Twitter won its first legal fight against Elon Musk on Tuesday when a Delaware judge granted the company’s request to fast-track its lawsuit seeking to compel the world’s richest person to complete his $44 billion purchase of the social-media site, The Wall Street Journal reported.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick, the chief judge of the Delaware Chancery Court, ordered a five-day trial in October, over Mr. Musk’s objections. Chancellor McCormick said the case should be resolved quickly, agreeing with Twitter’s claim that it could be harmed by uncertainty about its future as a public company.
“Those concerns are on full display in the present case,” Chancellor McCormick said. “Typically, the longer the merger transaction remains in limbo, the larger the cloud of uncertainty cast over the company and the greater the risk of irreparable harm to the sellers.”
The Verge reported: This is a win for Twitter, which asked for a shorter timeframe than Musk. The trial will be five days – longer than Twitter asked for but shorter than Musk did. The exact dates have not yet been scheduled.
According to The Verge, Twitter’s counsel said that Musk’s conduct was “inexcusable.” Musk has held up an employee retention plan and is engaging in “needless value destruction”. Musk’s lawyers suggested that Twitter was giving Musk the run-around with bot data. Both teams of lawyers agreed that Musk’s team had run millions of queries on Twitter’s firehose, a real-time feed of Tweets as they are sent.
The Verge contributed the 62-page lawsuit to DocumentCloud.
Politico reported: This lawsuit marks the latest in a monthlong back-and-forth between Twitter and Musk over his April offer to buy the platform for $54.20 per share and take the company private. Market conditions have since depressed Twitter’s value. Musk is trying to get out of the deal over claims that the company has failed to cooperate with his endeavors to determine the number of fake accounts on the platform.
According to Politico, a Twitter spokesperson said the company is “pleased that the court agreed to an expedite the trial.” Twitter’s attorney William Savitt said during the Tuesday hearing, “Musk has been and remains contractually obligated to use his best efforts to close this deal. What he’s doing is the exact opposite of best efforts.”
The Guardian reported that on July 8, Musk said he was terminating the deal for three broad reasons: Twitter had breached the agreement by failing to provide enough information on spam accounts; that it had misrepresented the number of spam accounts in its disclosures to the US financial watchdog; and that it had breached the agreement by failing to consult with him when firing senior employees recently.
Based on what I’ve read on Twitter, there are Elon Musk fans who hope that Elon Musk will buy Twitter, because they believe he will never ban any content or account from the site. There are also people who said they will leave Twitter if Elon Musk buys it.