“It would’ve been crazy to go forward with trial in a case that was moot,” he says. Still, staying the trial was the right move by the judge, observes Larry Hamermesh, professor at Delaware Law School. Twitter’s lawyers called Musk’s proposal an “invitation to further mischief and delay.” A corporate representative for one of the lending banks testified on the same day that Musk agreed to move forward with the purchase that he hasn’t communicated his intent to close the transaction, let alone on any particular timeline, according to court filings. It stressed that Musk refused to commit to a closing date and that financing for the deal remained suspect. In convincing McCormick to grant the trial stay, he might have blocked himself from further advancing the claim, Fleming says.Ĭonsidering Musk has gone back on his word before, Twitter opposed his motion to stay the trial. The crux of Musk’s lawsuit against Twitter is that the company made false and misleading statements about its bot and spam accounts. “If there is more litigation, judicial estoppel eliminates a number of arguments he otherwise might’ve made because he’s locked into the statements in his letter.” “He made quite a few representations in his letter seeking a stay about the status of what he intends to do with the merger agreement, and the judge relied on them when she granted his request to stay the upcoming trial,” says Joel Fleming, a securities and M&A lawyer at Block & Leviton. (At the same time, the mogul is under federal investigation for conduct related to his acquisition of Twitter, per a court filing unsealed on Thursday.) The confirmation from Musk that the deal is on might box him in, cutting off any wiggle room he may have had to walk away from the purchase. “I can’t say ‘I’m just kidding.’ Once a judicial officer relies on me to rule, that’s that.” “Judicial estoppel is the idea that if I stand up in court and make a statement, and then court then relies on it in making a ruling, I’m stuck with that statement,” explains Greg Varallo, a partner at law firm Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann. Musk’s $250.2 billion fortune is the world’s largest, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, but his wealth has fallen around $20 billion this year as Tesla shares declined.Elon Musk Mocks 'Barbie' as Hit Movie Gets Conservative Backlash He now owns 14.84% of Tesla, leaving him still by far the largest stakeholder. The disposals started in November after he polled Twitter users on whether he should trim his stake in the platform, kicking off the roller-coaster ride that’s stunned even the most seasoned Musk watchers. Musk, 51, has now sold around $32 billion worth of stock in Tesla over the past 10 months. Legal experts have debated whether the conflict over spam bots is enough to allow Musk to walk away from the deal. The Twitter deal included a provision that if it fell apart, the party breaking the agreement would pay a termination fee of $1 billion, under certain circumstances. At the weekend, Musk tweeted that if Twitter provided its method of sampling accounts to determine the number of bots and how they are confirmed to be real, “the deal should proceed on original terms.”
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