The news had been in the air for some time now, but now we have the official confirmation given by the person concerned: Elon Musk is officially trying to withdraw his deal of 44 billion dollars for the acquisition of Twitter.
In a deposit made yesterday, Friday afternoon, at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the team of Musk said they are ending the deal because Twitter violated “substantially” their agreement and made “false and misleading” statements during the negotiations.
Elon Musk has second thoughts: he no longer wants to acquire Twitter
The legal team of Elon Musk in fact stated the following:
“For nearly two months, Mr. Musk has been searching for the data and information needed to make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on the Twitter platform. But the company refused to provide this information.”
Despite this important news, however, it is good to report how in that of Twitter, they still hope to conclude the deal, despite the attempted resolution of Musk, using strong measures in case.
In fact, the president of the board of the social platform, Bret Taylor,wrote that the company “will pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement” and they are “confident that we will prevail” in court.
That said, for some time now Elon Musk set the stage for blowing up the deal after signing it, arguing that Twitter has released misleading statistics on the prevalence of bot spam on the platform.
However, it is not entirely clear whether Musk can legally abandon his agreement without incurring particular sanctions, simply because he is not happy with the presence of spam on Twitter, something he could (and probably should) investigate before signing the deal.
Obviously it is important to specify how it is mandatory that Elon Musk prove that Twitter violated their agreement, as he cannot simply withdraw the signed agreement simply because he decided to suddenly change his mind.
And there are good reasons why Twitter wants to keep the deal together, as the latter is potentially very profitable for the shareholders of the social network, with the promised payment of $54.20 per share, respect to $36,81 of the value of the shares to date that are coveted by many.
Furthermore, if the agreement is definitively lost, the party who withdraws back will have to compensate the other by paying $1 billion as a commission.