Twitter sued Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday, trying to force him to complete his $44 billion takeover of the social media company by accusing him of “outlandish” and “bad faith” actions that have caused the platform irreparable harm and “wreaked havoc” on its stock price.

Back in April, Musk pledged to pay $54.20 a share for Twitter, which agreed to those terms after reversing its initial opposition to the deal. But the two sides have been bracing for a legal fight since the billionaire said Friday that he was backing away from his agreement to buy the company.

Twitter’s lawsuit opens with a sharply-worded accusation: “Musk refuses to honor his obligations to Twitter and its stockholders because the deal he signed no longer serves his personal interests.”

“Having mounted a public spectacle to put Twitter in play, and having proposed and then signed a seller-friendly merger agreement, Musk apparently believes that he — unlike every other party subject to Delaware contract law — is free to change his mind, trash the company, disrupt its operations, destroy stockholder value, and walk away,” the suit stated.

Twitter filed its lawsuit in the Delaware Court of Chancery, which frequently handles business disputes among the many corporations, including Twitter, that are incorporated there.

As part of the April deal, Musk and Twitter had agreed to pay each other a $1 billion breakup fee if either was responsible for the deal falling through. The company could have pushed Musk to pay the hefty fee but is going farther than that, trying to force him to complete the full $44 billion purchase approved by the company’s board.

“Oh the irony lol,” Musk tweeted after Twitter filed the lawsuit, without explanation.

The arguments and evidence laid out by Twitter are compelling and likely to get a receptive ear in the Delaware court, which doesn’t look kindly on sophisticated buyers with highly-paid legal advisers backing off of deals, said Brian Quinn, a law professor at Boston College.

“They make a very strong argument that this is just buyer’s remorse,” Quinn said. “You have to eat your mistakes in the Delaware Chancery Court. That’s going to work very favorably for Twitter.”

Musk alleged Friday that Twitter has failed to provide enough information about the number of fake accounts on its service. Twitter said last month that it was making available to Musk a ″fire hose” of raw data on hundreds of millions of daily tweets.

The company has said for years in regulatory filings that it believes about 5% of the accounts on the platform are fake. Musk is also alleging that Twitter broke the acquisition agreement when it fired two top managers and laid off a third of its talent-acquisition team.

Twitter’s suit repeatedly emphasizes Musk’s contemplation of starting a Twitter competitor — an alternative option he sometimes aired publicly and sometimes privately to Twitter’s executives and board members. While the company has said it cooperated in providing the data he requested on fake “spam bot” accounts, the lawsuit suggests Twitter was concerned that disclosing too much “highly sensitive information” could expose the company to competitive harm if shared.

The biggest surprise for Quinn was how much evidence Twitter has — for instance, communications with Musk about whether to retain or lay off employees, as well as the billionaire’s own public tweets — to reject his arguments for backing out.

“They are marshaling many of Musk’s own tweets to hoist him on his own petard,” he said.

In a joint press release announcing the acquisition deal, Musk pledged to “unlock” the social media company’s potential by loosening restrictions on speech and rooting out fake accounts. Among his most attention-grabbing promises was to let former President Donald Trump back onto the platform. Musk argued that Twitter’s ban of Trump following the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was “morally bad” and “foolish in the extreme.”

But his confidence didn’t last long. Tesla’s stock — Musk’s primary source of wealth — plummeted amid a broader stock market selloff in May, and Musk soon seemed less enthusiastic about owning Twitter.

“For Musk, the best case is he pays the $1 billion breakup fee but that appears very unlikely,” said Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives. “The irony is that Twitter as a fiduciary is clearly looking to enforce a deal that Musk doesn’t want to get done. It’s like buying a house you don’t want.”

Twitter’s suit calls Musk’s tactics “a model of hypocrisy,” noting that he had emphasized plans to take Twitter private in order to rid it of spam accounts. Once the market declined, Twitter said, “Musk shifted his narrative, suddenly demanding ‘verification’ that spam was not a serious problem on Twitter’s platform, and claiming a burning need to conduct ‘diligence’ he had expressly forsworn.”

Similarly, the company charges that Musk operated in bad faith, accusing him of requesting company information in order to accuse Twitter of providing “misrepresentations” about its business to regulators and investors.

Musk “has been acting against this deal since the market started turning, and has breached the merger agreement repeatedly in the process,” the suit charged. “He has purported to put the deal on ‘hold’ pending satisfaction of imaginary conditions, breached his financing efforts obligations in the process, violated his obligations to treat requests for consent reasonably and to provide information about financing status, violated his non-disparagement obligation, misused confidential information, and otherwise failed to employ required efforts to consummate the acquisition.”

Youngboy Never Broke Again (a.k.a. NBA Youngboy) scored a major victory on the opening day of his Los Angeles trial for firearms possession on Tuesday (July 12), with the judge ruling to exclude the use of the rapper’s lyrics as evidence, defense attorneys confirmed to Billboard.

