Elon Musk. Image: Daniel Oberhaus (CC by 2.0)
A US judge accepted Twitter’s argument that a delay to the trial would cause damage to the company and said ‘delay threatens irreparable harm’.
Twitter’s lawsuit against Elon Musk over his attempt to back out of a $44bn takeover will be heard in October, a US court has ruled.
The verdict is a win for Twitter as the company pushed for an earlier start date to the trail than the Tesla CEO. Twitter wanted the trial to begin in September, while Musk was pushing for February, The Verge reports.
Twitter’s lawyer alleged that this could be part of a ploy by Musk to “run out the clock”, according to CNBC, leaving less time for appeals before his debt commitments for the deal expire.
Musk’s lawyer, meanwhile, claimed the timeframe proposed by Twitter was too aggressive for the legal team to review the necessary data.
Judge Kathaleen McCormick accepted Twitter’s argument that a delay to the trial would cause damage to the company and said “delay threatens irreparable harm”, The Guardian reports.
The legal action is the latest in a long line of back and forths since Musk first announced his intention to buy Twitter in April. Earlier this month, Musk shared his intent to withdraw from the $44bn deal, after claiming he didn’t receive enough information about fake accounts on the platform.
The Tesla boss had announced in May that he was putting the deal “temporarily on hold” until he could see calculations that confirm Twitter’s claim that spam and fake accounts represent less than 5pc of users on the site.
According to filings published on 8 July, Musk claims that Twitter ignored his requests for this information, rejected them for reasons that “appear to be unjustified” and gave “incomplete or unusable” information.
Twitter fired back with its lawsuit a few days later. The company claimed that Musk is refusing to keep his end of the deal because it “no longer serves his personal interests”.
Twitter said the lawsuit followed “a long list of material contractual breaches by Musk that have cast a pall over Twitter and its business”.
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