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Elon Musk Threatens to End Deal With Twitter

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OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.


Tesla CEO Elon Musk is threatening to exercise his “right not to consummate” his acquisition of Twitter and a “right to terminate the merger agreement.”

In a letter from his lawyers to the Twitter general counsel Vijaya Gadde, Musk accused Twitter of “resisting and thwarting” his right to information about fake accounts on the platform, calling it a “clear material breach” of the terms of their merger agreement.

“Mr. Musk reserves all rights resulting therefrom, including his right not to consummate the transaction and his right to terminate the merger agreement,” the letter, signed by Skadden attorney Mike Ringler, says.

“He said his team would do a random sampling to calculate the number of fake accounts, but Twitter’s CEO later explained that nonpublic information would be necessary to get an accurate count. Twitter executives told staff there’s ‘no such thing’ as putting the deal on hold as Musk claimed,” CNBC reported.

“In Monday’s letter, Musk’s lawyer wrote that the merger agreement requires Twitter to provide the data Musk requested and disputed the company’s alleged claim that it is only required to provide information for the limited purpose of helping to close the transaction,” the report added.

“To the contrary, Mr. Musk is entitled to seek, and Twitter is obligated to provide, information and data for, inter alia, ‘any reasonable business purpose related to the consummation of the transaction,’” the letter says.

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“At this point, Mr. Musk believes Twitter is transparently refusing to comply with its obligations under the merger agreement, which is causing further suspicion that the company is withholding the requested data due to concern for what Mr. Musk’s own analysis of that data will uncover,” it continues.

Axios reported: “The bottom line: There is zero chance that Twitter will simply accept Musk’s assertion that he has the right to withdraw from the agreement. If he tries to do so, things are likely to get messy.”

Last week, Musk sounded the alarm after he noticed something strange about his Twitter account.

A fan of the man who has made a successful bid to purchase Twitter, to the chagrin of some of its employees, noticed that Musk’s tweets stopped loading after scrolling.

“Hey @elonmusk, twitter is FKING you. Dear everyone, SCROLL down on @elonmusk’s tweets & replies and tell me….. DO THEY STOP LOADING????” the Twitter user said.

“Do @elonmusk’s tweets stop loading after a short scroll for YOU too?” he said in a poll that showed around 80 percent of the respondents saying that they had noticed the issue.

“The thing that’s fk’d about this is NO TRANSPARENCY. Twitter FKs users without consent (there’s a word for that, isn’t there…?) and doesn’t tell anyone what they’ve done. Users have NO RECOURSE and most never even KNOW they were—or are still BEING—FK’d. Not cool,” the user said.

“Hoping soon after this tweet thread is posted this “bug” is fixed, but I’m not counting on it,” he said.

The tweet caught the attention of the CEo who said in a tweet “Very strange indeed!”

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The U.K.’s Daily Mail reported that it “confirmed that Musk’s tweets older than 11 hours briefly stopped loading for some users, but the glitch went away on its own after repeatedly refreshing the page for around 30 minutes.”

The New York Post reported that it had “confirmed at the time of writing that his feed does not display any replies that are older than 17 hours and the earlier tweets only showed up after adjusting the settings to display only public tweets.”

If a Twitter employee is tinkering with his account, or if it is a bug, is unknown.

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