Tag: lawyer’s
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Lawyers see crypto regulation coming in 2023 because industry needs to rebuild trust by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch
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Elon Musk’s lawyers ask judge to call off Twitter trial
Lawyers for Elon Musk have officially asked to cancel the upcoming trial with Twitter, as the two sides attempt to negotiate a deal. In a new court filing, Musk’s lawyers asked the judge to call off the trial, which is currently scheduled to begin October 17th.
Earlier this week, Musk’s camp had proposed proceeding with the original deal, to buy Twitter at $54.20 a share, contingent on Musk’s financing going through and the adjournment of the trial. Twitter responded that it was also intent on closing the deal.
While that certainly seemed to put the two sides a lot closer to an agreement, it wasn’t an immediate end to the litigation. The New York Times has since reported that Twitter does not want to call off the trial until a deal is finalized and the company’s shareholders have been paid. There are likely other sticking points, too. Bloomberg reported Tuesday that “Musk is also seeking to reserve his rights to file a fraud suit over his claims the platform’s executives misled him and other investors about the number of spam and robot accounts.”
In their latest filing, Musk’s lawyers confirm the disagreement over the trial, writing that Twitter is now endangering the deal. “Twitter will not take yes for an answer,” Musk’s lawyers write. “Astonishingly, they have insisted on proceeding with this litigation, recklessly putting the deal at risk and gambling with their stockholders’ interests. Instead of allowing the parties to turn their focus to securing the Debt Financing necessary to consummate the transaction and preparing for a transition of the business, the parties will instead remain distracted by completing discovery and an unnecessary trial.”
Notably, the filing comes on the same day Musk was scheduled to be deposed in the case. The deposition was delayed — for the second time. Musk’s lawyers say they expect the deal could close “on or around October 28.”
Update 6 PM ET: The judge in the case has stayed the trial until October 28th, the date Musk’s lawyers said they expected to close. “If the transaction does not close by 5 p.m. on October 28, 2022, the parties are instructed to contact me by email that evening to obtain November 2022 trial dates,” Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick wrote.
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Twitter’s lawyers say Elon Musk wanted out of the deal because of ‘World War 3,’ not bots
The whistleblower complaint from Twitter’s former head of security is already complicating the company’s legal battle with Elon Musk. Lawyers representing Musk and Twitter met in court Tuesday for a hearing that will determine whether the claims made by Pieter “Mudge” Zatko can be added to Elon Musk’s legal case to get out of his $44 billion commitment to buy Twitter.
Notably, the hearing was one of the first times any Twitter representative has publicly addressed Zatko’s complaint. In the two weeks since Zatko went public, Twitter has largely stayed silent on the substance of the claims.
During the hearing, Twitter’s lawyers portrayed Zatko as a disgruntled employee, saying that he had a “huge ax to grind” with the company and that he “was not in charge of spam at Twitter.” They accused him of “structuring his whistleblower complaint, to tie it to the merger agreement.” (Zatko’s lawyers previously said he didn’t go public in order to “benefit Musk.”) Notably, Twitter’s lawyers didn’t address claims that the company’s lax security practices may have harmed national security or that CEO Parag Agrawal told Zatko to lie to the company board.
Twitter’s lawyers did suggest that Musk was looking for reasons to kill the deal before Zatko’s complaint was public. At one point, Twitter’s lawyer quoted from a May 3rd text message Musk sent to his banker at Morgan Stanley:
“Let’s slow down just a few days … it won’t make sense to buy Twitter if we’re headed into World War 3,” Twitter’s lawyer read aloud, quoting Musk. “This is why Mr. Musk didn’t want to buy Twitter, this stuff about the bots, mDAU [monetizable daily active users] and Zatko is all pretext.”
On the other side, Musk’s lawyers touted Zatko’s credentials as a “decorated” executive who had once been offered a position as a US government official. They said Musk had “nothing to do with” Zatko’s whistleblower complaint and that Twitter had purposely hidden damaging information. Whether it will be enough to sway the judge in the case though, is unclear. In one exchange the judge pointedly remarked on Musk’s decision to waive due diligence before agreeing to the acquisition.
“Why didn’t we discover this in diligence,” Musk’s lawyer said, referencing Zatko’s whistleblower complaint. “They hid it, that’s why.” “We’ll never know, right,” the judge responded. “Because the diligence didn’t happen.”
Musk’s lawyers, pushing for the October trial to be delayed, closed out the more than three-hour long hearing by arguing that “it’s not us causing this chaos or this delay.”
“Nobody at Twitter is having all hands on meetings today over the poop emoji from two months ago,” he said, in an apparent — and unprompted — reference to a May 16th tweet from Musk directed at Agrawal. “The reason that they’re having all-hands-on meetings today at Twitter is because a senior decorated executive said that the company was committing fraud. That’s our fault? That’s our chaos? That’s their chaos.”