Twitter shareholders are clear.
They want to sell the company to Elon Musk at the price he offered for it.
The company's titles are worth about 41 dollars on the stock market and the tycoon offered 54.2 dollars when valuing the company at about 44,000 million.
This Tuesday, the extraordinary meeting of shareholders of the social network gives the yes to the operation, whose effectiveness depends on the trial scheduled for within a month in Wilmington (Delaware).
The shareholders' meeting is formally held this Tuesday, but the remote votes received until Monday night were already enough to consider the proposal approved, according to sources familiar with the situation cited by the Reuters agency.
With this, Twitter considers all the conditions that were on its part to be fulfilled to close the operation, which is articulated as a merger with an instrumental company created by Musk.
The richest man in the world, however, no longer wants to buy Twitter.
Or, at least, he doesn't want to buy it at that price.
Since he took a stake, he made his offer and gave an ultimatum to the managers of the social network, the economic outlook has deteriorated.
Stocks have fallen, particularly some tech stocks and those dependent on ad revenue, and Musk has searched and searched for excuses that would give him the right to break the deal.
Musk's lawyers initially sent a letter on July 8 annulling the deal over an alleged excess of fake accounts, but had failed to make a strong case on that claim.
In their counterclaim they alleged some small disagreements that didn't seem very convincing either.
At the end of August, Musk grabbed like a straw at the denunciation of Peiter
Mudge
Zatko, a legendary
hacker
hired by the company to handle security and fired in January after 15 months on the job.
According to it, the social network Twitter hid "extreme, enormous deficiencies" from the United States federal authorities about its fight against
spam
on the platform, its defenses against
hackers
and the
software
used by its data centers.
An indemnification
Then, learning that Twitter had reached a settlement to pay Zatko $7.75 million in severance pay, Musk's lawyers sent another termination letter on September 9 just in case the first letter, from the July 8, and the second, on August 29, are considered invalid to break the agreement.
Although the lawyers insist that these are additional arguments, the feeling they convey is that they were not very convinced that their first allegations were enough.
Musk now alleges that Twitter should have obtained his consent to agree to the payment of that severance payment and that not having done so now allows him to break the agreement.
That is, assuming Musk was wrong with his first and second letters from him, he considers this $7.75 million severance package so exceptional that it would break a $44 billion buyout deal.
Twitter's lawyers have responded to those of Musk and registered their response with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC, for its acronym in English).
In it they assure that the rupture letter "is invalid and wrong under the agreement."
They also say that Musk and his associates "continue to knowingly, intentionally, deliberately and materially violate the agreement" and that Twitter will continue with its purpose of having the courts force it to comply with the agreement.
The judge of the Wilmington (Delaware) court who will rule on the case, Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick, 42, rejected last week to delay the trial until November, as requested by Elon Musk.
Instead, she did allow him to introduce new arguments for breaking the purchase agreement.
"The longer the trial is delayed, the greater the risk of irreparable harm to Twitter," the judge said in her decision.
And she added: “I am convinced that even a four-week delay would risk additional damage to Twitter too great to justify.”
The trial, therefore, remains scheduled for the week of October 17.
