Elon Musk Tweets Memes As Twitter Deal Goes Down In Flames

As was predicted by many and signaled for months, Elon Musk has moved to terminate his $44 billion purchase of Twitter after three months of flip-flopping on the deal.

Late Friday, Musk's lawyers sent a letter saying "Mr. Musk is terminating the merger agreement because Twitter is in material breach of multiple provisions of that agreement (and) appears to have made false and misleading representations upon which Mr. Musk relied when entering into the merger agreement."

The "provisions" and "misleading representations" in the letter refer to Musk's apparent dissatisfaction with how Twitter disclosed the number of spam bots on the platform. Musk has demanded that Twitter prove that less than 5 percent of the site's users are spam accounts.

In May, when Elon first started formally making an issue out of Twitter's spam accounts, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal posted a thread in which he explained that the company has found through their internal reviews that less than 5 percent of accounts on the site are spam bots. Furthermore, he asserted that their assessments hinge on private information they can't share, implying Musk couldn't get the data he wanted until his purchase of the company was finalized.

Let’s talk about spam. And let’s do so with the benefit of data, facts, and context…

— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022

Some observers have long suspected that the "spam bot" issue amounted to Musk proverbially grasping at legal straws to back out of his monumental purchase, perhaps without paying the $1 billion "kill fee" written into the deal. Musk bought Twitter at $54.20 a share, and much of it would be paid with his stock in Tesla.

The deal sent both Twitter and Tesla stocks haywire, each rising and falling depending on investors' faith that the deal would go through, leaving the funding of Musk's venture volatile. Since the time the deal was first announced, Tesla stocks have dropped 31 percent, according to CNN.

Twitter responded to Musk's formal move to withdraw by stating its intentions to enforce the purchase in court. "We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery," said Bret Taylor, the chairman of Twitter’s board.

As Musk seems to do almost every time he gets hit with a scandal or otherwise bad news, he's posting through it. This morning, he posted memes about Twitter's intent to sue Musk into completing the purchase he agreed to.

pic.twitter.com/JcLMee61wj

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 11, 2022

Chuckmate

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 11, 2022

Taste in memes aside, the posts did not inspire much confidence from some Twitter users who felt they essentially amounted to Musk saying "I'm not mad, I'm actually laughing."

this is levels of cope never before seen https://t.co/FJwtl5oNQP

— transgender marx (@JUNlPER) July 11, 2022

I’m not sure “shitpost your way out of it” is gonna be an effective legal strategy here. https://t.co/8UXwjvMvPl

— Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers) July 11, 2022

making your own meme featuring your own face that is only catered to your life is such divorced man energy https://t.co/KfaLBDdrv3

— harry ☭ (@emopunkloser) July 11, 2022

The coming legal battle will likely go on for months, meaning this is hardly the last we'll hear of Musk's contentious Twitter deal.