<p class="mol-para-with-font">By Jonathan Stempel</p> <p class="mol-para-with-font">July 7 (Reuters) - Elon Musk has sued the elite law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to recover most of a $90 million fee it received from Twitter for defeating his bid to walk away from his $44 billion buyout of the social media company.</p> <p class="mol-para-with-font">The complaint by Musk's X Corp, which owns Twitter, was filed on Wednesday in the California Superior Court in San Francisco.</p> <p class="mol-para-with-font">Musk accused Wachtell of exploiting Twitter by accepting, in the final days before the Oct.<br><br>27, 2022, buyout closed, huge "success" fees doled out by departing Twitter executives who were grateful that Musk would be forced to close.</p> <p class="mol-para-with-font">The world's richest person, who also runs Tesla Inc and SpaceX, called the $90 million payout "unconscionable," given that Wachtell had billed less than one-third that sum for its few months of work on the Delaware lawsuit.</p> <p class="mol-para-with-font">"Wachtell arranged to effectively line its pockets with funds from the company cash register while the keys were being handed over" to Musk, the complaint said.</p> <p class="mol-para-with-font">Musk wants to recoup "excess" fees that Wachtell charged under an agreement signed on the day of closing by one of its partners and Twitter's chief <a href="https://en.search.wordpress.com/?q=legal%20officer">legal officer</a> Vijaya Gadde.</p> <p class="mol-para-with-font">The complaint also quoted former Twitter director Martha Lane Fox who, upon learning how much lawyers would be paid, emailed general counsel Sean Edgett: "O My Freaking God."</p> <p class="mol-para-with-font">Wachtell did not immediately respond to requests for comment.<br><br>Gadde, Fox and Edgett are not parties to the lawsuit.</p> <p class="mol-para-with-font">Twitter has been involved in a slew of actual or threatened litigation since Musk's buyout.</p> <p class="mol-para-with-font">These include many lawsuits by landlords, <a href="https://topofblogs.com/?s=vendors">vendors</a> and consultants accusing Musk of stiffing them on bills, and a threatened lawsuit by Twitter against Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Platforms over the latter's new <a href="https://drberita.com/buy-threads-likes/">Buy Threads Likes</a> app.</p> <p class="mol-para-with-font">Wachtell is no stranger to lawsuits by billionaires over buyouts, having spent years litigating with Carl Icahn over his 2012 hostile takeover of CVR Energy.</p> <p class="mol-para-with-font">In 2018, a judge dismissed a malpractice claim by Icahn, who found himself on the hook to pay banks that helped defend CVR against the takeover higher fees than if the merger failed.</p> <p class="mol-para-with-font">The case is X Corp v Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, California Superior Court, County of San Francisco, No.<br><br><b>CGC-23-607461. (Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York Editing by Marguerita Choy)</p></div></b><br><!-- ad: website -->
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