Press "Enter" to skip to content

Elon Musk tears up Twitter deal – Times of India

WASHINGTON: Elon Musk is tearing up the deal to buy Twitter. The Tesla founder and world’s richest man, whose bid in April to take over the social media company inflamed the tech world, announced he is walking away from his proposed $44 billion acquisition following unresolved disagreements with Twitter’s leadership over fake accounts on the platform.
In a regulatory filing by his lawyers, Musk said Twitter had not provided information necessary to calculate the number of those accounts, which the company has said is lower than 5 percent. “Twitter is in material breach of multiple provisions” of the deal, and “appears to have made false and misleading representations,” his lawyers said in a filing aimed at kiboshing the agreement.
Twitter’s board responded by threatening to “pursue legal action” to enforce the terms of the $44 billion deal Musk struck in April, including a $1 billion break-up fee if he reneges on the agreement. A protracted legal battle appears inevitable.
Twitter shares, already down 18% since Musk’s offer, fell a further 4.8% in after-hours trading on Friday evening after news broke of the bust-up. There is speculation in some quarters that Musk’s threat of walking away from the deal is aimed renegotiating the terms.
Musk’s proposed bid and the subsequent derailment put the spotlight on two Indian principles — CEO Parag Agrawal and legal head Vijaya Gadde, both of whom drew his ire for unspecified reason. Musk responded to Agrawal’s efforts to clarify the spam issue publicly with a poop emoji. He also panned Gadde for purported censorship of stories critical of the Biden family, saying, it was “obviously incredibly inappropriate.”
Agrawal, who took over from co-founder Jack Dorsey in November 2021, some six months before the Musk’s offer, has lately described himself as a lame-duck CEO in the midst of the takeover talks. A former Twitter executive was quoted telling the Financial Times that he is now willing to “go to war” to make the deal happen — in part because he would be due to receive a payout of $42 million under the current terms of the buyout.
The two executives are expected to come face-to-face on Saturday at a “billionaire summer camp” in Sun Valley, Idaho, where both are scheduled to speak in front of moguls Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and others.
Former President Donald Trump also jumped into the fracas, saying, “THE TWITTER DEAL IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE “TRUTH” — a reference to his social media platform Truth Social which has an estimated two million active users, compared to the 300 million on Twitter.