Elon Musk and Twitter are currently embroiled in a legal battle over the former’s refusal to buy the latter after an agreement.
The legal proceedings have revealed that crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried had also been interested in purchasing Twitter.
Texts revealed
Reports on Thursday disclosed that William MacAskill, who is part of the FTX Future Fund funded by Sam Bankman-Fried, had tried to set up a meeting between Musk and FTX’s CEO back in March.
The reason for setting up a meeting was to see if the two entrepreneurs could buy the social media platform in a ‘joint effort’.
This information was revealed in text messages that were part of the legal proceedings and were later published online.
A professor of philosophy at Oxford University and a self-described ‘altruist’, MacAskill had reportedly stated that the FTX founder was willing to contribute around $8 to $15 billion for acquiring Twitter.
But, Michael Grimes, the Head of Global Technology Investment Banking at Morgan Stanley, had told Musk later that the CEO would only hand over $5 billion for making a joint deal of sharing the social media firm.
No deal
It was reported that Grimes had talked up Bankman-Fried to the Tesla and SpaceX CEO and had called the FTX head a doer builder and a genius.
However, it is unlikely that the ultimate crypto-tech billionaire team-up would happen, given that Musk has expressed his aversion to the practices used on Twitter.
According to Musk, he cannot move forward with his purchase agreement because he believes that 90% of the comments on Twitter are from spam accounts or bots.
His team also expressed concerns about whether the 238 million daily active users that Twitter reports are actual humans or automated bot accounts for the most part.
The issues
The representatives of the Tesla CEO alleged that misleading and false representations had been made by Twitter and the company had also breached several provisions of the agreement.
This was disclosed in a filing made in July with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). A lawsuit had been filed in July against Musk by Twitter.
This was after the former backed out of the $44 billion deal to purchase the social media firm. The July filing had Twitter stating that Musk could not just walk away.
It asserted that the tech billionaire had trashed the company, disrupted its operations, destroyed stockholder value and now wanted to walk away.
The company also said that since they had made the deal public, more and more employees had chosen to leave.
However, in a filing in August, Musk’s team referred to a whistleblower report from Pieter Zatko, the former Head of Security at Twitter.
The report said that half of the staff at Twitter can access ‘sensitive systems’, which is a big security concern.
Zatko also said that Twitter’s core code is not owned or licensed by the company, which means its owners could just file an injunction and shut it down anytime, or ask for massive damages.
Ezra Kloostra 
