Twitter and Elon Musk will appear in court in October over whether the billionaire should complete its $44 billion acquisition of the social media company, a Delaware judge ruled Tuesday.
The ruling was the first decision in a lawsuit that Twitter filed this month to force Mr Musk, the world’s richest man, to go through with the blockbuster deal. Mr. Musk had agreed to the purchase of Twitter in April, but said this month he wanted to end the purchase. Twitter had tried to expedite the matter by filing for a trial in September, which Mr. Musk had countered by requesting a trial in February.
In a nearly two-hour hearing on Tuesday, Kathaleen St. J. McCormick, the judge overseeing the case in the Delaware Court of Chancery, ruled that a trial would take place in October.
“The longer the merger transaction remains in limbo, the greater a cloud of uncertainty is thrown over the company,” she said.
The ruling was a win for Twitter, which said a longer timeline would give Mr. Musk more time to bully the company and find a way out of the deal. Ms. McCormick ruled that the trial will last five days, with the exact date to be determined based on the agenda of the court and the lawyers in the case.
“We are delighted that the court agrees to expedite this process,” said a Twitter spokesperson.
Alex Spiro, an attorney representing Mr. Musk, said, “We’ll be ready.”
When Mr. Musk agreed to buy Twitter, he had said he would take it private and the company had a lot of potential. But within weeks, he began claiming that Twitter had thwarted his efforts to understand how many of the accounts on his platform were fake, saying the company was not disclosing any relevant information to him.
Twitter has said that Mr. Musk was looking for a way out of the purchase when the stock market collapsed. The company has said it has worked with Mr. Musk to provide him with information about fake accounts.
During Tuesday’s hearing, Twitter insisted that the lawsuit be resolved as soon as possible. Bill Savitt, a Twitter attorney, said the “continued uncertainty” about the deal “damages Twitter, every hour of every day” and called for a lawsuit in September. Delay would allow Mr Musk to run out of funding for the deal, Mr Savitt said.
Musk’s attorneys said the billionaire needed more time to analyze extraordinary amounts of data to determine whether Twitter had accurately counted the number of inauthentic accounts on its platform.
Twitter tried to “disguise” its bone figures, Andy Rossman, a lawyer for Mr. Musk, said “for as long as it took to get this deal through.”
