Musk wanted the trial date to be stretched to early 2023, but the judge landed on October of this year.
In the multibillion dollar court case's opening statements, Twitter's attorneys attacked Elon Musk in a scathing, direct manner on Tuesday. The outcome of the case will determine whether the world's richest person will actually buy one of the most important social networks on the internet as he agreed to months ago.
“What we are looking at is a buyer conjuring an exit plan,” Twitter’s lawyers said of the Tesla CEO’s multiform complaints. “Buyer’s remorse can be an overused phrase, your honor, but it sure looks like what we have here.” Musk’s lawyers wasted no time in firing back, calling the company’s efforts to contravene the termination “too little, too late.”
“If Twitter wanted to be transparent with their second-largest shareholder, who is entitled to see their books and records; if they wanted to assure their would-be new-owner, they had every opportunity to do that, and they did the opposite,” Musk’s counsel said.
The date of the next trial is a point of contention between Twitter and Musk's lawyer. Musk wants to extend that period and allow for more discovery up to about February 2023, whereas Twitter is asking for a four-day trial in September. Musk's attorneys claim that additional time is needed for his team to fully examine the massive amount of Twitter data they have at their disposal and to get ready for trial. They also accuse the corporation of purposefully making it difficult for them to do searches. In the meantime, Twitter claims that lengthy delays would be detrimental to shareholders and are not sufficiently supported by the law. Twitter stated that even though the trial's chosen date is just two months away, Musk's team has effectively been preparing for the trial ever since the business initially gave Musk access to a "firehose of user data."
To compel the CEO of SpaceX to carry out his promise to purchase the business, Twitter filed a lawsuit in a Delaware court. Late in April, Musk agreed to buy Twitter for $44 billion at a share price of $54.20, which is significantly higher than the current price of $39.40. After a protracted back-and-forth in which he tweeted a feces symbol at the CEO of the company at one point, he sought to dissolve the contract on July 8.
Meanwhile, the millionaire was photographed aboard a lavish yacht in Mykonos, Greece, on Monday by paparazzi. He was spotted being hosed off by Ari Emmanuel, the model for Entourage and the brother of the American ambassador to Japan.
Twitter was accused of tampering with the legal process in order to gain an advantage by Musk's attorney in court.
"If the query is, 'Who is instigating chaos?' The New York Times received a copy of their Complaint before I did,' then the answer is: Twitter is, and shouldn't approach the Court for relief on that basis, according to Musk's attorney.
The abundance of artificial accounts on the social network, according to Musk, has made him less inclined to buy it. On Tuesday, he restated his argument and called Twitter out for its "obfuscation." He has challenged Twitter's estimations of spam bots and frequently requested more information about them, and Twitter has agreed with his requests.
In order to convince Musk to finalize the purchase, Twitter "wants to continue to cloak in secrecy the issue with their phony or spam accounts," according to his attorney.
Instead than stating, "Here is every piece of data we have and analyse," We encountered obstacles that hindered our specialists' attempts to evaluate the data, including delays, a non-working copy of the "fire hose" that was made more challenging to use, and fire hose limitations.
Twitter's attorneys argued that Musk's claim was unfounded and that Musk should not be surprised by the merger agreement between the two accounts for such conduct and spam accounts.
Nothing in the merger agreement is in any way dependent upon bots, fraudulent accounts, or other things of a similar nature. This litigation won't be about it because it's not covered by the merger agreement, according to Twitter's attorney.