Despite Elon Musk’s initial plans to purchase Twitter, the billionaire has changed his mind.
The 51-year-old Tesla CEO’s attorney sent a letter to the social media platform on Friday, July 8, of his intentions, according to CNBC.
In addition to withdrawing his merger agreement, Musk’s legal team alleged that Twitter is in “material breach of multiple provisions” after making false and misleading claims about the state of their business, per a letter published by the SEC.
Twitter, for its part, has yet to publicly address the South Africa native’s allegations but remained committed to sealing the deal.
“The Twitter Board is committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement,” board chair Bret Taylor tweeted on Friday. “We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery.”
The Space X founder initially announced earlier this year that he planned to purchase the media company for an impressive $44 billion.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in an April press release. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans,” he explained. “Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”
Musk, who had previously purchased nine percent of Twitter’s stock shares, later revealed his plans were on hold.
“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” the businessman tweeted in May. “Still committed to acquisition. To find out, my team will do a random sample of 100 followers of @twitter. I invite others to repeat the same process and see what they discover.”
Musk, who is one of Twitter’s largest shareholders, made headlines earlier this week after Insider reported that he had welcomed a pair of twins with Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis in November 2021.
“Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis,” he tweeted on Thursday, July 7, seemingly confirming the news. “A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far. … I hope you have big families and congrats to those who already do!”
The arrival of Musk’s 8-month-old twins makes him a father of 10. He also coparents twins Vivian and Griffin, both 18, and triplets Kai, Saxon and Damian, all 16, with ex-wife Justine Wilson. Musk and Wilson, 49, also shared late son Nevada before the newborn died of sudden infant death syndrome at 10 weeks. Musk later welcomed son X AE A-XII, 2, and daughter Exa Dark Sideræl, 7 months, with musician Grimes. (Exa was born via surrogate in December 2021, one month after Zilis, 39, welcomed her children.)
