Twitter sues to force Elon Musk to complete his $44B acquisition

Twitter sued Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday to force him to complete the $44 billion acquisition of the social media company.

Musk and Twitter have been bracing for a legal fight since the billionaire said Friday he was backing off of his April agreement to buy the company.

Twitter's lawsuit opens with a sharply-worded accusation: “Musk refuses to honour his obligations to Twitter and its stockholders because the deal he signed no longer serves his personal interests.”

“Having mounted a public spectacle to put Twitter in play, and having proposed and then signed a seller-friendly merger agreement, 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,” the suit says.

Twitter filed its lawsuit in the Delaware Court of Chancery, which frequently handles business disputes among the many corporations, including Twitter, that are incorporated there.

Musk alleged Friday that Twitter has failed to provide enough information about the number of fake accounts on its service.

Twitter said last month that it was making available to Musk a ″fire hose” of raw data on hundreds of millions of daily tweets.

The company has said for years in regulatory filings that it believes about 5% of the accounts on the platform are fake.

Musk is also alleging that Twitter broke the acquisition agreement when it fired two top managers and laid off a third of its talent-acquisition team.

Twitter's suit repeatedly emphasises Musk's contemplation of starting a Twitter competitor -- an alternative option he sometimes aired publicly and sometimes privately to Twitter's executives and board members.

While the company has said it cooperated in providing the spam bot data he requested, the lawsuit suggests there was concern that disclosing too much “highly sensitive information” could expose Twitter to competitive harm if shared.

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