The dispute over the takeover of Twitter is going to court - in two respects. After the short message service wanted to legally oblige the tech billionaire to buy it, the tech billionaire countered with a counterclaim.
In the dispute over a takeover of Twitter, high-tech billionaire Elon Musk has responded with a counterclaim against the short message service. Musk filed the lawsuit as "confidential" in the Delaware court in which Twitter is suing the founder of electric car maker Tesla. The lawsuit cannot therefore be examined. Shortly before, the responsible judge had set the start of the process on October 17th.
The richest person in the world had the planned takeover of Twitter for a price of 44 billion dollars (around 43 billion euros) burst on July 8 because of allegedly "false and misleading" information from the short message service. In particular, he accuses Twitter of having too few spam or fake accounts on the platform. Twitter described this justification as "hypocrisy" and wants to take legal action to force Musk to complete the contractually agreed purchase. Five days of negotiations are scheduled for the process.
Observers consider a judicial defeat of Musk and thus a forced fulfillment of the takeover agreement to be quite conceivable. It is also possible that the multi-billionaire would have to pay Twitter a contractual penalty of up to one billion dollars.
For Twitter, the quarter ended after the turbulent takeover attempt with a drop in sales and a large loss. Revenues fell 1% year over year to $1.18 billion. Analysts had expected a good 1.3 billion dollars. In addition to the uncertainty surrounding Musk's takeover plans, the company justified the decline with the weakening of the online advertising market.
The bottom line is that Twitter ended the second quarter with a loss of $270 million - after black numbers of almost $66 million a year earlier. The number of daily active users that Twitter can reach with its advertising because they use the in-house app or the web version rose from 229 million to 237.8 million within three months. In the first quarter, the service had gained a good 14 million users.
