Judge Kathleen McCormick ruled on Tuesday, July 19, that there will be a five-day trial in October to determine whether or not billionaire Elon Musk will have to go through with his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter
"The reality is that delay threatens irreparable harm to the sellers and Twitter," said Judge McCormick during a hearing in the Delaware Court of Chancery. "The longer the merger transaction remains in limbo, the larger a cloud of uncertainty is cast over the company."
According to Musk, Twitter withheld information and misled him about its potential, particularly regarding the number of bot accounts on the platform. Twitter, on the other hand, says it gave Musk all the information he requested. The social media giant argued that Musk is just trying to get out of the deal now because the outcomes are no longer favorable for him.
"Mr. Musk has made perfectly clear he has no intention of keeping any of his promises," Twitter's lead attorney Bill Savitt said. "Candidly, we suspect that Mr. Musk wants to delay this trial long enough to never really face a reckoning."
The company says that Musk's request for a trial scheduled in February of next year is another part of his efforts to get out of the acquisition agreement. The financing Musk has gotten from funds and banks to carry out the acquisition will expire in April of 2023.
In contrast, Twitter requested an expedited four-day trial scheduled for September 2022.
"We are pleased that the court agreed to expedite this trial," Twitter said through a spokesman.
While Savitt said that this "continued uncertainty" regarding the acquisition "inflicts harm on Twitter, every hour of every day," the tech mogul's attorney, Andy Rossman, says Musk needs more time to consider the deal and analyze Twitter's data.
According to Rossman, the platform is trying to "shroud" the number of fake accounts on its site in order "to get this deal railroaded through." Rossman said that Twitter's request for an expedited trial is "completely unjustifiable" because of how long it will take Musk to vet the company's bot numbers.
Meanwhile, Savitt says that the bot question is "an invented issue" that was never a part of Musk's acquisition deal. Savitt says the fixation on bot accounts is meant to "obfuscate and delay."
