It seems like an unfortunate day for the news to break out that Elon Musk has officially stepped out of the $44 billion Twitter deal. We have to accept that Elon Musk tried too hard to get the deal in the first place and seems like he tried too hard to get out of it too.
On Friday, the Tesla owner announced that it is stepping out of the Twitter deal as Twitter has violated many provisions of the merger agreement. In a filing, Musk’s attorney pointed out that Twitter had failed to provide information that was crucial for the company’s business performance like the number of bot accounts on the platform.
“Sometimes Twitter has ignored Mr. Musk’s requests, sometimes it has rejected them for reasons that appear to be unjustified, and sometimes it has claimed to comply while giving Mr. Musk incomplete or unusable information.”
The filing read, “Twitter has failed or refused to provide this information. Sometimes Twitter has ignored Mr. Musk’s requests, sometimes it has rejected them for reasons that appear to be unjustified, and sometimes it has claimed to comply while giving Mr. Musk incomplete or unusable information.”
Another reason why Mr. Musk is stepping out of this deal is that the company fired its senior executives and also laid off one-third of its talent acquisition. By doing so, Twitter violated its obligation to “preserve substantially intact the material components of its current business organisation”
On Friday, Tesla’s shares surged after its head announced that it is abandoning the Twitter deal while Twitter’s shares fell further closing at a value of $36.81, which is 29% less than $51.70, the company’s close on April 25th when Twitter accepted Elon Musk’s deal.
According to a report from Business Insider, the Tesla and SpaceX owner a.k.a the world’s richest man has also lost nearly a quarter of its value since he announced the Twitter deal.
From now, one can expect the beginning of a legal battle between the social media company and Elon Musk. Bret Taylor, the chair of the board at Twitter, tweeted, “The Twitter Board is committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement. We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery.”
On terminating the deal, Musk will have to pay $1 billion as a termination fee to the company.
It only gets more interesting as someone claimed that Twitter has suspended Elon Musk’s account after he tweeted about it on his account. While the world went bollocks on this news, only to know that it was just a prank and the suspended account has an (I) in ‘Elon’ instead of (l) in the username.
This long-drawn story of ‘will Elon Musk buy Twitter or not?’ had a good run but if we look back at the twists and turns in the story, it could also be a question of whether ‘this is it?’ For Musk, buying Twitter was certainly not just about money and rather saving the future and helping the world access free speech. So, it is actually heartbreaking to see him give up on the deal so easily.
