Musk’s plan to buy Twitter has worried policymakers around the world.
Joe Skipper | Reuters
Twitter filed suit against Elon Musk in the Delaware Court of Chancery on Tuesday after the billionaire said he was terminating his $44 billion deal to buy the company.
Twitter said Musk, after entering a binding merger agreement, now “refuses to honor his obligations to Twitter and its stockholders because the deal he signed no longer serves his personal interests.”
“Having mounted a public spectacle to put Twitter in play, and having proposed and then signed a seller-friendly merger agreement, Musk apparently believes that he — unlike every other party subject to Delaware contract law — is free to change his mind, trash the company, disrupt its operations, destroy stockholder value, and walk away,” Twitter wrote in the complaint. “This repudiation follows a long list of material contractual breaches by Musk that have cast a pall over Twitter and its business.”
Twitter said it seeks to stop Musk from further breaches of the agreement and compel him to consummate the merger “upon satisfaction of the few outstanding conditions.”
Twitter’s suit was expected after Musk said late last week that he no longer plans to buy the social network, citing Twitter bots and claiming that the company didn’t give him the information he needed to evaluate the deal.
The suit says that Musk’s claims about why he wants to terminate the deal, including the prevalence of bots on the service, are “pretexts.”
This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.