Elon Musk has officially announced he intends to pull out of his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. According to Musk’s filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday, his team claims that he is bailing on the deal because Twitter was in “material breach” of their agreement and had made “false and misleading” statements during negotiations.
Read: James Webb Space Telescope unveils deep view of the universe
“For nearly two months, Mr. Musk has sought the data and information necessary to ‘make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on Twitter’s platform,’” Musk’s legal team writes. “Twitter has failed or refused to provide this information.”
Twitter, on the other hand, has denied these claims and has announced it intends to close the transaction at the agreed price. It will pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement. There is a clause in the initial contract that any party that wishes to pull out of the deal would need to pay the other $1 billion, which Musk will obviously take to court due to his claims of bad dealings on Twitter’s behalf.
Twitter has gone to great lengths to show compliance with Musk’s requests. In early June, the company opened up “firehose” access to its service so that Musk could receive and analyse every tweet as it’s posted. The company has also continuously tried to reassure the public that it has spam and bots under control. Twitter has told reporters that it kicks over 1 million spam accounts off of its platform a day. That’s double the number CEO Parag Agrawal stated in May, though the company maintains its long-held position that bots make up less than 5 percent of its active user base.
Twitter has responded to Musk’s allegations before. In June, the company said it would give him access to the “firehose” API that basically acts as a stream of all the tweets posted to the platform so he could run his own analysis. About a month after Agrawal’s thread about spam, the company announced it was rolling out an overhauled version of its reporting system, which lets users flag accounts that may belong to spammers.
