Elon Musk, Twitter divorce can cost a billion. But the offer was a gamble- Corriere.it

The first two big challenges – transforming the auto industry by pushing it towards electric and conquering space as a private individual – he fought (and won) in the world he loves: industry. The third will have to play away, in a field unknown to him: that of a complex legal dispute and for a long time, before the court of Delaware, the state in which Twitter is registered (for tax reasons).
As he had long ago threatened to do, Elon Musk has decided not to buy the San Francisco social network anymore. Except that the accusation against Twitter of having hidden the reality of a number of bots (fake accounts, without a real user) higher than 5% reported in the company documents, which seemed aimed at obtaining a substantial reduction in the price agreed in April, before the collapse of the stock exchanges and, above all, of technological stocks (54.20 dollars per share, with a total outlay of 44 billion), now it seems like a real backtrack: for some time without a rudder, TwitterIn addition to continuing to lose ground on the stock market, it is losing some of its best brains as competitors try to steal advertising contracts from it.

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The options of the judges

Used to talk in a light-hearted way about his business and to insolent the stock exchange authorities with his tweets that influence the markets often providing publicly sensitive information before notifying it, according to the rulesto the control bodies, this time Musk moved in a different way: backtracking he did not announce it on social media but communicated it to the Sec, the supervisors of the Stock Exchange, with an 8-page memoir of his lawyers. And yesterday, Saturday 9 July, on the stage of the Allen & Co Sun Valley Conference, she did not want to talk about the case. The argument used to take back the buy offer (too many fake accounts) is considered weak by experts. The cancellation of business of this magnitude is granted by the judges only when the transaction is substantially different how it was presented. If the bots are in the end, instead of 5, 10 or 15% of the 330 million accounts, as experts speculate, the judges will hardly allow Elon to back down. It would be different if there were many more bogus accounts, even half. But this would be an earthquake for the entire world of social networks: the suspicion of enormously inflated user numbers would affect everyone, from Facebook to YouTube via Snapchat.

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The response of the markets

Musk, who had agreed to pay a billion dollar penalty in the event of a withdrawal from the deal, is in trouble, but much worse is Twitter which, with its president Bret Taylor, continues to argue that Tesla’s founder can’t back down and hopes the Delaware court will oblige him to go all the way: Friday 8 July, after the announcement of the withdrawal of the purchase proposal, the headline of the social network accused a decline of 5% and in the post market it lost almost as much, going down to $ 35. And that’s not all because many analysts believe that on Monday 11 July, when the markets reopen, the value of Twitter could drop as much as 25 dollars.

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What happens now

How will it end? Difficult to make predictions because the Delaware laws allow judges to beat various roads, while Musk, who in his time had said thatand buying Twitter was a social and political commitment to himwithout profit targets, he is used to amaze. He could get out of the deal without damage or he might have to pay the $ 1 billion penalty. But the judge could also force him to buy the company anyway (there are precedents) even if, generally, the Delaware court tries to resolve these disputes with out-of-court financial agreements between the parties. For now Elon he has to deal mainly with domestic issues: two more children have sprung up, twins had by an employee of one of his companies, Neuralink. He uses Twitter again as a lifesaver: he publishes a post with the graph of the US population decline. In short: more children (he has reached 9) to help the homeland …

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