Twitter sues Elon Musk, setting up epic legal fight
filed suit Tuesday against Elon Musk to force the billionaire to make good on his promise to purchase the company, issuing the first legal volley in what is expected to be one of most high-profile business trials in recent history.
In a scathing attack on Musk and his motivations, Twitter accused the world’s richest man of repeated hypocrisy, selfinterested rule-breaking and of purposefully trying to hurt the company that as incoming owner he was duty-bound to protect.
“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,” the company wrote in a fiery legal complaint, referring to Musk’s exit strategy as a “model of hypocrisy.”
For months, Musk has publicly threatened to walk away from the sale of the influential social network, efforts that culminated last week in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing claiming he was “terminating” the agreeTwitter ment because Twitter hadn’t given him enough information about spam and bots on its service.
“Oh the irony lol,” Musk tweeted shortly after the case was revealed.
Now, a judge in a specialized business court in Delaware must determine whether the world’s richest man can exit the $44 billion deal despite a contract binding him to complete the acquisition barring a major change to the company’s business.
Experts said they anticipated months of agonizing legal drama to play out in the Delaware Court of Chancery, a tiny, clubby court that has decided the outcomes of some of the biggest business squabbles
in the U.S. The court has seven judges — one chancellor and six vice chancellors — who have enormous discretion to force companies to take specific actions.
The process will likely submit Twitter to a grueling level of public scrutiny,
forcing the platform to open up its books and expose internal deliberations in ways that might further damage its stock price and reputation, already-battered from the market downturn and months of sparring with Musk.