A judge in the US state of Delaware has set a date for the court showdown between Elon Musk and Twitter sometime in October, stating that further delay “threatens irreparable harm” to the company, which is seeking to force the billionaire to complete a $44 billion takeover.
Musk’s legal team sought to postpone the hearings until February next year, while Twitter requested a trial as early as September.
The social media company’s representative accused the billionaire of “attempted sabotage” and “doing his best to run Twitter down.” Twitter lawyer William Savitt argued that “the continued uncertainty caused by Musk’s purported termination inflicts harm on Twitter every day, every hour of every day.”
“The longer the delay, the greater the risk,” the head judge of Delaware’s Court of Chancery, Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick, agreed in a ruling on Tuesday. The judge left it to the parties to agree on the exact date of the trial, unless they reach a settlement by then.
Twitter filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk last week in an effort to force him to honor his pledge to buy the company for $44 billion or $54.20 per share. The world’s richest man called off the deal, accusing the company of “material breach of multiple provisions” regarding the issue of fake or bot accounts on the platform. Musk’s team did not agree with Twitter’s estimate of the number of these types of accounts, which put it at just 5% of users, saying the company made “misleading representations.”
The social media giant in turn accused the billionaire of negotiating in bad faith. “Having mounted a public spectacle to put Twitter in play, and having proposed and then signed a seller-friendly merger agreement, Musk apparently believes that he… is free to change his mind, trash the company, disrupt its operations, destroy stockholder value, and walk away,” the lawsuit states.