Twitter officially filed suit against Elon Musk in Delaware Chancery Court on Tuesday to compel him to buy the company for $44 billion.
In April 25, Musk agreed to purchase the company’s outstanding common stock at $54.20 per share, roughly $44 billion. As of Tuesday, Twitter was trading around $34 a share.
Twitter’s suit was expected after Musk said last week that he no longer plans to buy Twitter , citing Twitter bots and claiming that the company didn’t give him the information he needed to evaluate the deal.
The lawsuit accuses Musk of hypocrisy and bad faith in breaching his contract with Twitter.
“Musk refuses to honor his obligations to Twitter and its stockholders because the deal he signed no longer serves his personal interests,” the lawsuit said.
“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,” it added.
The suit accused Musk of “a long list of material contractual breaches by Musk that have cast a pall over Twitter and its business” and asks the court to “compel consummation of the merger upon satisfaction of the few outstanding conditions.
” The lawsuit points out that in the purchase agreement, “Twitter negotiated for itself a robust right to demand specific performance of the agreement’s terms that encompassed the right to compel defendants to close the deal, and ensured that Musk personally was bound by that provision (among others).”
Twitter filed the suit to “hold Elon Musk accountable to his contractual obligations,” Twitter board chair Bret Taylor tweeted.
“Oh the irony lol,” Musk tweeted after Twitter’s filing.
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