Twitter says Musk is ‘conjuring’ excuse to escape takeover deal

theguardian.com:

Twitter has rejected Elon Musk’s claims in court that he had legitimate reasons to back out of a $44bn deal to purchase the social media platform, marking the latest development in a dramatic legal showdown.

In a filing made public on Thursday, Twitter called Musk’s arguments for abandoning the deal “a story, imagined in an effort to escape a merger agreement that Musk no longer found attractive once the stock market and along with it, his massive personal wealth, declined in value”.

Twitter sued Musk last month to force him to complete the deal, and the company’s filing on Thursday comes in response to Musk’s own counter lawsuit, which he filed under seal last week and which is due to be made public on Friday.

The current standoff began after Musk claimed Twitter was not forthcoming about the problem with spam bots on the platform, citing it as his reason for abandoning the deal. The social media firm had claimed spam accounts made up less than 5% of more than 200 million users but Musk insisted that the number was higher and accused Twitter of withholding information on the problem. Twitter, meanwhile, has accused Musk of “conjuring” the issue to escape the deal without penalty.

“The counterclaims are a made-for-litigation tale that is contradicted by the evidence and common sense,” Twitter’s response says, according to legal documents obtained by Reuters. “Musk invents representations Twitter never made and then tries to wield, selectively, the extensive confidential data Twitter provided him to conjure a breach of those purported representations.”

At the same time, the response says, Musk also accused Twitter of breaching their agreement by “stonewalling” his information requests. Twitter denies this and says information