The war is not over yet, however, Twitter has won the first legal "battle" with Elon Musk, to force the latter to complete the company's $44 billion purchase as soon as possible. The court decided that the trial will take place in October.
Legal experts said the ruling was good news for Twitter, which had sought a speedy process to resolve the dispute. The court accepted the company's argument that a delay would cause serious damage to the business.
A lawyer representing Twitter in the virtual hearing accused Musk of "attempted sabotage." "He's doing everything he can to destroy Twitter," said attorney William Savitt.
Musk's lawyer, Andrew Rossman, said the allegation that Musk was trying to hurt the business was "nonsense." "He has no interest in hurting the company," Rossman said, noting that the Tesla boss is Twitter's second-largest shareholder.
On July 8, Elon Musk said he was pulling out of the deal for three general reasons: Twitter had breached the deal by failing to provide enough information about spam accounts on the platform; that he had misrepresented the number of spam accounts; and that he had breached the agreement by not consulting him when he recently laid off employees.
On the other hand, Twitter argues that the world's richest man has no evidence that spam accounts are more than 5% of daily active accounts and that the firing of employees was part of the normal course of business.
Experts say that both sides should resolve the dispute to save time and energy, otherwise they could be damaged like Twitter like Elon Musk. The dispute can damage the reputation of the parties and cause the value of the companies' shares to decrease.
