Elon Musk Reacts to Twitter Lawsuit Threat

CEO, and chief engineer at SpaceX, Elon Musk, arrives for the 2022 Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on May 2, 2022. Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images

Billionaire Elon Musk reacted with a series of memes to Twitter’s preparations to sue him in a bid to force him to complete the purchase of the social media platform for $44 billion.

In a late-night Twitter post on July 10, Musk shared a meme featuring images of himself laughing, along with captions that marked several key developments in his buyout bid saga.

Musk agreed to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share, which is well above the current market price of $32.65 at the close of regular trading on July 11.

He has since moved to abandon the deal, making a formal filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (pdf) that claims there are too many bots and automated accounts on the platform.

Twitter fired back, saying it would try to enforce the deal and possibly hit Musk with a lawsuit.

Bret Taylor, chairman of Twitter, said in a July 8 social media post that the company plans to sue Musk in the Delaware Court of Chancery to force him to follow through with the deal.

There has been media speculation that a filing could come as soon as early this week.

In April, Musk bought a significant amount of Twitter’s shares, triggering speculation that he would enforce changes to the company’s content moderation policies.

Musk has repeatedly taken aim at Twitter, arguing that it has a left-wing bias and targets conservative accounts.

‘Exorbitant’ Price

Former President Donald Trump reacted to Musk’s filing that seeks to pull out of the $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, saying he believed the move was inevitable.

“I knew that Twitter had a lot of the fake accounts because I read, like everyone else does," Trump, who owns the Truth Social platform, told Breitbart News.

He also said he “thought that the price [tag] was exorbitant.”

Twitter has said that bots or automated accounts make up less than 5 percent of the total accounts, a claim disputed by Musk. His legal team said in the July 8 filing that Twitter has failed to give him sufficient access to its data to carry out his own analysis, while essentially arguing that the company misrepresented its monetizable daily active user counts and so broke the terms of their agreement.

“I called it early and said, ‘That deal is never going to happen,’” Trump said, noting that he thinks the matter is heading for litigation.

The meme Musk posted on July 10 concludes with an image of him laughing, along with the caption “now they have to disclose bot info in court,” suggesting that he believes Twitter will be forced to provide some of the information he’s been demanding regarding automated accounts.

Trump also suggested that the Twitter buyout saga bodes well for his own social platform.

“Personally, I have something called Truth,” he said, referring to the Truth Social platform.

“It’s very successful. We have better interactions. It’s doing phenomenal, and it’ll be over 5 million people very soon, and we’ll be at 10 million people in the not-too-distant future.”

Jack Phillips contributed to this report.