bye, Twitter: Elon walks away

Elon Musk got everyone's hopes up about Twitter: he would buy it outright, dismantle its woke censorship, and allow it to become a true free-speech zone. The other possibility, always lurking in the background, was that Musk would raise everyone's expectations, then back out of the deal, thereby collapsing Twitter's net worth. This seems to be what's happening now, but Twitter isn't going down without a fight. After first being extremely reluctant to reveal to Musk the true nature of its "bot" problem (computer-generated accounts posing as real people and trained to say certain things by an algorithm), Twitter now has the nerve to prepare to sue Musk for backing out. The Epoch Times says this:

Elon Musk Walks Away From $44-Billion Twitter Deal, Twitter to Sue

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has filed to exit from his multi-billion-dollar deal with Twitter over concerns about its spam bots, a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing shows.

“While Section 6.4 of the Merger Agreement requires Twitter to provide Mr. Musk and his advisers all data and information that Mr. Musk requests ‘for any reasonable business purpose related to the consummation of the transaction,’ Twitter has not complied with its contractual obligations,” reads an SEC filing dated July 8, 2022.

“For nearly two months, Mr. Musk has sought the data and information necessary to ‘make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on Twitter’s platform,’” the filing continued.

[...]

The SEC filing said Musk and his Morgan Stanley advisers have been requesting this information since May 9, but Twitter has “failed to provide much of the data and information” requested.

“Accordingly, for all of these reasons, Mr. Musk hereby exercises X Holdings I, Inc.’s right to terminate the Merger Agreement and abandon the transaction contemplated thereby, and this letter constitutes formal notice of X Holding I, Inc.’s termination of the Merger Agreement pursuant to Section 8.1(d)(i) thereof,” the SEC filing says. X Holdings is a company Musk formed to fund the purchase of the social media platform.

[...]

“The Twitter Board is committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement. We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery,” Taylor wrote on Twitter.

Twitter wants it both ways: to be coy about the spam-bot problem and to take Elon Musk's money. Underlying all this is Twitter's desire to continue to be an oppressive platform that amplifies the left while squelching the right—not allowing people to state a simple fact like "trans women are still biologically male" while allowing Islamic terrorists freely to tweet their Jew-hatred. I say, fuck Twitter. I'm glad I left in 2016. And I'm going to enjoy watching from a distance as Twitter's stock crashes.

ADDENDUM: Gateway Pundit has this headline:

HUGE: Twitter Is in SERIOUS TROUBLE – Filing Materially Inaccurate Representations with the SEC Could Be Entity Ending

Excerpt (with reference to Musk's claim that Twitter has been dishonest):

As TGP mentioned before, messing with the SEC is like messing with Sasquatch. You best not do it.

Filings with the SEC must be perfect. To misrepresent numbers or assertions in the filings is a very big deal. Companies have gone bankrupt for doing so.

I don't expect anything remotely "entity-ending" about this, of course: we live in an era where the big fish always get away with their crimes after acting with impunity. The best we can hope for is a slap on the wrist. Twitter will live through this strife, but it's going to come out battle-damaged, and that's what I'm hoping to see.