Twitter filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk on Tuesday after he sent a letter to the platform’s board last week expressing his intent to terminate his bid to purchase the company for $44 billion.
The company argued Musk is refusing to “honor his obligations to Twitter and its stockholders because the deal he signed no longer serves his personal interests,” according to the complaint.
“Rather than bear the cost of the market downturn, as the merger agreement requires, Musk wants to shift it to Twitter’s stockholders,” the complaint added.
The lawsuit accuses Musk of having “repeatedly disparaged Twitter and the deal, creating business risk for Twitter and downward pressure on its share price” since signing the merger agreement.
“Musk apparently believes that he — unlike every other party subject to Delaware contract law — is free to change his mind, trash the company, disrupt its operations, destroy stockholder value, and walk away,” it adds.
Twitter has asked the Delaware Chancery Court, where the case will be heard, for an expedited trial in September.
The suit comes days after Musk sought to end the acquisition. A regulatory filing from attorney Mike Ringler on behalf of Musk argued that Twitter is “in material breach of multiple provisions” of their April 25 merger agreement, and “appears to have made false and misleading representations upon which Mr. Musk relied when” agreeing to purchase the company.
Musk has claimed Twitter is undercounting fake “bot” accounts, which he says is information that is “fundamental to Twitter’s business and financial performance.”
The letter claims that Twitter must provide all the data that he requests “for any reasonable business purpose related to the consummation of the transaction” and accuses the company of failing to comply with its contractual obligations.
“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,’” the letter reads. “Sometimes Twitter has ignored Mr. Musk’s requests, sometimes it has rejected them for reasons that appear to be unjustified, and sometimes it has claimed to comply while giving Mr. Musk incomplete or unusable information.”