Elon Musk moved Friday afternoon to terminate his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter. Twitter share price fell about 6% in after-hours trading Friday immediately following the news.
Next chapter will most probability be a court battle.
A lawyer representing Musk claimed in a letter to Twitter’s top lawyer that Twitter had failed / refused to respond to repeated requests for information about fake accounts on the platform that was critical to the company’s business performance.
Since weeks, Musk has concerns that there are a higher number of bots and spam accounts on the platform as Twitter has said publicly. The Tesla stock, which was part of the deal, has declined hardly since the deal was announced.
Musk previously pointed out that he would shut down the business unless the company showed evidence that spam and bot accounts accounted for less than 5% of users seeing ads on the social media service.
Last month, Musk got access to a channel by Twitter through which he could see raw data from hundreds of millions of tweets a day.
This chance was intended to make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on Twitter’s platform.
Musk appears to be arguing that he shouldn’t be on the hook for the $1 billion breakup fee set out in the terms of the deal in case the acquisition falls through.
Source: CNN Business
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