(Reuters) – Elon Musk announced on Friday that he was terminating the agreement to buy Twitter for 44 billion dollars (43 billion euros) and accused the social network of having violated its contractual obligations by providing in particular incorrect or incomplete data on the number of fake accounts.
The title Twitter, which had lost 4.85% in session on Wall Street after an article from the Washington Post indicating that the takeover project was threatened, lost 7% in after-market transactions.
Twitter board chairman Bret Taylor said the board plans to take legal action to enforce the agreement.
“Twitter’s Board of Directors is committed to entering into the Agreement at the price and on the terms agreed to with Mr. Musk,” he wrote.
Lawyers for the Tesla boss said in a filing that Twitter failed to respond to numerous requests for information about spam accounts and fake accounts, fundamental data for evaluating the company’s performance.
“Twitter violates several provisions of the agreement and appears to have made false and misleading statements upon which Mr. Musk relied in entering into the merger agreement,” the document said.
Under the terms of the deal, the billionaire will have to pay a $1 billion severance fee if he doesn’t close the deal.
Elon Musk had threatened to terminate the takeover deal unless Twitter proved that spam and bot accounts accounted for less than 5% of users who see advertising on its platform.
Last month, Twitter granted Elon Musk access to its “firehose”, a repository of raw data on hundreds of millions of daily tweets.
According to the billionaire, the company provided incomplete or unusable data, and it appeared that it had counted suspended accounts in its user total which it therefore knew were false.
This decision risks leading to a long legal tussle between Elon Musk and the San Francisco-based company.
(Chavi Mehta in Bangalore, French version Tangi Salaün and Camille Raynaud)
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