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REPUBLICA PRESS
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The Elon Musk-Twitter Saga Now Moves to the Courts

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Now that Elon Musk has signaled his intent to walk away from his $44 billion offer to buy Twitter, the fate of the influential social media network will be determined by what may be an epic court battle, involving months of expensive litigation and high-stakes negotiations by elite lawyers on both sides.

The question is whether Mr. Musk will be legally compelled to stick with his agreed-upon acquisition or be allowed to back out, possibly by paying a 10-figure penalty.

Most legal experts say Twitter has the upper hand, in part because Mr. Musk attached few strings to his agreement to buy the company, and the company is determined to force the deal through.

inauthentic accounts. He also said that Mr. Musk did not believe the metrics that Twitter has publicly disclosed about how many of its users were fake.

Twitter’s board responded by saying it intended to consummate the acquisition and would sue Mr. Musk in a Delaware chancery court to force him to do so.

At the heart of the dispute are the terms of the merger agreement that Mr. Musk reached with Twitter in April. His contract with Twitter allows him to break off his deal by paying a $1 billion fee, but only under specific circumstances such as losing debt financing. The agreement also requires Twitter to provide data that Mr. Musk may require to complete the transaction.

Mr. Musk has demanded that Twitter give a detailed accounting of the spam on its platform. Throughout June, lawyers for Mr. Musk and Twitter have wrangled over how much data to share to satisfy Mr. Musk’s inquiries.

as they face advertising pressure, global economic upheaval and rising inflation. Twitter’s stock has fallen about 30 percent since the deal was announced, and trades well under the Mr. Musk’s offering price of $54.20 a share.

Legal experts said Mr. Musk’s dispute over spam could be a ploy to force Twitter back to the bargaining table in hopes of securing a lower price.

During the deal-making, no other potential buyer emerged as a white knight alternative to Mr. Musk, making his offer the best that Twitter is likely to get.

Twitter’s trump card is a “specific performance clause” that gives the company the right to sue Mr. Musk and force him to complete or pay for the deal, so long as the debt financing he has corralled remains intact. Forced acquisitions have happened before: In 2001, Tyson Foods tried to back out of an acquisition of the meatpacker IBP, pointing to IBP’s financial troubles and accounting irregularities. A Delaware court vice chancellor ruled that Tyson had to complete the acquisition,

jittery employees.

attempted to break up its $16 billion deal to acquire Tiffany & Company, ultimately securing a discount of about $420 million.

“This stuff is a bargaining move in an economic transaction,” said Charles Elson, a recently retired professor of corporate governance at the University of Delaware. “It’s all about money.”

A lower price would benefit Mr. Musk and his financial backers, especially as Twitter faces financial headwinds. But Twitter has made clear it wants to force Mr. Musk to stick to his $44 billion offer.

The most damaging outcome for Twitter would be for the deal to collapse. Mr. Musk would need to show that Twitter materially and intentionally breached the terms of its contract, a high bar that acquirers have rarely met. Mr. Musk has claimed that Twitter is withholding information necessary for him to close the deal. He has also argued that Twitter misreported its spam figures, and the misleading statistics concealed a serious problem with Twitter’s business.

A buyer has only once successfully argued in a Delaware court that a material change in the target company’s business gives it the ability to cleanly exit the deal. That occurred in 2017 in the $3.7 billion acquisition of the pharmaceutical company Akorn by the health care company Fresenius Kabi. After Fresenius signed the agreement, Akorn’s earnings fell and it faced allegations by a whistle-blower of skirting regulatory requirements.

Even if Twitter shows that it did not violate the merger agreement, a chancellor in the Delaware court may still allow Mr. Musk to pay damages and walk away, as in the case of Apollo Global Management’s deal combining the chemical companies Huntsman and Hexion in 2008. (The lawsuits concluded in a broken deal and a $1 billion settlement.)

habit of flouting legal confines.

revealed in May that it was examining Mr. Musk’s purchases of Twitter stock and whether he properly disclosed his stake and his intentions for the social media company. In 2018, the regulator secured a $40 million settlement from Mr. Musk and Tesla over charges that his tweet falsely claiming he had secured funding to take Tesla private amounted to securities fraud.

“At the end of the day, a merger agreement is just a piece of paper. And a piece of paper can give you a lawsuit if your buyer gets cold feet,” said Ronald Barusch, a retired mergers and acquisitions lawyer who worked for Skadden Arps before it represented Mr. Musk. “A lawsuit doesn’t give you a deal. It generally gives you a protracted headache. And a damaged company.”

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