[imagesource: Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge / Getty Images]

Twitter is suing Elon Musk after he pulled out of the $44 billion acquisition deal he made in late April to purchase the social media platform.

In a letter sent to Twitter by Musk’s lawyers formally withdrawing from the deal last week, his primary reason was that the company didn’t provide sufficient information regarding how many accounts were bots or fake.

Lawyers for Twitter filed papers in the Delaware chancery court on Tuesday, alleging that the world’s richest person treated the signed agreement as an “elaborate joke”.

For evidence of that, the legal eagles point towards Musk’s tweets themselves, and his “frequent jabs” at the company’s leadership on its own platform.

Financial Times spoke with Ann Lipton, a corporate law professor at Tulane University:

“We already knew Musk’s claims were weak. Twitter’s complaint hammers that home,” said Lipton…

The characterisation of the deal, she said, is that Musk “decided to buy Twitter on a lark, essentially that he bullied the board into taking this deal and now he’s treating it as a plaything and walking away because the market dropped . . . while hurting Twitter stockholders”.

For an idea of how Musk is (publicly, at least) handling news of the lawsuit, we head to Twitter:

💩 = bs

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 13, 2022

🤣

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 12, 2022

Ah, I see. Totally normal stuff.

In the filing in Delaware, lawyers for Twitter included multiple tweets from Musk himself as evidence of what they claim is a cavalier and shifting attitude to the agreed-upon deal.

Via Gizmodo, we’ll feature a couple of screenshots and a description of why they’re included.

A little more than two weeks after announcing the deal to acquire Twitter, Musk tweeted on May 13 that the deal is “temporarily on hold”… [and] he explained that he was waiting for information to support the company’s assertation that spam accounts represented less than 5% of its users…

“The Reuters story Musk linked to in his tweet was a report on Twitter’s 10-Q filing made on May 2, 2022, and contained the same heavily qualified 5% estimate Twitter had been disclosing in its SEC filings for the past three years,” the company’s lawyers wrote.

Lawyers for Twitter were not impressed with the deal being put “on hold” and they were even less impressed with what followed:

In Twitter’s view, this amounted to a public misrepresentation, especially considering the fact that it had met with Musk before he tweeted and informed him that its “spam estimation process entails daily sampling for a total set of approximately 9,000 accounts per quarter that are manually reviewed.”

To the polls, we go:

On May 17, Musk conducted a poll and asked whether the public believed that 95% of Twitter’s users were “real, unique humans.”

…Twitter alleges in its suit that this was yet another violation of the billionaire’s non-disparagement agreement.

Let’s fast forward to one of his tweets after he had announced he was pulling out of the deal:

Chuckmate

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 11, 2022

Not that we needed more proof that Musk is a dad, but this joke sure confirms it.

In response to this tweet, the company alleges that “Twitter, the interests of its stockholders, the transaction Musk agreed to, and the court process to enforce it all constitute an elaborate joke”.

Eric Talley, a law professor at Columbia, says these tweets, as well as other private correspondence between Musk and Twitter, show that the billionaire was “working to kneecap the deal”:

Twitter hopes to impress upon the court that the mogul had gone too far.

“[The complaint] was definitely designed to try to give a sense of just how from Twitter’s perspective, even for a Silicon Valley company, it was hard to deal with what they alleged to be this type of sophomoric behaviour,” Talley said.

Expect further poop and laugh-cry-face emojis in response.

We live in strange times.

[sources:ft&gizmodo]