Elon Musk pulls plug on $44 billion Twitter deal, company vows legal fight
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Billionaire Elon Musk on Friday announced that he will abandon his tumultuous $44 billion offer to buy Twitter after the company failed to provide enough information about the number of fake accounts.
In a regulatory filing, Elon Musk's lawyers said Twitter had failed to respond to multiple requests for information on fake or spam accounts on the platform, which is fundamental to the company's business performance.
Elon Musk terminating the deal that he inked in April to buy the social media giant sets the stage for an epic court battle over a billion-dollar breakup fee and more.
Twitter immediately fired back, saying it would sue the Tesla CEO to uphold the deal.
Twitter's chairman, Bret Taylo, said the board will pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement. "The Twitter Board is committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement," Taylor tweeted.
The terms of the deal require Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk to pay a $1 billion breakup fee if he does not complete the transaction.
Elon Musk also faces a lawsuit accusing him of pushing down Twitter's stock price in order to give himself an escape hatch from his buyout bid.
In May, Musk said he was putting the deal on hold until the social media company proved that spam bots account for less than 5 percent of its total users.
Last month, he warned Twitter that he might walk away from his deal to acquire the social media platform if it fails to provide the data on spam and fake accounts that he seeks.
In response, Twitter offered Mr. Musk access to its "firehose" of raw data on hundreds of millions of daily tweets. Twitter said such private data helps avoid misidentifying real accounts as spam.
Twitter has maintained that no more than five percent of accounts are run by software instead of people, while Musk has said he believes the number to be much higher.
Elon Musk had vowed to restore free speech on the micro-blogging platform. "I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter because that is what free speech means," he tweeted in April as he finalized the $44 billion deal to takeover Twitter.