Last Update: July 08, 2023, 02:22 AM IST
United States of America, USA)
Musk is seeking to recover the additional fees that Wachtel charged under an agreement signed by Vijaya Gadde, one of its partners, and Twitter’s chief legal officer on the day of closing.
Elon Musk is suing the law firm Wachtel, Lipton, Rosen & Katz for the $90 million fee he received for thwarting his bid to walk away from the Twitter buyout.
Elon Musk is suing the elite law firm Wachtel, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to recover most of the $90 million fee he received from Twitter for thwarting his bid to back out of buying the social media company for $44 billion. filed.
The complaint from Musk’s X Corp, which owns Twitter, was filed on Wednesday in California Superior Court in San Francisco.
Musk accused Watchtel of exploiting Twitter by accepting huge “success” fees from Twitter executives in the final days before the buyout closed on October 27, 2022, who were grateful that Musk would be forced to shut down.
The world’s richest man, who also runs Tesla Inc and SpaceX, called the $90 million payment “unconscionable”, noting that Wachtel received less than a third of that amount for his few months’ work on the Delaware lawsuit. Billed less.
“While the keys were being handed over to Musk, Wachtel arranged to effectively line his own pockets with money from the company’s cash registers,” the complaint states.
Musk is seeking to recover the “excess” fee that Wachtel took under a settlement signed on the day of closing by Vijaya Gadde, one of its partners and Twitter’s chief legal officer.
The complaint also cited former Twitter director Martha Lane Fox, who emailed general counsel Sean Edgett after learning how much the lawyers would be paid: “Oh my freaking god.”
Wachtel did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Gadde, Fox and Edgett are not parties to the suit. Twitter has been involved in several actual or threatened lawsuits since its purchase of Musk.
These include several lawsuits by landlords, vendors and consultants accusing Musk of rigging bills, and a threatened lawsuit by Twitter against Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta platform over his new Threads app.
Wachtel is not new to being sued by billionaires over buyouts, having spent years in litigation with Carl Icahn over its hostile takeover of CVR Energy in 2012.
In 2018, a judge dismissed a malpractice claim by Icahn, which found itself in a bind to pay banks that helped defend CVR against higher fees from the acquisition than it would have if the merger failed.
The case is X Corp. v. Wachtel, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, California Superior Court, County of San Francisco, No. CGC-23-607461.
(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed – reuters,
