Twitter still hasn't set a date for shareholders to vote on its acquisition by Elon Musk, but it's urging them to approve the deal despite the fact it's suing Musk over trying to wiggle his way out.
A filing Friday updating its proxy statement for the deal added information about the lawsuit Twitter filed Tuesday to compel Musk to carry out his $44 billion takeover and included reams of correspondence between Musk's lawyers and Twitter's.
If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 21, 2022
The correspondence shows increasingly heated rhetoric over the issue of fake or spam accounts, a major point of contention between Musk and Twitter. Despite vowing to "defeat the spam bots" in April, as tech stocks fell and the value of his Tesla holdings declined, Musk began questioning Twitter's disclosures about the percentage of bots that made up its monetizable user base.
Twitter's lawyers pressed Musk on how the requests related to completing the deal: The merger agreement allowed Musk to request information that was helpful for consummating the transaction, not canceling it, as he now appeared to seek to do. In its lawsuit, Twitter argued that Musk was seeking to back out of the deal because he now regretted it given the decline in the market value of tech companies, including his own.
Despite the contentious language exchanged in the lawsuit and the letters revealed in the filing, Twitter still wants to sell itself to Musk, it told shareholders. With the expiration of a customary waiting period for antitrust review, shareholder approval is the last obstacle to getting the deal done.
Climate TRACE's data show emissions at the facility-level.Image: Climate TRACE