The decision by U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner means prosecutors won’t be able to use lyrics from three Youngboy songs — “Lonely Child,” “Life Support” and “Gunsmoke” — to help convict the rapper (born Kentrell Gaulden), who’s charged with possession of a firearm after he was discovered with a loaded FNX-45 gun during a traffic stop in Tarzana, California on March 22, 2021.

Among other lines, prosecutors had argued that the lyric “FN, Glock, MAC-10s” from “Gunsmoke” demonstrates the rapper’s “familiarity and knowledge of FN, the high-end manufacturer of the gun found in defendant’s car that he denies knowingly possessing,” according to a court filing on Monday (July 11).

In their own filing rebutting the prosecution’s request, defense lawyers had said that allowing the lyrics as evidence would be “highly prejudicial as they discuss hardcore rap which has been empirically established to be more negatively received than other genres of music” and that the lyrics “offer very minimal probative value and are substantially outweighed by the prejudice contained within the words of the songs.” Their argument echoes the growing controversy around rap lyrics being cited in criminal cases against such hip-hop artists as Young Thug, Gunna, Drakeo the Ruler and Bobby Shmurda in recent years.

The judge’s ruling marked a highlight of the first day of Youngboy’s L.A. trial, which took place at Roybal Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse in Downtown Los Angeles and included jury selection and opening arguments by the prosecution and defense lawyers.

The possession charge at issue in the case stems from Youngboy’s previous felony conviction for aggravated assault with a firearm, which prevents him from possessing a firearm and ammunition. The U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana had charged Youngboy with this violation and issued a warrant for his arrest; soon after, law enforcement got a search warrant for Youngboy’s cell phone and tracked him to Tarzana.

According to the indictment, LAPD officers surveilled Youngboy as he got into his new Mercedes GLS 200 Maybach, which had been purchased just over a week before, and then tried to pull him over, using marked police cars with sirens and lights.

But in their opening statement, the defense argued that a policeman’s body camera will show that, after complying with officers, pulling over for them and showing his hands, the cops took “defensive positions behind the doors of both cars.”

“This is what Mr. Gaulden is looking at. He sees… this isn’t a traffic stop. This isn’t where they go up and ask for his license, his registration… they’re talking to him on a megaphone,” said the defense. They went on to state that the indictment doesn’t mention that it was “4, 5, 6, 7 police cars marked and unmarked all pulled up behind him,” which they say can also be seen in the body cam footage.

“Police officers are moving towards the front with hands on their weapons,” the defense continued, adding that it was at this moment that Youngboy fled in his car, not understanding why he’d been pulled over or that there was a warrant out for his arrest.

In their dueling opening statements, the prosecution and the defense both noted the speed of the Maybach as it raced down the street — and that the car caught air after hitting a speed bump. To indicate the danger this posed to the public, the prosecution noted the bump was positioned as Youngboy “approached an elementary school and passed a middle school.”

Soon after, Youngboy abandoned his car and began to run away on foot. He was ultimately discovered hours later near the backyard of a stranger’s home in Tarzana and his car was searched by law enforcement.

In its opening statement, the prosecution explained that during a search of the full car, the loaded gun was discovered along with Youngboy’s ID, credit cards and “half a million dollars worth of expensive watches, jewelry, much of which was custom made for the defendant with his rap logo.”

But the defense noted that despite the indictment stating that the tan-colored gun was discovered on the floor behind the front passenger’s seat of the car, multiple people searched the Maybach before the gun was found — something they described as unlikely given how prominent the firearm would have been against the car’s black carpet. Describing the body cam footage, the defense further attempted to poke holes in the prosecution’s assertion about the position of the gun by noting that it appeared an officer in question was “rummaging through something” during a search of the backseat of the vehicle on the driver’s side, but that “never once at that point does [the officer] notify anyone that he sees a gun.”

The defense further alleged that law enforcement didn’t properly document where the items were discovered inside the car, stating, “They didn’t take photographs to show exactly where [the] items were all found. What they’re doing is moving things around and taking photographs.”

Elsewhere in the prosecutors’ opening statement, which was far briefer than that of Youngboy’s legal team, they argued that Youngboy was captured on video in Baton Rouge, Lousiana with the “same exact type of gun” discovered in Tarzana, as well as in a photo in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania a few months ahead of his arrest.

But the defense argued this evidence doesn’t prove the charge at hand.

“[This case is] about this gun, at this place, at this time… The government is going to spend half of their case talking about stuff that happens in cities far away at times far in the past,” the defense argued.

The Los Angeles trial is scheduled to continue over the coming weeks. Youngboy is also facing trial in a separate case in Louisiana, where he is charged with illegally possessing drugs and firearms that were discovered during an arrest in Baton Rouge in September 2020.