Lawyer Monthly - August 2023

Elon Musk Sues Law Firm That Compelled Him to Complete Twitter Takeover Elon Musk has filed suit against top law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to recover the bulk of a $90 million fee it received from Twitter after thwarting his attempt to ditch his $44 billion buyout of the company. In a suit filed on 5 July in the California Superior Court in San Francisco, Twitter parent company X Corp, owned by Musk, accused Wachtell of exploiting Twitter by accepting a large ‘success’ fee paid by soon-to-depart Twitter executives shortly before the buyout was conclude on 27 October 2022. Musk called the $90 million sum “unconscionable” and accused Wachtell of having “undertaken absolutely no risk” in obtaining the fee by arranging to bill Twitter by hourly rates instead of taking the case on a contingency basis. Musk is seeking to recoup the “excess” fees that Wachtell charged. The firm has tackled buyout-related lawsuits from billionaires previously, having spent years embroiled in a legal battle with Carl Icahn over his 2012 hostile takeover of CVR Energy before Icahn’s malpractice claim was ultimately dismissed. Twitter itself has been the subject of a number of lawsuits, both threatened and actual, since Musk’s 2022 buyout. Multiple landlords, consultants and vendors have accused Musk of not paying bills, and Twitter has threatened a lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta over the latter company’s new social media app, Threads. Monthly Round-Up AUGUST 2023 8 LAWYER MONTHLY AUGUST 2023 Photo Credit: WikiCommons - Ministério Das Comunicações. License: Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

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