SAN FRANCISCO: Twitter on Tuesday said a preliminary count shows shareholders endorsed Elon Musk's bid to buy the social media platform for $44 billion, even as he tries to break the contract.
The tally came during a shareholder meeting that lasted just minutes, with most of the votes having been cast online. Twitter has sued Musk to complete the deal, and a trial is set for October.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has cancelled the $44 billion Twitter takeover deal over the actual presence of bots on the platform.
While Twitter has claimed that Musk is inventing reasons to get out of buying the company, Musk's lawyers say that Twitter is the one holding back the deal by dragging its feet and providing insufficient data to the billionaire's requests.
Musk agreed in April to buy Twitter and take it private, offering $54.20 a share and vowing to loosen the company’s policing of content and to root out fake accounts. As part of the deal, Musk and Twitter had agreed to pay each other a $1 billion breakup fee if either was responsible for the deal collapsing.
Musk has claimed that Twitter has failed to provide him with enough information about the number of fake accounts on its service, but the company has estimated for the past several years that fewer than 5% of mDAU are spam or fake accounts.
Musk’s attorneys also contend that Twitter has refused to provide them with raw data that it maintains in the ordinary course of business, and which requires significant “machine time” and software development to be processed and analyzed by expert witnesses by a proposed Monday deadline.
Twitter said last month that it was making a “fire hose” of raw data on hundreds of millions of daily tweets available to Musk.
Billions of dollars are at stake, but so is the future of Twitter, which Musk has said should allow any legal speech -- an absolutist position that has sparked fears the network could be used to incite violence.