A Delaware judge has ruled that the requested trial between Twitter and Elon Musk will commence in October.
Musk has pulled out of his proposed $44B merger of Twitter. Twitter immediately sued. The decision by the Delaware judge is against Musk's wishes for a delay in the legal proceedings but not quite as soon as the September date Twitter had asked for.
Shares of Twitter were trading around $39.70 ahead of the announcement. They have increased to a new high of $40.50 before backing off to $39.82 currently in active and volatile trading.
The trial will be 5-days which is longer than the 4-days requested by Twitter but shorter than the extensive request my Musk.
The arguments offered a hint at what both parties will say at trial and a hint about how the judge feels about them.
Twitter lawyers said:
"Nothing in the merger agreement is contingent in any way at all on bots, false accounts or anything [of the like]. It isn't what the merger agreement is about, so it isn't what this case will be about." ...
"Twitter never made any representation about [5% of accounts being bots on Twitter]. The representation that Musk asserts is made up from whole cloth."...
"The disclosures actually say: there are false or spam accounts on the platform, and there is a process for identifying them, and that process says that there are ~5% of spam accounts, and that process may be flawed, and that figure may be flawed."
They said Musk can't prove that the actual claim made by Twitter re: bots is false or misleading, due to its clear caveats and nuance. They said Twitter never made the claim that Musk says they did, and the disclosure they did make is accurate.
Musk's team asked for more time because it wanted to analyze bot data but this decision is a hint that the judge won't make it about bots.
