Musk sues law firm because he’s mad that Twitter paid $90 million bill
Musk sues law firm because he’s mad that Twitter paid $90 million bill
Musk tries to claw back $90M from firm that forced him to complete Twitter deal.
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I have to say that in this case it sounds like Elon Musk has a point. If his court filings are to be believed:
In the middle of the board's final October 27 meeting, former Twitter general counsel Sean Edgett sent the chart of fees that the Twitter board was meeting to approve. Upon seeing the magnitude of the fees being presented for the board's approval, one former Twitter director immediately exclaimed in an email reply to Edgett:
O
My
Freaking
God
Despite any initial shock, Twitter's lame duck board members voted to approve Wachtell's excessive and unconscionable fee.
Immediately following the Twitter board's rubber-stamp approval, [Chief Legal Officer Vijaya] Gadde signed Wachtell's letter agreement. Then, to ensure that the eleventh-hour fee payment went through before the Musk Parties (Twitter's new owners) could learn about the massive gift included in that fee, Edgett expedited the wire payment on the invoice for the balance ($84,294,962.97) of the $90 million total fee that Wachtell had submitted to Twitter the day before. Twitter's $84 million wire to Wachtell was posted only ten minutes before Gadde and Edgett were terminated upon the closing of the merger.
It seems like they fulfilled their legal obligation as the legal counsel for Twitter. “The bulk of the $84.3 million paid to Wachtell on October 27 was allegedly a "success fee" for forcing Musk to close the deal.”
I see no problem with this, a lot of lawyers work on contingency. If the contract stipulated the amounts above the $18 MM in previously owed invoices, they should be paid. Elon’s not happy about the Twitter deal and isn’t exactly known for paying bills that are contractually obligated, so this sounds like he’s trying to claw back as much cash as possible from his dumb Twitter takeover.
So, I don't think there's enough information in this article to determine one way or another. It could have been a pre-arranged agreement where the lawyers were getting a huge payday because they were proposing to accomplish a difficult and massively lucrative outcome. In which case, fair play. It could also however have been that the fee schedule was wholly unreasonable and the managers of the company agreed to it basically because it wasn't their money, and only after it had become solidly settled that it wasn't their money.
Just because Elon Musk is a non-bill-payer and POS in many other respects doesn't mean he's automatically lying when he claims it was the second one. I genuinely don't know one way or another.
I agree that there’s not enough information to decide veracity of Elon’s lawsuit, but based on his history, he doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt. I’d say a key indicator is if the attorneys representing Musk in this lawsuit are his employees or an outside legal firm with a track record. If they’re employees, he’s lying. They filed this lawsuit because he told them to because he knows no outside agency is taking that case for less money than he’d potentially recover. If he’s telling the truth, outside attorneys would be okay taking the case because they’ll get to notch an easy win.
Yah, that's fair enough. He's the boy who cried wolf at this point.
What an odd state of affairs that one of the richest people to ever inhabit the planet is the boy who cried pedophile. Worst timeline, ever.
In what limited time I've spent interacting with extremely rich people I've found them to be pretty much the same cross-section of humanity as in any other grouping. There are some happy people and some sad. Some are insane, some are great, some are stupid, some are smart, etc etc. I thought there would be some notable difference but that doesn't seem to be the case.
I'm still a little sad about how Elon Musk turned out. Somewhere inside him is a happy nerd that just wants to build rockets and electric cars. Plenty of billionaires are happy to just sit back poisoning the water and staying out of the spotlight, and he's not that, for which I give him props. It just seems like right around covid time he took this hard sudden turn into crazy-sociopathic-POS land, his kids won't speak to him, he's aggressively mocking towards all these Twitter engineers who just want to do their jobs, he just overall turned out as a bad person, and I wish it hadn't happened that way.
I think there was an opportunity for Elon to turn out differently, but his upbringing almost guaranteed he’d turn out a bastard. He might be into rockets and electric cars, but that doesn’t mean he actually makes things work, he’s an executive who started life somewhere between third and home. He got his start in Canada when he stepped of a plan with uncut emeralds from his family’s emerald mine. He could afford to take risks and such because his family’s wealth was extraordinary (and built on the exploitation of others, which totally wouldn’t be a recurring theme in companies he runs).