Elon Musk is a freewheeling, shoot-from-the-lip kind of Twitter user who is famously fond of memes.
But now Musk’s snarky and derogatory tweets aimed at Twitter have been dragged into court. The company, which is suing to force the mega-billionaire complete his $44 billion buyout, alleges that Musk has on multiple occasions violated a provision of the merger agreement stipulating that Musk may tweet about the deal only “so long as such Tweets do not disparage the Company or any of its Representatives.”
“Since signing the merger agreement, Musk has repeatedly disparaged Twitter and the deal, creating business risk for Twitter and downward pressure on its share price,” the company’s lawsuit claimed.
Indeed, Musk has dissed or mocked Twitter or its employees at least 16 times on the social network since announcing his binding deal to buy Twitter on April 25. Musk purportedly wants to nix the deal over his hunch that Twitter has more spam and bot accounts than it acknowledges; Twitter alleges the spam/bot issue is a red herring and that Musk actually wants to scrap the pact because the deal has become more expensive for him personally given the sharp drop in Tesla’s stock price.
Twitter is hoping to build a case that shows Musk has acted in bad faith — to persuade the court to order Musk to pay up, or use the litigation as leverage to cut a favorable settlement.
Musk’s disparaging tweets include a post on July 10, prior to Twitter suing Musk in the Delaware Court of Chancery, in which he responded to the company’s legal threat with a meme showing himself laughing at the prospect of the company needing to disclose data about spam and fake accounts in court. “They said I couldn’t buy Twitter. Then they wouldn’t disclose bot info,” Musk’s post said. “Now they want to force me to buy Twitter in court. Now they have to disclose bot info in court.”
Shortly afterward, he tweeted a meme of Chuck Norris sitting in front of a chess board with only a single pawn against his opponent’s full complement of pieces — “Chuckmate,” Musk explained — suggesting that he has outflanked Twitter in the legal chess match. Later that evening, Musk responded to someone who said Twitter’s claim about the scope of spam/bot accounts “seems false” and that therefore the “SEC should strictly look into this” by endorsing the sentiment, tweeting, “Hello???@SECGov.” On July 11, he said that Twitter’s disclosure that it had slightly overcounted daily active users for three years because of a software error was “problematic.”
Then early on July 12, Musk tweeted the crying-laughing emoji in response to a user who had posted a meme showing the billionaire reacting to “owning Twitter” vs. “OWNING Twitter” — the latter in the sense of having pwnd someone.
