Delaware Court of Chancery Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick ruled in Twitter’s favor on Tuesday for an expedited trial to force Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of the company. The five-day trial will take place in October. However, the court thinks that the case should be tried over five days against Elon Musk, which is slightly longer than Twitter’s proposal. This isn’t quite as early as Twitter wanted to go to court, but the ruling still favors the company over its presumptive buyer.
No Public Company of This Size has Ever Had to Bear These Uncertainties
In a filing yesterday, Twitter argued that the company is harmed each day that its conflict with Musk continues, so the case needs to be tried as soon as possible. The company also stated that Musk’s proposed schedule, slating the trial for February, was “calculated to complicate and obfuscate.” “Millions of Twitter shares trade daily under a cloud of Musk-created doubt,” Twitter wrote. “No public company of this size has ever had to bear these uncertainties.”
At the hearing, Musk’s lawyers argued that they need more time to investigate the “firehose” of data that Twitter provided in an attempt to confirm its estimates that less than 5% of monetizable daily active users (mDAUs) are bots. Musk’s team is running millions of searches on this data to better understand the platform’s calculations, which have appeared in SEC filings consistently since the company went public in 2013.
Elon Musk Shifted His Narrative When the Fixed-Price Deal Became Less Attractive, Claims Lawsuit
“In his press release announcing the deal on April 25, 2022, Elon Musk raised a clarion call to ‘defeat the spam bots.’ But when the market declined and the fixed-price deal became less attractive, Elon Musk shifted his narrative, suddenly demanding ‘verification’ that spam was not a serious problem on Twitter’s platform, and claiming a burning need to conduct ‘diligence’ he had expressly forsworn,” Twitter wrote in its lawsuit against Elon Musk.
Read more: Elon Musk Aims to Block Twitter’s Request for Fast-track Trial
