AFP
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NOS News•yesterday, 21:26
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Twitter has won its first victory in the lawsuit against Elon Musk over his canceled takeover: the substantive treatment will start in October. Musk wanted the case to start in February next year, while the platform wanted the process to start as soon as possible. The company had deployed on September.
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Twitter has an interest in keeping the uncertainty associated with the case as short as possible. The judge also pointed this out. As long as the acquisition remains uncertain, the greater the cloud of uncertainty that hangs over the company.”
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Musk’s team says it will take months to gather information about the amount of fake accounts active on Twitter. The team also wants to hear from experts.
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Number of fake accounts
The court in the American state of Delaware, where Twitter is registered as a company, will allocate five days in October to the case. It ultimately revolves around the question of how many fake accounts are active on the platform.
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The company has reported in official documents for years that the number of active bots is less than 5 percent of the number of daily active users and emphasizes that this is an estimate.
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Musk doesn’t believe Twitter, he thinks the real number of fake accounts is rather around 20 percent. He has provided no evidence for this. Fake accounts were one of the main reasons he first wanted to buy the platform and then cleaned them up.
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Doubt about takeover
The billionaire and CEO of Tesla made an offer on Twitter in April and reached an agreement with the company the same month. This happened under great pressure; the Twitter board didn’t really want it at first, but soon gave in anyway.
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In May, Musk first showed doubts about the acquisition because of the fake accounts. At the beginning of this month, he announced that he was definitely canceling it. A possibility that in principle he does not have, after all, there is an agreement. The social media company therefore wants to keep him to the agreements made and decided to file a case.
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It remains to be seen how that lawsuit will ultimately unfold. Several outcomes are possible.
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Four possible scenarios in which the case could end:
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NOS
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