Elon Musk Gives Up on Buying Twitter

Billionaire Elon Musk announced on Friday (8) that he has withdrawn from the deal to buy Twitter. In a document sent to the SEC, the American body equivalent to the Securities and Exchange Commission, he stated that there had been a violation of several provisions of the agreement.

In a statement, Twitter said the company would go to court to enforce the deal signed with Musk.

The announcement of the billionaire’s departure from the business comes three months after he reached an agreement with the board of directors of Twitter to buy the social network for US$ 44 billion (about R$ 231 billion at the price of this Friday).

Before the takeover offer, Elon Musk even acquired 9% of the shares of the social network.

The richest man in the world had been questioning the platform about the number of fake and spam accounts and had already threatened to back out of the purchase if he couldn’t carry out his own analysis. The social network says that fake profiles represent less than 5% of its base of 229 million users.

But Musk says his partial analysis of data provided by the company shows the number is higher. According to his lawyers, everything indicates that the information disclosed about the suspicious accounts is “false or materially misleading”.

“Musk’s advisors’ preliminary analysis of the information provided by Twitter to date makes Musk strongly believe that the protection of fake and spam accounts included in the reported user count is much higher than 5%,” the billionaire’s lawyers said in a statement. letter sent to the SEC this Friday.

In May, he even claimed that suspicious accounts could represent 20% of Twitter’s user base.

The new document points out that Twitter did not provide all the data that, in Musk’s assessment, would be necessary to finalize the negotiation.

“Twitter has failed to fulfill its contractual obligations. For nearly two months, Musk sought the necessary data and information to ‘make an independent assessment of the prevalence of false accounts or spam on the Twitter platform,'” the letter reads.

“Twitter failed or refused to provide this information. Sometimes Twitter ignored Musk’s requests, sometimes rejected them for reasons that seem unwarranted, and sometimes claimed to comply by providing Musk with incomplete or unusable information,” he continued.

He made the matter public on Twitter itself, and when the social network’s chief executive, Parag Agrawal, defended the company in a series of tweets, Musk responded with a poop emoji.