The social-media platform just launched a sneak attack against the guy it want to buys the company for $44 billion.
What a weird mess of a legal saga this Elon Musk–Twitter suit is turning out to be. It has been less than a month since the social-media company filed a complaint in Delaware Chancery Court trying to force Musk, the world’s richest man, to buy it for $44 billion. Those, of course, were simply the terms of an agreement Musk initiated back in April — before he tried to back out of it three months later by claiming the site is overrun with spambots. Since then, Musk has had a string of bad luck. First, the judge in the case turned out to be Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick, who recently — with obvious parallels to this drama — forced a private-equity company to buy a cake company it no longer wanted. Then Chancellor McCormick sided with Twitter by agreeing to an expedited trial starting October 17 (Musk wanted the trial to kick off next year) and giving Twitter’s team extra time to suggest redactions to a legal response filed late last week by Musk’s team, essentially laying out their side of the case. (The document from Musk’s side is expected to be made public at some point on Friday.)
The withholding by the court of the Musk response for a few extra days has become the center of a new round of legal drama in the case. The extra response time sounds small, and it is, but — bear with me — it is also meaningful. Lawyers for Twitter evidently used that extra time to plot a kind of legal sneak attack on Musk and filed a preemptive response to his not-yet-public response. Twitter’s new response is public, as of Thursday night. This matters not for any legal reasons — the judge already knows that Musk has filed in his response, and anyway, McCormick is unlikely to be swayed by outside opinion. It matters because of optics. Musk has spent much of his life trying to draw attention to himself, and Twitter is an important large public company that is, in a very real way, reliant on the opinions of the general public. Defining this case in the public imagination is key for both parties.
