News
August 5, 2022 at 4:29am
Elon Musk accused Twitter of fraud in a countersuit over his aborted $44 billion deal for the social media company, claiming the platform held back necessary information and misled his team about its true user base.
According to The Washington Post, the countersuit filed Thursday by the billionaire and Tesla CEO alleged that Twitter committed fraud, committed a breach of contract and violated the Texas Securities Act.
Musk’s counterclaims were filed confidentially last week and unsealed in a filing late Thursday at the Delaware Chancery Court, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Musk had offered to buy the company this year, then tried to back out of the deal by claiming the social platform was infested with much larger numbers of spam bots and fake accounts than Twitter had originally disclosed.
Twitter then sued Musk in an attempt to force him to complete the acquisition. Musk responded by filing a countersuit.
Musk’s attorneys argued that Twitter’s own disclosures revealed that it has 65 million fewer monetizable daily active users than the 238 million that Twitter claims, the Post and the Journal reported.
The filing also said most of Twitter’s ads are shown only to a sliver of the company’s user base, the Post added.
In an unexpected twist, Twitter filed a response denying Musk’s accusations before Musk’s own counterclaims surfaced.
Twitter called Musk’s reasoning “a story, imagined in an effort to escape a merger agreement that Musk no longer found attractive.”
The case is scheduled to go to trial on Oct. 17.
The Western Journal has reviewed this Associated Press story and may have altered it prior to publication to ensure that it meets our editorial standards.