Over the final two months, fairly a number of labels have been utilized to Elon Musk’s proposed $44 billion takeover of Twitter. The buyout has, variously, been known as a saga, a drama, a conflict, a battle and “capitalism gone rogue.” When a narrative includes somebody as colourful as Musk, and when the narrative retains shifting because it has, it’s simple to gin up more and more colourful phrases to explain the goings-on.

And why cease now? Musk actually hasn’t. The storyline shifted once more on Monday with Musk flatly stating what he has been saying implicitly for the previous a number of weeks: He’ll name off the deal and stroll away except Twitter lets him see the info used to calculate its estimate about bots and spam accounts that could be inflating estimates of site visitors to the location. Twitter says he can’t, and it received’t.

At this level, calling the Musk-Twitter deal a saga or a drama sorta undersells what’s occurring. Actually, it now resembles a multibillion-dollar sport of rooster: Musk behind the proverbial wheel of 1 automotive, the Twitter board piled in one other, the 2 automobiles hurtling towards one another.

The sport’s dynamics start with Musk’s assertion that there are various extra bots on Twitter than the corporate acknowledges. Twitter and its CEO Parag Agrawal continue to maintain that these spammers account for lower than 5% of day by day energetic accounts. Musk has advised the share is far larger, presumably 5 occasions as a lot.

Musk on Monday mentioned Twitter’s failure to supply him with knowledge on the bots constitutes a “materials breach” of the merger settlement, an excellent sufficient violation for him to terminate the deal. Earlier, he argued a barely totally different level, suggesting the discrepancy between his determine and Twitter’s is likely to be sufficient to name off the deal, presumably as a result of a variance between his quantity and Twitter’s may represent fraud on Twitter’s half–or, if not outright fraud, then discovering the inconsistency may fall below the class of a so-called “Materials Hostile Change,” a sudden occasion that will materially and adversely change the course of Twitter’s enterprise. If advertisers discovered the place was, the truth is, a ghost city full of faux profiles—faux individuals—they’d most likely be much less inclined to pay for advertisements there. Very unhealthy for a corporation reliant on advert income. Very materially antagonistic, you may say.

However might you say Musk has a shot at proving both case in court docket? Right here, attorneys and authorized specialists are likely to hem and haw. Most likely not, they typically say. And the newest bit about Twitter not sharing its bots knowledge with him is particularly skinny, these specialists say. “There is not a selected time period within the merger settlement that obliges Twitter to do what Musk is asking, and so Twitter is just not breaching the settlement in the event that they refuse,” explains George Geis, a company regulation professor on the College of Virginia. “Most merger agreements do have an obligation on the sellers’ half to help the customer with due diligence. However Musk waived that.” Sure, he actually did forgo his proper to due diligence again in April when he first struck a take care of Twitter’s board.

However what if Musk isn’t looking for a sure-proof authorized case? What if he simply desires: “Leverage,” says Geis. “My sense is that sooner or later perhaps per week or two in the past he requested his attorneys to take a better look and mentioned, ‘Get me actual leverage on the transaction.’”

Because of this it doesn’t actually matter whether or not Musk is right concerning the bots or whether or not Twitter is. Musk doesn’t must be right and win a trial. He merely wants to search out one thing to get a case going and wrap up Twitter in time-consuming litigation. And he’s seemingly already discovered sufficient to try this, those self same specialists say. Musk can afford to attend and afford the million-dollar charges his Skadden, Arps attorneys will accumulate; publicly traded Twitter doesn’t have the identical luxurious of limitless time. Twitter’s board might have as soon as considered promoting the corporate to Musk for $54.20 a share as a wise achievement of its fiduciary obligation to traders–significantly because the inventory market has plunged because the deal was authorized. However does forcing the enterprise into a dangerous state of years-long limbo—because the courts sift by means of Musk’s case—fulfill the identical obligation? Even when the board agrees, shareholders might not. The deal nonetheless must go to traders for a vote, which can occur at some later date this yr.

Predicting how this sport of rooster ends—a contest that has already confirmed so unpredictable—appears to beg the potential for getting a face stuffed with egg. For the sake of a fulsome dialogue, although, right here’s an informed guess on the final result: If the markets keep depressed, the Twitter automotive slams on its proverbial brakes first, and the board renegotiates. The corporate merely has extra to lose than Musk within the prolonged means of involving some Delaware choose within the course of.

Two extra factors to bolster this conclusion. A pair weeks in the past, Musk rejiggered the financing he wants for his bid, eradicating a dangerous margin mortgage from the bundle of $45 billion-plus in fairness and debt. Usually, you don’t muck round with altering the phrases of financing you don’t intend to wish. Then there may be the plain, time-tested reality that almost all fine-print M&A disputes virtually all the time finish with the 2 events making up and consummating the transaction. Ask a lawyer (or a number of), they usually can typically solely level to 1 or two examples that wound totally by means of the authorized system. Because it occurs, in the newest instance from 2018, a court docket did permit German healthcare firm Fresenius to stroll away from its buy of Akorn, a generic drug producer, although the dimensions of Akorn’s issues do appear drastically better than even probably the most fluffed-up determine about bots on Twitter.

But Fresenius-Akorn is the exception. As a rule, issues typically conclude as they did for LVMH when it purchased Tiffany & Co.. The 2 luxurious firms sued one another in 2020 after LVMH tried to scupper a deal to purchase Tiffany, citing the pandemic’s results on the jeweler’s enterprise. In the long run, they settled out of court docket as soon as Tiffany agreed to a barely lowered worth, lower than 3%.

“If you wish to get a reduction on one thing, you don’t go and say, ‘I desire a low cost,’” says Andrew Verstein, co-director of UCLA’s Lowell Milken Institute for Enterprise Regulation and Coverage. “You simply must have some pretext on which a vendor can go to their constituents and say, ‘Look, this man drove a tough discount, and he identified some points, and we had been prepared to chop a brand new deal.’”