Elon Musk Sues Wachtell's Legal Office, Lipton, Rosen & Katz For Fees Received From Twitter

Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against the well-known law office, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, to get back most of the 90 million US dollars honorarium they received from Twitter in exchange for their success in thwarting Musk's offer to stop last year's Twitter purchases.

The lawsuit was filed by Musk's X Corp, who owns Twitter, and filed on Wednesday 5 July at the California Superior Court in San Francisco.

Musk accused Wachtell of using Twitter by accepting a huge "successful" honorarium in recent days before the completion of the purchase on October 27, 2022, given by Twitter executives who left the company and grateful that Musk would be forced to complete a purchase of 44 billion US dollars (Rp667 trillion).

The world's richest man, who also runs Tesla Inc and SpaceX, called the payment of $ 90 million "inhumane", given that Wachtell has only delivered less than a third of that amount for several months of work in the case in Delaware.

"This lawsuit reveals that Wachtell has arranged for their pocket to be filled with funds from the company's treasury when the key is handed over" to Musk, the lawsuit states.

Musk wants to get back the "excessive" fee imposed by Wachtell under an agreement signed on the day of completion by one of the company's partners and Twitter's chief law officer, Vijaya Gadde.

The lawsuit also lists a statement from former Twitter director Martha Lane Fox, who, after learning how many lawyers would be paid, sent an email to legal adviser Sean Edgett: "O My thanks God."

Wachtell did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Gadde, Fox, and Edgett are not the defendants in this lawsuit. Twitter has been involved in a number of real lawsuits or threats of lawsuits since Musk's purchase.

This includes many lawsuits by property owners, vendors and consultants accusing Musk of not paying their bills, as well as the threat of a lawsuit by Twitter against Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Platforms over their new app, Threads.

Wachtell is not a foreigner in dealing with lawsuits by billionaires over purchases, as they have spent years litigating Carl Icahn over the coercive takeover of CVR Energy in 2012.

In 2018, a judge rejected the demands of professional negligence by Icahn, who had to pay for banks that helped defend CVR from takeover with higher honorariums than if the merger failed.