Reckless Musk should pay a heavy price

Elon Musk has good lawyers – the fact he won a defamation case brought against him by a British cave diver who he called “pedo guy” on Twitter is proof of that.

Musk will need those lawyers to be at their best, now that Twitter is suing him for backing out of a $44 billion (€43.8 billion) takeover deal.

Back in April, Musk boasted about making Twitter better and “defeating the spam bots”, only to then complain he needed more information regarding the extent of the problem.

[ Twitter hires US law firm Wachtell to sue Elon Musk for ending €43bn takeover ]

As Bloomberg’s Matt Levine points out, Musk went from saying he wanted to buy Twitter to sort out the bot problem, to saying he wanted to get out of the deal over the bot problem. It’s hard to take this seriously.

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Might a deal yet be done, with Musk eventually negotiating a lower price? Will he pay a fine and settle the matter out of court? Hopefully not.

Takeover agreements are meant to be binding, not something to be casually abandoned. To quote from the Twitter lawsuit, Musk apparently feels “free to change his mind, trash the company, disrupt its operations, destroy stockholder value, and walk away”. That’s not on, and Musk should pay a heavy price.