According to Judge Kathleen McCormick, the trial will last five days
The lawsuit filed by Twitter Inc in an attempt to force Ilon Musk to honor its commitment to buy the platform for $44 billion will go to trial in October, a Delaware judge ruled today, adopting a timeline closer to what the company had proposed.
Twitter and Musk had proposed different trial dates, with the billionaire businessman asking for the trial to begin in February 2023.
According to the judge Kathleen McCormick, the trial will last five days. The judge ruled that both sides are able to handle the expedited trial and Twitter, as a publicly traded company, is entitled to have any clouds that threaten it lifted quickly.
“The reality is that the delay (of litigation) is causing irreparable harm to the sellers,” she said, referring to Twitter shares.
Musk was asking for the trial to be held in February and last two weeks, while Twitter was asking for a four-day trial at the end of September.
Twitter shares were up 3.6% in early afternoon trading at $39.81.
The platform claims Musk breached the buyout agreement and is asking a judge to order him to complete it at the agreed price of $54.20 per share. Twitter’s attorney, Mr William Savitt, argued during today’s proceedings that the number of fake and “robot” accounts on the platform had nothing to do with Musk’s buyout deal. He claimed that the businessman made this excuse because he was “looking for a way out of a deal that had no way out”.
Musk’s lawyer, on the other hand, accused Twitter of being obstructive and not giving the information the entrepreneur requested regarding how it calculates the number of fake accounts. “When Mr. Musk started asking, the answers he got were disturbing,” Andrew Rossman said, arguing that it would take “months” to analyze the data and answer those questions.
Rossman also dismissed the suggestion that Musk is trying to hurt Twitter, pointing out that his client owns more stock in the company than all of Twitter’s directors combined.
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