Elon Musk and Twitter will go to trial over their $44 billion deal in October

The trial will seek to decide whether the billionaire must complete his $44 billion acquisition of the social media company, a Delaware judge ruled on Tuesday

By Kate Conger

Published: Jul 20, 2022

Twitter has said Musk was searching for a way out of the purchase as the stock market slumped. Image: Jim Watson / AFP

Twitter and Elon Musk will go to trial in October over whether the billionaire must complete his $44 billion acquisition of the social media company, a Delaware judge ruled on Tuesday.

The ruling was the first decision in a lawsuit that Twitter filed this month to force Musk, the world’s richest man, to go through with the blockbuster deal. Musk had agreed to buy Twitter in April, but indicated this month he wanted to terminate the purchase. Twitter had sought to expedite the case by requesting a trial in September, which Musk had countered by asking for a trial in February.

“The longer the merger transaction remains in limbo, the larger a cloud of uncertainty is cast over the company,” Kathaleen St. J. McCormick, the judge overseeing the case in the Delaware Court of Chancery, said in a nearly two-hour hearing.

The ruling was a win for Twitter, which said that an extended timeline would give Musk more time to badger the company and find a way out of the deal. McCormick ruled that the trial will last five days, with the exact date to be based on the schedules of the court and the lawyers in the case.

“We are pleased that the court agreed to expedite this trial,” a Twitter spokesman said.

Alex Spiro, a lawyer representing Musk, said, “We’ll be ready.”

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When Musk agreed to buy Twitter, he said that he would take it private and that the company had plenty of potential. But within weeks, he began arguing that Twitter had stymied his attempts to understand how many of the accounts on its platform were fake and said the company was not disclosing relevant information to him.

Twitter has said Musk was searching for a way out of the purchase as the stock market slumped. The company has said it worked with Musk to give him information about fake accounts.