Twitter shareholders on Tuesday approved Elon Musk’s $44 billion offer to buy the social media platform, The Washington Post reported.
Since yesterday, various reports indicated that there was already a wide margin of approval by shareholders prior to Tuesday’s vote, with the required majority supposedly secured before the meeting.
The approval means that Musk and Twitter will proceed to a trial in October in Delaware Chancery Court, where the billionaire will try to get out of the deal by arguing that Twitter withheld important facts about its internal operations; including an alleged undercount of spam and bot accounts on the platform.
For its part, Twitter will push to close the deal anyway, claiming that Musk’s complaints are simply a pretext to get out of the deal.
Shareholders were widely expected to vote in favor of the deal after a stock market downturn made Musk’s $54.20 per share deal for Twitter, which was signed in April, look expensive in the current environment. Twitter stock is now hovering around $41 a share.
The approval comes after the appearance of the whistleblower Peiter Zatko before the US Senate
The vote follows Tuesday morning testimony by Twitter whistleblower Peiter “Mudge” Zatko — a notorious hacker who served as Twitter’s chief security officer until he was fired last year — before the US Senate.
Zatko has previously spoken about widespread security vulnerabilities in Twitter and that the company’s statistics on bot activity are misleading, putting the popular social media platform in check.
During his appearance before the Senate this morning, the whistleblower also said that some Twitter employees were concerned that the Chinese government might collect data on the company’s users, GLM reported.
Twitter has said that Zatko’s allegations appeared to be “riddled with inaccuracies” and that security and privacy are top priorities at the company.