Twitter Obliterates Elon Musk's Excuses for Trying to Kill $44 Billion Deal in Blistering Court Filing https://t.co/CabnzdjyW9 pic.twitter.com/VisaCLMx1s
— Gizmodo (@Gizmodo) August 5, 2022
“The Counterclaims are a made-for-litigation tale that is contradicted by the evidence and common sense,” Twitter said in the new court filing. The company called his complaints “factually inaccurate, legally insufficient, and commercially irrelevant.”
“Musk invents representations Twitter never made and then tries to wield, selectively, the extensive confidential data Twitter provided him to conjure a breach of those purported representations. Yet Musk simultaneously and incoherently asserts that Twitter breached the merger agreement by stonewalling his information requests,” the social media company continued.
The legal beatdown continued from there, eviscerating Musk’s claims about the number of bots on Twitter and the number of active users on the platform—the two big issues the billionaire takes with the deal.
Whatever excuses Musk can come up with, he signed an agreement to buy the company at a given price and waived any due diligence. Twitter could have thousands of bodies buried underneath its headquarters in San Francisco and that still wouldn’t change the fact that Musk decided to only have substantive questions after he signed on the dotted line. He said he’d buy Twitter, as-is and without refunds.
The following screenshots are directly from Twitter’s court filing on Thursday, sometimes including Musk’s original claims along with Twitter’s response. There are also annotations made by Gizmodo to highlight the truly amusing elements, such as the fact that Musk is now complaining about the number of active users on the site, but failed to attend a meeting about that very topic. Or that Musk’s way of calculating bots on the platform identified his Twitter account as a likely bot.
Remember the future we were all going to be living in by now, when Musk owned Twitter and Trump's account was reinstated and Twitter was ruined because Musk had crazy ideas about how it should be operated and we all lamented, early, the Twitter that was?
As I've said before, that's the problem with the future: nobody lives there. I'm even old enough to remember when Dems didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of maintaining, much less gaining complete, control of Congress in November, 2022. And when Trump's endorsement meant the forces of darkness were going to take over the world, and overturning Roe meant no right thinking person in America would ever allow abortions ever!
All by way of saying: where's the Musk-owning-Twitter future we were promised? Not a comment on how the case is proceeding, because that's entirely up to the judge (or jury, if jury trial has been requested. I have no idea.). But there was a recent article about Tesla owners tired of justifying their cars in the face of Musk's public asshole presentations. It may be going well, or not, in court for Musk.
It's not going well in the court of public opinion. I call if the Trumpification factor. And I continue to note how the courts are chewing it up and spitting it out. I would further point out that for all Trump's belligerence and supposed success in defeating civil litigants with sheer tenacity, he's never won against a government opponent. He and his father lost the case over fair housing back in the day, a government case. And Trump has never faced criminal charges. You can't force your opponent to give up and go away when that opponent is the government, and Trump has two governments after him in criminal investigations.
Musk was following in Trump's wake: money and braggadocio and trolling on Twitter, even trolling Twitter. He thought that made him invisible and bulletproof. Odds are he's going to find out it didn't.
Of course, that depends on who is in “the public.”
Any wonder Tesla owners are embarrassed? And when is Musk going to Mars? After he buys Twitter?"I became a Marine to protect your base on Mars," is an audience question that was just asked, if you're wondering how the Tesla annual shareholder meeting is going
— Michael Ballaban (@Ballaban) August 4, 2022
The media, corporate, allegedly public, social-disease are all operating on what Marilynne Robinson identified as intellectual lassitude and the slacker cynicism that is another name for it. Twitter is a medium made for intellectual lassitude.
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