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Twitter lawyers filed Elon Musk on Tuesday with blunt and forceful language in the initial arguments of the multimillion-dollar court case that will decide whether the world’s richest man will buy one of the Internet’s most influential social networks, as agreed ago months. .
“What we’re looking at is a buyer evoking an exit plan,” Twitter lawyers said of the Tesla CEO’s multifaceted complaints. “Buyer remorse may be an abused phrase, honor, but it sure seems like what we have here.”
Musk’s lawyers wasted no time in reacting and described the company’s efforts to contravene the termination as “too little, too late.”
“If Twitter wanted to be transparent with its second shareholder, it has the right to see its books and records; if they wanted to insure their new owner, they had every opportunity to do so, and they did the opposite, ”Musk’s lawyer said.
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Twitter and Musk’s lawyer disagree on when the impending trial should take place. While Twitter is seeking a four-day trial in September, Musk wants to extend it and allow continued discovery until February 2023. Musk’s lawyers say his team needs more time to analyze the Twitter data avalanche at your disposal and prepare for trial. and accused the company of intentionally making it difficult to conduct searches. Meanwhile, Twitter says prolonged delays would hurt shareholders and are not backed by a sufficient legal precedent. With just two months to go before Twitter’s preferred test date, the company said Musk’s team has been essentially preparing for the test since the company granted Musk a so-called hose test. user data in early June.
Twitter has sued in Delaware court to force the CEO of SpaceX to comply with its agreement to buy the company. Musk agreed to buy Twitter for $ 44 billion in late April at a stock price of $ 54.20, well above the current price of $ 39.40. He asked to terminate the deal on July 8 after a long round trip that at one point saw him tweet a poop emoji to the company’s CEO.
The billionaire, meanwhile, was spotted Monday by paparazzi on a luxury yacht in Mykonos, Greece. Ari Emmanuel, the inspiration for Entourage and brother of the U.S. ambassador to Japan, was seen dragging him with water.
In court, Musk’s attorney accused Twitter of destroying the proceedings to take advantage of them.
“The New York Times received a copy of his complaint before me, so if the question is: who is creating the chaos? Twitter is, and shouldn’t come to court asking for relief on that basis,” he said. Musk’s lawyer.
Musk has argued that the prevalence of automated accounts on the social network has aggravated his desire to buy it. He reiterated the point Tuesday and accused Twitter of “obfuscation.” He has challenged the Twitter measures of spam bots and has repeatedly asked for more data about them, requests that Twitter has complied with.
“Twitter wants to keep secretly surrounding the issue with its fake or spam accounts whenever necessary for Musk to complete that purchase,” his lawyer said. “Instead of saying, ‘Here’s all the data we have to look at,’ we had delays, we got a non-working replica of the ‘fire hose’ that became harder to use, we had limits on the fire hose to thwart the efforts of our experts to analyze the data “.
Twitter lawyers said his claim was false and that the merger agreement between the two accounts for this activity, that spam accounts should not be news to Musk.
“Nothing in the merger agreement is conditioned in any way on robots, fake accounts or anything [of the like]. That’s not what the merger deal is about, so that’s not what this case will be about, ”the Twitter lawyer said.
Musk had asked for the trial to be delayed, though his lawyer said Tuesday: “Obviously, we don’t oppose the expedition, period.” The Twitter lawyer rejected his efforts to stop the process and accused him of trying to “exhaust the clock.”
Musk’s lawyer argued that he had never done intentional harm to the company because he is such a major shareholder.
“The idea, frankly, ladies and gentlemen, that Mr Musk is trying to harm the company or is actually damaging the company by sending tweets, is absurd. He has no interest in damaging the company. He has a much greater financial stake. that whole Twitter board, ”his lawyer said.
“Backward justice is denied justice,” the Twitter lawyer said.
The federal government is also now involved in the merger. In a letter sent Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission questioned whether Musk was serious in his attempts to buy Twitter.
In her sentencing, Judge Kathaleen McCormick said Musk’s team “underestimated” the court’s ability to litigate the case quickly. The court finally ruled in favor of Twitter, setting a five-day trial in October this year. This has lagged slightly since Twitter’s preferred trial in September, but it still comes many months before the date Musk’s lawyers sought.
This is a developing story, check back for updates.