Elon Musk Pulls Out of Twitter Deal, Faces Lawsuit

CLAY: Elon Musk announced that he is now no longer going to buy Twitter for $44 billion, $54.20 a share. Immediately, Twitter said they continue to believe that this deal is in effect and that they will be suing in Delaware, which is where many of the largest corporations are located, and that they will be seeking — as a part of that lawsuit — to enforce the agreement for Elon Musk to buy this company for $54.20 a share.

Now, a bunch of different details here that I think are significant in terms of the larger media ecosystem as we come up on the midterms and who owns the company. Certainly, we have talked a great deal about this on the program. Twitter stock, as we speak, down $3 a share — nearly 10% — $20 below the purchase price that Elon Musk had said he was going to be buying the company for.

My prediction, Buck, is that this is gonna deal a long-form sort of litigation, major battle. There will be top lawyers who are making thousands and thousands of dollars an hour arrayed on both sides. And I feel as if Elon Musk still may purchase Twitter, and he’s trying to get a better deal because since this agreement occurred back in April, the bottom has fallen out of the stock market and every stock is down a lot.

BUCK: Well, usually you’d see a situation like this and assume the cost of litigation would be so high that clearly it can’t be a strategy that the person would employ if they still wanted to buy the company. But when you are the richest man on the planet, you know, it turns out —

CLAY: (laughing) You can afford a few lawyers.

BUCK: — yeah — your decision to have this go to the lawyers for a while is not necessarily gonna change much of anything for you. I don’t know… I don’t think that he’s going to end up buying Twitter, which is disappointing, and I do think that there will be likely a backlash — I think you and I agree on this one — where Twitter will, once it’s in the clear and they know that Elon will not — ’cause what I’ve always wanted to see. I’ve said this all along ’cause I think it would be so interesting. I mean, imagine if somebody came along and bought the New York Times.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: And they decided, “I’m going to release all of the internal communications about news stories, all the biased editorial stuff going on — everything — so that people can just crowdsource it,” right? Imagine if someone did that. That is, in a sense, what would be possible here. I don’t think he would put it all out there, but Elon certainly could have looked into what Twitter was doing to suppress conservatives all along. That’s, I think, where we’re gonna be missing out here, because what Twitter has done up to this point in order to skew the conversation… I know Twitter may have delivered elections, in a sense, to Democrats, if you really willing to do the analysis on it.

CLAY: Oh, I think certainly.

BUCK: I think Twitter has been — and you’d say, “Oh, well, not that many people are on it.” Yeah, but it’s such a feeder for the entire news ecosystem and the ability… Even just to take the Asheville Mask Incident of 2022 for a second, 80% of people know that people in Asheville with the N95s on walking around outside are crazy. Not the sense you got from Twitter, though. Twitter it’s all, “Oh, it’s very normal.” It’s not normal at all. These people are nuts.

CLAY: Yeah, and what Elon is saying, by the way, as justification for why he is not purchasing the company is he’s saying that the data stream — the fire hose of data — that Twitter provided for him shows that way more of the accounts on Twitter are bots than Twitter has claimed. Twitter claims that around 5% of the accounts on the site are bots. Elon Musk is arguing that it’s far more than that.

And if that is in fact true, remember, only about 20% of the American population is on Twitter anyway. One in five of you theoretically out there listening and probably a lot of you, super frustrated when Trump got kicked off of Twitter may have said, “Hey, I’m going to Gettr, I’m going to TRUTH Social,” or I think a lot of people increasingly are just saying, “I don’t need social media in my life.”

I hear from a lot of people saying that whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, the amount of time suck that that can involve. And I’m not on there, Buck, for really super personal things, right? I don’t know what’s going on with my high school friends or college friends on Facebook. I don’t spend any time there. But if this were true, then only 20% of people — according to Twitter’s own numbers — are on Twitter.

And only one in every 50 people ever bothers to actually send a tweet with their own opinion on it. If those numbers are exaggerated, Twitter is even less influential in terms of raw numbers than it would argue that it is. So that’s why I think the ultimate outcome here is going to be that Elon Musk decides to buy Twitter for a lower price and there’s an acknowledgment that some of the representations by Twitter were not otherwise accurate. Because I don’t think the court is going to order specific performance here. There are damaging, clearly, but the idea that you would order someone, “Hey, you have to buy this company,” seems like a difficult corporate perspective for any Delaware court to adopt.

BUCK: Yes, and I think that this will be interesting for how it affects TRUTH Social and Gettr and Parler and some of the other platforms out there, too, that are already devoted to free speech principles. One of the things that you see on the internet is there’s usually a winner and then maybe space for one beyond that, maybe two.

CLAY: The Coke-Pepsi effect, basically.

BUCK: That’s kind of it, usually. So we’ll see what’s happening on these various platforms. You know, I would love to see Elon buy it. I think there’s on me other things. You know, Clay, you know some people. Tell Elon, “Elon, there’s some other acquisitions he should consider making that would be very helpful for the purposes of free speech and more than that, even, showing the machinery of Democrat speech suppression that has been underway.”