Twitter to sue Musk for terminating $44 bn takeover deal

Micro-blogging platform Twitter on Saturday announced it was going to sue Tesla CEO Elon Musk for terminating the $44 billion takeover deal. In a surprising move, Musk's legal team said in a US Securities and Exchange (SEC) filing that he is terminating the deal because Twitter was in "material breach" of their agreement and had made "false and misleading" statements during negotiations.

In a following tweet, Twitter Chairman Bret Taylor said that the "board is committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement".

"We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery," he added. Musk had put the deal on hold over the actual number of spammy/fake accounts and bots on the platform, and sought a reply from Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. On Thursday, Twitter claimed it is suspending more than 1 million spam accounts a day.

"That is indeed the real question," Musk replied on Friday. The new figure doubled the previous update from Agrawal who said that the platform removes 500,000 spam accounts a day.

"We suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before any of you even see them on Twitter. We also lock millions of accounts each week that we suspect may be spam -- if they can't pass human verification challenges (captchas, phone verification, etc)," Agrawal had tweeted in May.

In an internal memo to Twitter employees sent Friday and obtained by The Verge, the company's general counsel, Sean Edgett, told staffers to "refrain from Tweeting, Slacking, or sharing any commentary about the merger," and that management would be "very limited on what we can share".

"I know this is an uncertain time, and we appreciate your patience and ongoing commitment to the important work we have underway," Edgett wrote.