Twitter Says It Has The Votes To Approve Musk Acquisition

Twitter said on Tuesday that, based on a preliminary tally, it has a sufficient number of votes from shareholders to approve Elon Musk's $44 billion acquisition of the social media giant, reports Fox Business.

In April, Twitter accepted the Tesla chief executive's offer to acquire and take it private at $54.20 per share. 

Musk has since filed three separate termination notices in an effort to walk away from the deal after claiming the company has breached its obligations under the acquisition agreement. Musk claims that Twitter has misrepresented the total number of spam and fake accounts on its platform. 

Twitter, which maintains that spam and fake accounts make up less than 5% of its users, has repeatedly called the termination notices "invalid and wrongful" and is suing the world's richest man in the Delaware Court of Chancery in an effort to get him to follow through on the deal's original price and terms. The legal showdown will kick off with a trial beginning Oct. 17. 

The shareholder vote comes after Twitter's former security chief Peiter "Mudge" Zatko testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. 

Zatko filed a whistleblower complaint with Congress, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice in July accusing Twitter of "extreme, egregious deficiencies" in its cybersecurity.

"The company's cybersecurity failures make it vulnerable to exploitation, causing real harm to real people," Zatko told lawmakers. "When an influential media platform can be compromised by teenagers, thieves and spies, and the company repeatedly creates security problems on their own, this is a big deal for all of us."