Twitter shareholders approve of Musk takeover
3 Min Read
Twitter agrees to Elon Musk's bid to buy the company after he wanted to pull out from the agreement.
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Elon Musk's Twitter profile is seen on a smartphone placed on printed Twitter logos in this picture illustration taken April 28, 2022 (Reuters)
Twitter shareholders approved on Tuesday during a special meeting eccentric billionaire Elon Musk's $44 billion bid to acquire the social media giant after a lot of disputes from both sides about the sale.
"Based on the preliminary count. stockholders have approved both proposals," Twitter General Counsel Sean Edgett said during the meeting after the shareholders voted on the deal.
The shareholders approved a proposal adopting Musk's agreement and plan of merger and a second proposal approving a non-binding advisory basis for the compensation that Twitter's named executive officers would get due to the merger, Edgett explained.
Whether or not the merger takes place is in the hands of the court examining the dispute between the billionaire and the social media giant after the former said that he wanted to pull out from the deal he signed on acquiring Twitter for $44 billion.
Musk claimed that he wanted to pull out from the deal after raising claims of fraud, alleging that the firm had been misleading regarding key aspects of its business, in particular the number of active and spam or bot accounts.
Twitter has been claiming that less than 5% of its user base is comprised of bots.
Meanwhile, Twitter has slammed Musk's attempts at walking away from the deal even if the bot count is found to be wrong due to this not being a clause in the buyout offer the billionaire had made.
The tech giant has also accused Musk of making up the story to try and escape a merger deal that he was no longer interested in.
Twitter sued Musk for abandoning the deal, but the latter countersued.
"Musk's counterclaims, based as they are on distortion, misrepresentation, and outright deception, change nothing," Twitter said in a court filing.
The world's wealthiest man had in late April made advances to buy Twitter, and the latter agreed to sell out after a markup, only to later decide to retract his decision.
Records made public a few week ago showed that the former chief of Twitter was served with a legal order demanding that he give Musk any communications on documents linked to the takeover deal, in addition to information relating to false or spam accounts or how Twitter calculates how many active users it has.
Musk's legal team had warned a month ahead of the withdrawal that he could walk away from the negotiations table over acquiring Twitter if the big tech firm continues dismissing his demands to be more explicit about the number of fake and spam accounts on the platform. The news of the entrepreneur potentially dropping the deal caused Twitter shares to dip by 5%.
The deal, however, does have a clause obliging the party breaking the agreement - if it were to fall apart - to pay a termination fee of $1 billion.
Musk said earlier this month that if Twitter was able to provide its method of sampling 100 accounts and how it verified that the accounts are real, the $44 billion deal should proceed in accordance with its original terms.
Depending on who wins the case, either Musk or Twitter will be entitled to receiving a breakup fee if the other party is found responsible for the failed agreement.
