The chairman of Twitter’s board vowed the company would take legal action after Elon Musk said he was dropping his bid to acquire the social media platform on Friday.
“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,” the chairman, Bret Taylor, tweeted.
A lawyer representing Musk sent a letter to Twitter’s top lawyer, Vijaya Gadde, indicating Musk would be dropping his bid to buy Twitter, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing.
“… Twitter is in material breach of multiple provisions of that Agreement, appears to have made false and misleading representations upon which Mr. Musk relied when entering into the Merger Agreement, and is likely to suffer a Company Material Adverse Effect,” Musk’s lawyer wrote.
The letter claimed that the social media platform had ignored or rejected requests from the Tesla executive for information that Musk believed was needed to “make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on Twitter’s platform.”
The development came close to three months after Musk reached a deal to buy the social media platform for $44 billion, a deal that was celebrated by Republicans and criticized by Democrats.
But he tweeted in May, weeks after a deal had been reached, that it was “temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users” while later adding “Still committed to acquisition.”
According to a review conducted by The Associated Press of the social media platform’s SEC filings, uncertainty over spam bots on Twitter and its estimate of accounts have been noted for at least several years.