(FiveNation.com)- The deposition of Tesla CEO Elon Musk by lawyers from Twitter has been pushed back, according to many reports.
The deposition was supposed to allow Twitter’s lawyers to question Musk as part of their high-stakes battle in court over whether Musk must follow through on his promise to buy Twitter for $44 billion, or whether he can back out of the deal, as he has said are his wishes.
Parag Agrawal, the CEO of Twitter, was also set to face questioning from Musk’s lawyers on Monday. He said that the questioning would be postponed to sometime in the future for both he and Musk.
The postponements of the questioning of the two executives actually resulted in Twitter’s stock price rising 5.4% and finishing at $43.03 following the news. Many people apparently thought the delay was a sign that a settlement would soon be reached.
But, many legal experts said that delays such as this are not out of the ordinary when they’re done ahead of pretrial hearings. In fact, another hearing was scheduled for later in the week to address many pretrial motions that had been filed in the case.
The trial is set to be held in October, for now, and Monday’s depositions were supposed to force the two men to answer questions from the other side’s legal team. The trial will ultimately attempt to decide who’s at fault for the collapse of the bid by Musk to purchase Twitter, and whether either side owes the other any money because of it.
It’s expected that the trial will last one week, and it’s scheduled to start on October 17. It was be held in Delaware Chancery Court.
Back in April, Musk — who’s the richest man in the world — agreed to purchase Twitter for $54.20 per share. After the purchase went through, Musk said he intended to take the company private, loosen the policies the company had come up with regarding moderating content, and then root out the number of fake accounts the social media giant has.
But, that deal came crashing down rather quickly. After a number of public spats and criticisms that actually took place on Musk’s Twitter account, the CEO of Tesla announced in July that he was going to back out of his agreed-upon deal.
There were many different justifications he gave for wanting to back out of the deal. One of the main ones was that the actual number of fake accounts on Twitter was much higher than the company had disclosed to him originally. He also said that when he inquired about it, Twitter executives were shady about providing him with more information.
In response, Twitter filed a lawsuit against Musk that seeks to force him to live up to his agreement and purchase the company. One of the reasons they might want to do that is the performance of the stock in recent months.
Twitter stock closed at $43.84 at the end of September, 19.11% lower than what Musk agreed to purchase the company for.
