TheQuartering [8/8/2022]
The richest man in the world has claimed in court that Twitter lied to him about key parts of the business. The Tesla CEO is facing a lawsuit to force him to go through with his purchase of the social media company.
Billionaire Elon Musk has accused the social media platform Twitter of fraudulently holding back information about the company as part of a countersuit, media reported on Friday.
The court records show that Musk is claiming Twitter misled him about key aspects of the business during his bid to buy the company for $44 billion (€43.3 billion).
The social media company is suing the Tesla CEO to force him to go through with the deal, which he has since tried to abort.
“Twitter’s disclosures have slowly unraveled, with Twitter frantically closing the gates on information in a desperate bid to prevent the Musk Parties from uncovering its fraud,” the countersuit, which was unsealed in a court filing late Thursday, claims.
Twitter said in its own filing that “according to Musk, he — the billionaire founder of multiple companies, advised by Wall Street bankers and lawyers — was hoodwinked by Twitter into signing a $44 billion merger agreement.”
Twitter had issued its own response to the countersuit before it was made public.
The company preemptively denied accusations from Musk that it had committed fraud, employed “delay tactics” and offered only “sanitized, incomplete information” on the number of bots on the platform.
Musk has previously said he pulled out of the deal because Twitter did not give him an accurate estimate of bot accounts on the network.
His lawyers claim that the number of “monetizable daily active users” is some 65 million fewer than the figure of 238 million originally given by the company.