$44bn deal: Twitter hires familiar Wachtell to prosecute Musk

Twitter has engaged Wachtell Lipton to prosecute Tesla CEO, Elon Musk for terminating $44bn takeover deal.

Interestingly, the Delaware-based leading litigation practice firm had initially defended Musk in a shareholder lawsuit brought in Delaware by Tesla shareholders.

Twitter hired Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to take a legal action against the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.

Financial Times reports that the San Francisco company is preparing to file its lawsuit with the Delaware Court of Chancery against Musk early this week.

Wachtell Lipton defends companies in lawsuits over breach of fiduciary duty and broken merger agreements in the state. The firm had initially defended Musk in a shareholder lawsuit brought in Delaware by Tesla shareholders who alleged that Musk had improperly bailed out SolarCity, another piece of his empire, when Tesla acquired the clean energy company in 2017.

Elon Musk ended agreed $44 billion deal to buy Twitter citing “material breach of multiple provisions” of the merger agreement in a letter on Friday evening.

According to reports, under the April 25 agreement, Twitter was obligated to provide Musk with the data he requested, in order to “make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on Twitter’s platform,” said the letter, sent by his attorneys to Twitter’s Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde.

Musk called that information necessary to finance and plan the buy-out and “engage in transition planning” for the company, but Twitter “failed or refused” to provide it, the lawyers said. The company either ignored his requests, “rejected them for reasons that appear to be unjustified,” or claimed to comply while giving Musk “incomplete or unusable information,” according to the letter.