Twitter sues Musk

The company has accused the Tesla CEO of “hypocrisy” after he backtracked on his $44 billion buyout bid

Twitter has sued Elon Musk in an effort to force the Tesla CEO to honor his pledge to buy the company for $44 billion after he walked away from the deal, according to a lawsuit filed with the Delaware Court of Chancery on Tuesday.

“Musk’s exit strategy is a model of hypocrisy,” the plaintiff argued, accusing the billionaire of negotiating in bad faith.

“Having mounted a public spectacle to put Twitter in play, and having proposed and then signed a seller-friendly merger agreement, Musk apparently believes that he… is free to change his mind, trash the company, disrupt its operations, destroy stockholder value, and walk away,” the document states.

The social media company also said that Musk had committed “a long list of material contractual breaches… that have cast a pall over Twitter and its business.”

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“Twitter brings this action to enjoin Musk from further breaches, to compel Musk to fulfill his legal obligations,” the suit says. “Rather than bear the cost of the market downturn, as the merger agreement requires, Musk wants to shift it to Twitter’s stockholders.”

On Wednesday, in an apparent reference to the lawsuit, Musk tweeted: “Oh the irony lol.”

Earlier, following his decision to terminate the deal, Twitter stocks plunged almost 7%, trading below the $54.20-per-share offer Musk made to the company in April.

On Friday, the Tesla CEO canceled the $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, accusing the company of “material breach of multiple provisions” regarding the issue of fake or bot accounts on the platform. Musk’s team did not agree with Twitter’s estimate of the number of these types of accounts, which put it at just 5% of users, saying the company made “misleading representations.”