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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Totally agree. the "gun" that forced him to write his X came from his own lawyers, which is why he is sueing what was his own lawyers. He hired them to help him break contract, but they couldn't find termites in the contracts basement and his pinkie was not miraculously found to be behind his back the whole time.

My point remains: of all the bizarre 420 driven choices he's made for our delight, sueing his own lawyers for not helping him avoid $44b of buy price is perhaps the least insane: if his new lawyers have a cause, he should totally seek to recover pennies in the thousand dollars.

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> Totally agree. the "gun" that forced him to write his X came from his own lawyers, which is why he is sueing what was his own lawyers.

Eh? Wachtell were Twitter's lawyers, not his. He hired a different firm to try to get out of the contract.

My mistake. Apologies for misunderstanding which side they were on. So, the fee was paid by Twitter to them, at the point, or just before he acquired Twitter and all its assets and obligations?

Did he acquire knowledge in company papers which might show a basis to recover his payment?

The fee was paid by pre-Musk Twitter to the law firm hours before the acquisition. This is less damning that it may appear, because Musk instructed Twitter to explicitly not pay Wachtell, but those instructions don't mean anything to pre-Musk Twitter. The best time to pay Wachtell would be right before the acquisition (to ensure that the legal matters are complete without Musk halting payments).

It's unclear what the company papers show. The Matt Levine article [1] goes into pretty good detail about the case.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-07-11/matt-l...

I want to clarify something, because I feel it's misunderstood (correct me if wrong). He's not suing what was his own lawyers. Here's the setup.

1. He signs a binding agreement with Twitter in April 2022 to buy.

2. Gets cold feet due to lack of investors, tech stock prices coming down after a period of hype, climate of expected impending recession, and rising interest rates... or... maybe he never thought he has to actually buy Twitter because the agreement was a formality he can ignore.

3. Starts finding reasons to get out of the deal, i.e. the infamous argument about how many bots Twitter has (and whether this constitutes material change in what Musk agreed to buy for that price).

4. Twitter (not Musk) hires the firm in question "Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz", to ensure Musk follows the contract. Twitter hired that firm. They were playing against Musk's intent to get out of the deal.

5. So they do their job, and Musk can't get out of the deal. And Twitter pays them 90 million as Musk acquires the company.

6. Now Musk is mad that what is now his company paid 90 million to fight against him. And he's fighting to get some of that money back, claiming "Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz" overcharged Twitter because Twitter new after the deal, this counts on Musk's bottom line anyway.

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