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| Photo Credit: AP. |
Twitter says it would sue Elon Musk after news broke that the billionaire has abandoned a deal to purchase the social networking site. Musk who is currently the world’s richest man announced Friday that he would abandoned his $44 billion offer to buy Twitter after the company failed to provide enough information about the number of fake accounts.
Under the
deal, Musk would be compelled to pay a $1 billion breakup fee should he fail to
complete the takeover but Twitter plans to launch a legal battle to compel the
Tesla CEO to complete the purchase. The company’s board has approved the deal
and CEO Parag Agrawal has insisted he wants to consummate, according to The
Associated Press.
Musk lawyer
Mike Ringler wrote a letter to Twitter’s board complaining that his client had
for nearly two months sought data to judge the prevalence of “fake or spam”
accounts on the social media platform, The Associated Press reports.
“Twitter has
failed or refused to provide this information. Sometimes Twitter has ignored
Mr. Musk’s requests, sometimes it has rejected them for reasons that appear to
be unjustified, and sometimes it has claimed to comply while giving Mr. Musk
incomplete or unusable information,” the letter said.
The chair of
Twitter’s board Bret Taylor while responding said in a tweet that the board “is
committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with
Mr. Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement. We
are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery.”
Former
President Trump who was banned from the platform celebrated the news on Truth
social saying “THE TWITTER DEAL IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE ‘TRUTH’”, The Associated
Press reported. Trump was banned from the platform following the January 6,
2021 Capitol Hill riot and Musk has promised to get him back on the platform.
The
Associated Press reported that on Friday shares of Twitter fell 5% to $36.81
below the $54.20 that Musk agreed to pay while it’s stock continued to decline
following the publication of Musk’s letter.
Twitter said
on Thursday that it deletes 1 million spam accounts each day, adding that it
reviews “thousands of accounts” sampled at random, using public and private
data such as IP addresses, phone numbers, location and account behavior when
active to determine whether an account is real, according to The Associated
Press.