Elon Musk on Monday threatened to end his $44 billion agreement to buy Twitter. This comes after the company refused to give him information about its spam bot accounts. The threats were made through a letter to Twitter by the lawyers of Tesla and SpaceX. That letter was included in a filing from Twitter with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
As per the letter, Musk has been repeatedly asking for the information since May 9. Almost a month after his offer to buy the company. He wanted to evaluate how many of the company’s 229 million accounts are fake.
Details about Musk’s agreement with the company
The lawyers claim that Twitter has offered only to provide details about the company’s testing methods. But they contend that’s “tantamount to refusing Mr. Musk’s data requests.”
The data is required so that Musk can do his own verification of what he says are Twitter’s lax methodologies. Moreover, a merger agreement was signed between Musk and the company. And the company is resisting and thwarting his information rights under the agreement.
The lawyers said in the letter-
This is a clear material breach of Twitter’s obligations under the merger agreement and Mr. Musk reserves all rights resulting therefrom, including his right not to consummate the transaction and his right to terminate the merger agreement.
Notably, he has spent weeks complaining about the spam bot problem on Twitter. Some claim that this is nothing more than an effort to escape the deal with Twitter. A few weeks back he tweeted that the deal was “on hold.” It was due to his concerns around bots and said the deal “cannot move forward” until Twitter proves the accuracy of its spam counts. However, today he made an official threat to back out of the acquisition.