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Comment by extheat | Hacker News Reader

Going through court will lead to even more dragged out speculation and hurt Twitter more than any other party. They can't be 100% sure that they will win the case, and will also have to work to run the company on the side in a continuing state of limbo with the acquisition litigation. In the end, even if they win, and Musk must buys the company at the deal price, by the time that goes through the markets may as well have rebounded to make the acquisition price reasonable again. Buying a company isn't like buying a piece of candy and eating it to the point of no return. The amount of money Elon has on paper won't be impacted, which a lot of people are not understanding. The winners at the end of the day would be the lawyers and millions of dollars dumped into fighting a case instead of settling.

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> Going through court will lead to even more dragged out speculation and hurt Twitter more than any other party. They can't be 100% sure that they will win the case,

It's hard to be 100% sure, but there is a rather high probability that they will win and if they do, even if EM only has to pay a fine, they will have an official court statement saying that their bot statement is reasonable which is significantly better than leaving it with "we settled with EM since we don't think that we can defend this statement".

> In the end, even if they win, and Musk must buys the company at the deal price, by the time that goes through the markets may as well have rebounded to make the acquisition price reasonable again.

And that's fine. After all, Twitter agreed to the sale at that price.

> The winners at the end of the day would be the lawyers and millions of dollars dumped into fighting a case instead of settling.

There would be at least three winners:

  1. The lawyers, but they probably already got millions over the whole mess.
  2. The legal system, since there would be some indication that even EM has to follow the rules for once.
  3. The shareholders who will get significantly more money and who are actually the people the board represents.

>Going through court will lead to even more dragged out speculation and hurt Twitter more than any other party

>The winners at the end of the day would be the lawyers and millions of dollars dumped into fighting a case instead of settling.

I don't understand this popular hot take.

There's no rich egomaniac foil for EM, is there? There's just a corporate machine that he offered a piece of "candy" worth tens of billions and then tried to take back.

As many people have said, if EM just walks away and Twitter does nothing, the stock price is probably half of what it was supposed to be acquired for.

Ten billion dollars will fund a literal battalion of lawyers for a decade if necessary.

The point isn't to help Twitter, the company.

The point is to help Twitter's shareholders.

Specifically, to help them to the massive premium over the current stock price Elon is legally obligated to pay.

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