Elon Musks’ $44B offer to buy Twitter is on the brink of collapsing after Elon Musk’s Tesla sent a letter to Twitter’s board saying it was canceling its acquisition. Elon Musk announced on Friday he is backing out of his tumultuous $44bn offer to buy Twitter after the company failed to give sufficient details on the number of fake accounts.
July 8 (Reuters) – Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla (TSLA.O) and the richest man in the world, said on Friday he is ending his $44 billion offer to buy Twitter (TWTR.N) as the social media company violated several provisions in its merger agreement. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Friday he was terminating his $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter, saying the social media company had failed to disclose fake accounts on the platform. The statement was yet another turn in a “will-he-will-not-he” saga, which began when Elon Musk struck a deal in April to purchase Twitter (TWTR.N) but then suspended the buyout until the social media company showed that spambots made up less than 5 percent of its total users.
Twitter Inc made misleading statements regarding the number of spam bots on the social media platform and did nothing to fulfill its contractual obligation to provide information about how it assessed the prevalence of the bots, representatives of Elon Musk said in the cease-and-desist letter sent on Friday. Twitter Inc did not obtain the parent’s approval to change its operations, including for the specific changes listed above, Elon Musk said in the letter, calling this a material breach of the merger agreement.
Twitter’s chief legal officer alleges in the letter that Twitter has not met Twitter’s contractual obligations to provide sufficient data about “Tumultuous” to Elon Musk, and said Twitter appears to have made false and misleading statements on which Mr. Musk relied in agreeing to the transaction. Bouzy said the letter to Twitter’s board makes several legitimate criticisms about Twitter’s lack of transparency, including that Twitter refuses to give Teslas CEO the same level of inside data it offers to some of its biggest customers. For almost two months, Mr. Musk has been seeking data and information needed to make an Independent assessment of the prevalence of false or spammy accounts on the Twitters platform, Mr. Musks’ lawyers said in a letter to Twitter. Musk’s attorney, Mike Ringler, wrote in a letter that for nearly two months, Elon Musks’ firm has sought the data necessary to judge the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on the social media platform.