Can the courts force Elon Musk to buy Twitter now that he doesn't want it?

According to Musk, he is "terminating" his agreement to buy the social networking site. It's not as simple as saying "Hasta la vista, baby" and smoking it with a pistol. The company is trying to get Musk to buy the company even if he doesn't want to.

The courts may be able to force this transaction to be completed when one party wants out. Is that the outcome that they want?

For what it's worth, it's what they're signaling at the moment. Taylor, who is a member of the board of directors, claims his fellow board members are ready to close the deal on the price and terms agreed upon with Musk.

"We are confident that we will win in the Delaware Court of Chancery," Taylor said, referring to a state court where disputes are sorted out by an official with the title "chancellor" instead of a judge. Delaware is where the company is incorporated, not California where it is based.

The shareholders of the company are trying to get Musk to take the company off their hands in order to get a better price for their stock. It's possible that Musk doesn't want this because his market cap is close to $28 billion.

Ronald Gilson is a professor of law and business at Columbia University. According to Gilson, one resolution is for Musk to pay an amount that reflects the loss he would have had if he had completed the purchase. He said that the fight was about money.

The legal proceedings may come down to a squabble about Musk's actions having deprived Twitter's shareholders of a yet-to-be-determined sum of money, along with exactly what that sum is, and whether or not he's right. Gilson said that the Chancery Court has a lot of ways to get the two sides to negotiate in order to avoid a trial.

In order to avoid a trial, the two parties need to find a compromise. "My understanding is that the acquisition agreement was written to limit Musk's ability to do exactly what he is now doing," Gilson said.

According to the text of the agreement, specific performance is an alternative to awarding damages in a dispute that requires the transaction to be completed. "I like the odds of getting specific performance and making Musk close the deal in court, but I don't think anything is a certainty at this point," Levine wrote.

In May, Musk claimed that he had been deceived about the number of bots on the service. A fairly serious allegation that could be construed as fraud was treated like a transparent stalling tactic by many commentators. Musk was given a lot of data in order to put his fears to rest.

If we take Musk's word for it, his fears wouldn't go away. He's more certain than ever that they're flogging a service that's overrun with the internet's bad guys. According to the letter Musk's lawyers wrote to Twitter attempting to break off the deal, Musk has been trying to work out an accurate count of "monetizable active daily users" as opposed to the fake ones.

According to the letter, all indications suggest that several of the public disclosures made by the company are false or misleading. The legal argument Musk's lawyers are going to make in that Delaware court is going to be based on the email claim.

It looks like Musk might become the new owner of a bird-themed social media website if that doesn't work.

Musk may be playing a weak hand.