guess now we know why he bought twitter
Elon Musk Loses an Important Battle
The billionaire is set to acquire Twitter , its primary communications network for which
he made a $44 billion bid on April 14.
This offer, at a price of $54.20 per Twitter share, was accepted by the board of directors of the social network.
Both parties are now working out the details of the transaction. It is not completely certain that the operation will be finalized. Questions about financing, mainly through a leveraged buyout, have been raised.
In the meantime, Musk, who has become one the biggest influencers on Twitter with more than 86.6 million followers, must now also deal with the consequences of his activity on the social network.
A New York judge has just rejected his request to ditch a settlement reached in September 2018 with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
That agreement was supposed to end an investigation into a tweet that caused the price of Tesla shares to fall, a company of which he is the chief executive officer.
According to this agreement, Musk was fined $20 million, with an additional $20 million in financial penalties for Tesla.
The serial entrepreneur also had to give up his title as Tesla's chairman, and a lawyer for the high-end electric vehicle manufacturer had to pre-approve his stock-related Tesla tweets before they were published.
That position was quickly dubbed the "Twitter sitter" by the media, a moniker which has stuck.
After accepting these terms, the billionaire recently escalated hostilities with the SEC, which he accuses of harassment and violating his free speech rights.
It should be noted that it is in the name of the principles of free speech that Musk has said he wants to acquire Twitter.
"As Musk states, '[e]conomic duress is an equitable doctrine which comes into play upon the doing of a wrongful act which is sufficiently coercive to cause a reasonably prudent person faced with no reasonable alternative to succumb to the perpetrator's pressure,'" Judge Lewis Liman
wrote in his ruling on April 27.
"But Musk's argument that the SEC acted wrongfully amounts to one sentence: 'In 2018, the SEC took advantage of the position in which it put Mr. Musk'."
"That conclusory assertion is insufficient to sustain a finding of economic duress," Liman said.
And then added: "Musk was not ****** to enter into the consent decree; rather, "for [his] own strategic purposes, [Musk], with the advice and assistance of counsel, entered into these agreements voluntarily, in order to secure the benefits thereof, including finality."
The judge insisted that "Musk cannot now seek to retract the agreement he knowingly and willingly entered by simply bemoaning that he felt like he had to agree to it at the time but now — once the specter of the litigation is a distant memory and his company has become, in his estimation, all but invincible —wishes that he had not."