Pavlo Gonchar | Lightrocket | Getty Images Shares of Twitter plunged sharply in early premarket trading on Monday after Elon Musk said he was trying to close a $44 billion takeover of the company. The company’s shares fell nearly 9% in premarket US trading before paring some losses to trade 7% lower. Tesla stock, meanwhile, was up about 1 percent in premarket trade. On Friday, Musk’s lawyer informed Twitter’s board that he wants to cancel the deal. The billionaire has taken issue with the number of bots and fake accounts on Twitter and says the company is not being honest about how much activity on the service is genuine. Twitter, on the other hand, says it has given Musk the information he needs to evaluate his claim that spam accounts make up only 5% of monetized daily active users, including the so-called “firehose.” of an unfiltered stream in real time. of daily tweets. Brett Taylor, Twitter’s chairman of the board, said the company would pursue legal action in the Delaware District Court to enforce the deal. Musk responded on Monday by posting a meme mocking Twitter management for the failed deal. It features images of Musk laughing along with text claiming the company is trying to “force” him to buy it in court. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment on the meme. Musk is one of the most popular Twitter users, with over 100 million followers. He used the social networking site for everything from corporate communications for his various companies to attacking the very platform he previously wanted to own. Richard Windsor, founder of research firm Radio Free Mobile, said Musk’s “willingness to heavily renegotiate the price of Twitter” was likely the reason for his exit from the deal. Although he is not a Twitter shareholder, Windsor says that if he was, he would be selling now. “There’s still a disconnect between the fundamentals and the share price,” Windsor said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Monday. “If you look at some of the places the tech sector has been in the last couple of months, you could put Twitter’s valuation somewhere between $13 [billion] at $15 billion, which is about 50% below even where the stock price is today.”
