A US judge accepted Twitter’s argument that delaying the trial would harm the company, saying that delay threatens irreparable harm.
Twitter’s lawsuit against Elon Musk over his bid to pull out of a $44 billion acquisition will be heard in October, a US court has ruled.
The verdict is a win for Twitter, as the company pushed for an earlier start date than Tesla’s CEO. Twitter wanted the trial to begin in September, while Musk pushed for February. The edge reports.
Twitter’s lawyer claimed this could be part of Musk’s ploy to “run off the clock,” according to CNBCleaving less time for appeals before his debt obligations for the deal expire.
Musk’s lawyer, meanwhile, claimed that the timetable proposed by Twitter was too aggressive for the legal team to review the necessary data.
Judge Kathaleen McCormick accepted Twitter’s argument that delaying the trial would harm the company, saying that “delay threatens irreparable harm.” the guard reports.
The legal action is the latest in a long back and forth since Musk first announced his intention to buy Twitter in April. Earlier this month, Musk shared his intention to pull out of the $44 billion deal after claiming he hadn’t received enough information about fake accounts on the platform.
The Tesla boss had announced in May that he was putting the deal “temporarily on hold” until he could see calculations confirming Twitter’s claim that spam and fake accounts represent less than 5 pc of the site’s users.
According to documents published on July 8, Musk claims Twitter ignored his requests for this information, turned them down for reasons that “seem unjustified” and provided “incomplete or useless” information.
Twitter fired back with his lawsuit a few days later. The company claimed Musk is refusing to stick to the deal because it “no longer serves his personal interests.”
Twitter said the lawsuit followed “a long list of material contractual violations by Musk that have put a damper on Twitter and his company.”
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