Twitter has asked a Delaware court to force Elon Musk to honour his $44bn agreement to buy the company, setting the stage for a high-stakes legal battle between the billionaire entrepreneur and the social media platform.
The Silicon Valley company filed the lawsuit in Delaware chancery court on Tuesday, just days after Musk last week announced that he planned to terminate the deal, alleging Twitter had breached the merger agreement by not sharing sufficient information on fake accounts.
In the strongly-worded complaint, Twitter’s lawyers said that Musk’s claims were “pretexts and lack any merit”. They argued the Tesla chief executive was trying to back out of the deal rather than “bear the cost” of the downturn in tech stocks.