Twitter filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk on Tuesday in an attempt to force the entrepreneur to continue with his $44 billion purchase of the company.
“Musk refuses to honor his obligations to Twitter and its stockholders because the deal he signed no longer serves his personal interests,” the company said in the lawsuit. “Musk apparently believes that he — unlike every other party subject to Delaware contract law — is free to change his mind, trash the company, disrupt its operations, destroy stockholder value, and walk away.”
Musk decided that he wanted to terminate the deal because he claims that the company was not disclosing accurate information about how many spam accounts are on the platform.
Musk responded to news that Twitter would sue him by trolling the company with a meme at the start of the week. “They said I couldn’t buy Twitter,” the meme begins. “Then they wouldn’t disclose bot info.”
“Now they want to force me to buy Twitter in court,” the meme continues. “Now they have to disclose bot info in court.”
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 11, 2022
The New York Times reported that Musk’s attempts to terminate the deal could force Twitter to offer him the company at a discounted rate. The report added that if Musk successfully terminates the deal that it could be catastrophic for the company as the value of its stock has declined 35% from the $54.20 per share that Musk offered.
Musk purchased the company back in April, saying that he wanted to buy the social media platform—which has been accused of censoring conservatives and promoting wokeism—because his “strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.”
Regarding the financial aspect of acquiring the company, Musk said, “I don’t care about the economics at all.”
Musk further noted that one of his top priorities at Twitter would be “eliminating the spam and scam bots and the bot armies” on the platform.
“It’s important to the function of democracy, it’s important to the function of the United States as a free country and many other countries, and to help freedom in the world more broadly than in the U.S.,” Musk said. “Civilizational risk is decreased the more we can increase the trust of Twitter as a public platform, and so I do think this will be somewhat painful.”
This report has been updated to include additional information.