In an unexpected twist, Twitter was able to deliver its response to Musk before Musk’s own counterclaims became public. A judge ruled Wednesday that Musk’s counterclaim will be made public by Friday.
However, parts of Musk’s counterclaim were included in the Twitter response. These include accusing the company of fraud and “delay tactics” and only providing Musk with “sanitized, incomplete information” in response to his questions about spam accounts and other company metrics. While Twitter has claimed that Musk is making up reasons to walk away from buying the company, Musk’s lawyers say Twitter is the one holding up the deal by “dragging its feet” and providing insufficient data on the billionaire’s demands.
In a response filed Thursday in Delaware Court of Chancery, Twitter called Musk’s reasoning “a story, concocted in an attempt to escape a merger deal that Musk no longer found attractive.”
“Counterclaims are a made-up story for litigation that is contradicted by evidence and common sense,” said Twitter’s response. “Musk invents representations that Twitter never made and then tries to use, selectively, the extensive confidential data that Twitter provided him to conjure up a violation of those alleged representations.”
At the same time, the response said, Musk also accused Twitter of violating their agreement by “dragging” his requests for information.
Representatives for Musk did not immediately return a message for comment Thursday, though Musk spoke briefly on Twitter at Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting Thursday.
He told an audience at Tesla’s factory near Austin, Texas, that Twitter fits the grand vision for his holding company. He said that since he uses Twitter a lot, with more than 100 million followers, he knows what to do with it.
“I understand the product pretty well,” he said. “So I think I have a good sense of where I can direct the engineering team at Twitter to make it fundamentally better,” he said.
