Tesla founder Elon Musk. /
The trial in which it will be decided whether or not the billionaire will be forced to buy the social network will begin on October 17
The soap opera of the founder and CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk, and Twitter continues. As expected, the South African tycoon strikes back and has also filed a countersuit against the social network after the company denounced him for rescinding the platform’s purchase agreement worth 43,000 million euros in early July, according to reports ‘The Wall Street Journal’.
Although the content of the brief is confidential, its defense strategy will be based on the fact that Twitter did not respond when it asked about the number of false accounts that existed on the social network and what was the social network’s way of locating and eliminating them, despite to be included in the contract, according to Musk’s legal team.
Likewise, the North American newspaper assures that it is “likely” that the founder of Tesla affirms that the company changed the number of monetizable daily active users before the agreement between both parties was finalized, which would have changed the purchase price of the social network .
Musk’s legal team has previously assured that Twitter would have violated and breached the purchase agreement for various reasons, including that the company had fired two executives without prior consultation.
The trial for Twitter’s lawsuit against the tycoon, in which it will be decided whether or not the billionaire will be forced to buy the social network, will begin on October 17 and will last five days. The Delaware judge overseeing the case agreed to Twitter’s request for a fast-track process, alleging that the deal to buy the company had to be before October 24, compared to Musk’s claim to postpone it to February of the year that comes.
1,000 million penalty
But in addition, there is at stake 1,000 million dollars (about 987 million euros), which is the penalty that appears in one of the clauses of the agreement in the event that one of the parties backs out of an acquisition for an amount of about 44,000 million dollars (42,156 million euros).
The technology entrepreneur had made it a requirement for the purchase that the number of false accounts be below 5%. And, although those responsible for the social network insist that the ‘bots’ (false users created by artificial intelligence) are around that figure, Musk suspects that the real number would be four times higher.