Elon Musk to Go Through With His Purchase of Twitter
As of now, Elon Musk is the richest man in the world, surpassing the former title holder, Jeff Bezos, by nearly $90 million. In April of 2022, he made the decision to purchase the social media application, Twitter.
Musk filed a letter with the Delaware Chancery Court, stating that he was going to purchase Twitter on the terms that he and the networking app had agreed to. The price he is paying is $44 billion, which he was well aware of. This comes out to about $54.20 per share of the company.
Shortly after his announcement that he was going to buy the entire app, he pulled out of the deal on July 8th. His reasoning was that Twitter did not make him aware of the large number of fake accounts on the app. Four days later, Twitter handed him a lawsuit with the Delaware Chancery Court, the intentions of which were to force Musk to go through with his purchase and stay true to his word.
His lawyers advised him that he would lose a counter-lawsuit, but it is possible that he went through with one anyway. An assistant professor of law at Case Western Reserve University’s School of Law, Anat Alon-Beck, told Yahoo Finance that “he will be a fool to not at least try to buy the company now and avoid being deposed during trial.”
Text messages between Musk and a representative of Twitter have been made public, showing that Musk had concerns about fake Twitter accounts before he went through with the original purchase. Fake accounts, or bots, are accounts that may be run by AI which are mainly used to spread misinformation and promote scams.
“This is hard to do as a public company, as purging fake users will make the numbers look terrible, so restructuring should be done as a private company,” Musk said, along with saying that the former CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, has the same stance on the topic.
On March 31st, Musk sent a text saying that “it really needs to get crushed. It’s a major blight to the user experience and they scam so many people.” Despite saying this, mere days later, on April 4th, Musk became the largest shareholder of Twitter. Shortly after, he was asked to join the board of Twitter to help them combat the issue. Musk said, quote, “it would be a waste of time,” and offered to just buy the whole company instead.
Money talks, so the people at Twitter didn’t have much of an issue with his purchasing offer. But now, despite voicing his concerns beforehand and not doing much to help with said concerns, the issue of fake Twitter accounts has not been solved, and Musk wants to take back his purchase.
His claim is that the company lied to him about how many fake accounts take up the population of Twitter. Twitter’s claim is that it is not fair or sensical to back out now, especially considering he was aware of the problem before he offered to buy the company. Musk’s lawyers are right, his case wouldn’t hold up well in court. But it will certainly be interesting to see how the situation plays out.
