Elon Musk and Twitter are now facing class action lawsuits over the takeover deal that may or may not still be on the table. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Elon Musk and Twitter are now facing class action lawsuits over the takeover deal that may or may not be on the table. Can I tell you something, Elon Musk wins here. I mean, if I’m.
Farron Cousins: Really?
Mike Papantonio: If I’m, oh yeah. If I’m looking at this case, he wins. Not to say that’s a good or bad thing, but I mean, it’s pretty clear. Here, here’s the way I see it. Twitter goes in and they don’t disclose everything. I mean, they, he’s supposed to do due diligence. They’re supposed to disclose the bots. They’re supposed to disclose these huge numbers that are just fake numbers. And so whether it’s right or wrong, he’s got a pretty good defense here. He’s got a pretty good attack on saying I pulled out because they weren’t telling me the truth. Now there’s a lot of other reasons he pulled out and talk about those reasons.
Farron Cousins: Well, yeah. I mean, Tesla’s stock is, you know, absolutely just on this downward spiral, which is really bad for him.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: And Tesla still being a public company that board could force him out if it continues to go down, which of course happened with the whole Twitter thing. But Elon Musk as part of this, you know, agreement that they had, had actually, according to some reports waived his due diligence, said I’m willing to go with as is, let’s do this. And then all, the lawsuit, which actually filed by a good friend of ours.
Mike Papantonio: Mm-hmm.
Farron Cousins: Their, their law firm.
Mike Papantonio: Mm-hmm.
Farron Cousins: Very talented folks. But they’re saying, the lawsuit says, what he’s done by bringing all of this public, by lowering Twitter stock price, by basically exposing, hey, it’s like 20% bots out here. These aren’t real people. That’s gonna drive money away. And by lowering the price, it helps leverage the Tesla stock drop, which is what he used to back up.
Mike Papantonio: Collateral.
Farron Cousins: The loan. Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: It was collateral. Yeah.
Farron Cousins: So it’s a really, it’s, it’s fairly complicated for people to really understand, but it’s, it’s a up uphill battle for sure.
Mike Papantonio: The, the risk, the risk that Twitter has here is there’s gonna be a lot of exposure. He’s gonna say, there’s gonna be depositions and the depositions are gonna show, it’s not just the bots that they were lying about. They’re trying to make this look like it was bigger than it was. And I get it. You know, he says that yeah, where I’m gonna wave, he didn’t wave due diligence totally. He waved some aspects of due diligence. And if you find that the company is just covering, covering stuff up and he goes into a deal and thinks it’s a deal, whether it’s right or wrong.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: I’m not just, I’m not saying he’s right. I’m saying it’s a pretty darn good attack. And you’ll, you’re gonna see that, that attack develop stronger and stronger.
Farron Cousins: Well, so, and I ask you this, because you know a heck of a lot more than I do obviously, does it come down to what the intent was? Because obviously if he’s, because we know he tweeted out like, oh no, I just found out it’s 20% bots. Well, if that was information that Twitter had and it was, you know, corporate secrets or however they classify that and then he tweets it out publicly, one, he didn’t have to tweet it publicly.
Mike Papantonio: Right.
Farron Cousins: So.
Mike Papantonio: That affected, that affected Twitter.
Farron Cousins: Right. So.
Mike Papantonio: That’s.
Farron Cousins: Is the intent there? Like, if you can prove with that tweet.
Mike Papantonio: No, I think. Yeah. If you say he did this to, to crash the Twitter stock, you know, I, I, yeah, that’s a good argument and you certainly can use it. But here’s what I’m trying to say to you. When discovery begins and they start kicking over all the rotted logs about Twitter, it’s gonna be a lot of pressure. You, you think about shares dropping, buddy. They’re gonna, they’re gonna drop like a, like an anvil out of the sky.
Farron Cousins: Well they need to do that with all the other ones too.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: I would love to see those numbers as well.
Mike Papantonio: It’s, some of it’s just fantasy, man.
