Elon Musk, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Tesla, has declared his intention to terminate $44 billion Twitter deal following a series of accusations that the company lied about the number of bots and spam accounts on its platform.
In a series of letters sent to Twitter through his lawyer, with the recent one dated September 9th, Musk stated his intentions of terminating his deal from acquiring the micro-blogging platform.
Musk through his lawyers, amended his filed lawsuit by adopting allegations made by a whistleblower Peiter Zatko, who revealed to Congress how Twitter lied to the Tesla CEO.
Musk’s legal team also cited Twitter’s multimillion-dollar payment to its former security chief and whistleblower Peiter Zatko, which he declared was a violation of the merger agreement and a reason to end the deal.
He has asked the Delaware judge to find that he was not obligated to close the deal.
Meanwhile, a recent publication on Investors King disclosed that the majority of Twitter Inc’s shareholders voted in favour of the social media company’s $44 billion sale to Elon Musk.
Following Musk’s decision to end the deal, Twitter responded to musk saying, “As was the case with both your July 8, 2022 and August 29, 2022 purported notices of termination, the purported termination set forth in your September 9, 2022 letter is invalid and wrongful under the Agreement… Twitter has breached none of its representations or obligations under the Agreement.”
The social media company stated that it has conducted an internal investigation of Zatko’s allegations and determined they lacked merit. Twitter has therefore urged the presiding judge to order Musk to buy the company for $54.20 per share.
Whether Musk is actually allowed to terminate the deal is a matter for a court in Delaware after Twitter sued Musk in July for trying to abandon the deal.
However, Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick has already ruled that Musk will be allowed to use Zatko’s allegations to support his case, and that there will be a “limited” discovery on documents related to the whistleblower’s report.