When Elon Musk announced his intention to end his $44 billion bid on Twitter, the social media company was not quick to give up. Today, Twitter sued the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla for refusing to fulfill his contractual obligation to purchase the platform. The company’s lawyers argue that Musk’s concerns about Twitter’s bot numbers are illegal.
When you agree to buy a slow-growing social media platform for more than it’s worth, there’s no take back unless the company has seriously misrepresented itself. Although Twitter handed over its “fire hose” of internal data, Musk claimed the wealth of information was not enough. So he expanded his ongoing public tantrum over Twitter bots, culminating in his statement that the deal fell through.
As Twitter wrote in its lawsuit against the whimsical billionaire, “Musk apparently believes that—unlike any other party subject to Delaware contract law—he is free to change his mind, destroy the company, interfere with its operations.” , destroy shareholder value and walk away.” In response to the lawsuit, Musk tweeted, “Oh the irony lol.”
Anyone with a Twitter account (even the bots!) has seen that Musk has been tweet through it† Based on the memes he’s posted, it wasn’t at all shocking that he was getting cold feet over his $44 billion impulse purchase, especially in light of the stock market downturn.
Twitter’s lawyers agreed: “In his press release announcing the deal on April 25, 2022, Musk called for a clarion call to ‘beat the spam bots.’ But as the market fell and the fixed-price deal became less attractive Musk changed his story and suddenly demanded ‘verification’ that spam was not a serious problem on the Twitter platform, claiming a burning need for ‘zeal’ that he had expressly renounced.”
How do you prove that an extremely online mega-rich troll is trying to cheat you? You show the receipts. And the receipts in this case are memes.
Twitter’s lawsuit against Musk contains more photos than your standard legal filing. In the 62-page document, the plaintiff shares several images of Musk’s tweets (mostly memes about the takeover) to prove he acted in bad faith. Of course they include the poo emoji that Musk tweeted Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal when he tried to answer the mogul’s spam questions.
Elon Musk Responds To Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal With A Poo Emoji On Twitter
As part of the agreement between Musk and Twitter, Musk is in violation if he discredits the platform. According to Twitter, that poop emoji does indeed count as contempt, but the platform’s lawyers pulled a number of tweets to defend their case. In two other cases, Musk tags the SEC’s Twitter account and urges them to investigate Twitter’s financial disclosures, which claim that more than 95% of daily active users from whom money can be made are people. As the lawsuit reads, “Musk’s conduct simply confirms his desire to escape the binding contract he voluntarily signed and harm Twitter in the process.”
Image Credits: Twitter
Twitter’s lawyers also added a meme posted by Musk yesterday, in which the billionaire laughs alongside text that jokes about the platform: “They said I couldn’t buy Twitter. Then they wouldn’t release bot info. Now they want to force me to buy Twitter in court. Now they have to disclose bot info in court.”
He then tweeted a meme of Chuck Norris playing chess, declaring, “Chuckmate.”
Elon Musk memes in Twitter lawsuit
Does Elon Musk understand that Chuck Norris memes have stopped being funny since Tesla produced its first car? Maybe he’s too busy single-handedly increasing the birth rate in the US to keep up with pop culture. Anyway, Twitter used these memes to claim that Musk sees this hugely impactful acquisition as “an elaborate joke”.
This is far from the first time we see memes go to court — in 2013, the creators of the memes Keyboard Cat and Nyan Cat earned a settlement after suing Warner Brothers for unauthorized use of their copyright in a video game. That incident alone was almost ten years ago. Now even you can get tea-spilling group chats subpoenaed and featured prominently in a New York Times feature†
It’s not even the first time Musk has gotten into serious legal trouble for his bad jokes.
In 2018, Musk tweeted that he was considering take Tesla private for $420 a share and already had insured financing† Naturally, he was just making a low hanging weed joke, so the SEC accused Musk of fraud over “false and misleading” tweets. As a result, Musk stepped down as chairman of Tesla’s board of directors, paid the company a $20 million fine, and after signing an agreement with the SEC, he must now have tweets about Tesla reviewed by attorneys who “Twitter become sitters.
However, this is the first time memes have played a role in determining the fate of a massive corporate takeover. We hope the judges in Delaware Chancellery lots of fun.