily.
The company said at the time that it intended to close the deal at the agreed price and conditions. “Twitter has shared and will continue to share information cooperatively with Musk to complete the transaction in accordance with the terms of the merger agreement,” it said in a statement.
In May, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal said the social media network estimates that less than 5 percent of all its users are fake.
But in a series of tweets, he highlighted the challenge of removing real people from the robots and accounts used for spam campaigns.
“The difficult challenge is that many accounts that seem superficially false are actually real people,” he wrote. “And some of the spam accounts that are actually the most dangerous and cause the most damage to our users may seem totally legitimate on the surface.”
Daniel Ives, an analyst at investment firm Wedbush, said Musk’s presentation on Friday was bad news for Twitter.
“This is a disastrous scenario for Twitter and its Board, as the company will now fight Musk in a lengthy legal battle to regain the deal and / or the $ 1 billion breakout fee.” , wrote in a note to customers.