By: Bryan Li

Elon Musk’s financial backers were going to loan him half of the money he needed to buy Twitter, The Washington Post claims. Now, Musk cannot back out of his deal, and the banks lending him money can’t back out of it, either.

In April this year, Elon Musk entered a deal to buy Twitter with a promise to improve the social media platform. Now, he is trying to back out because Twitter has not given him ample information on the amount of fake and spam accounts. The Washington Post says that Twitter is trying to sue him to close the deal.

The banks, including Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Barclays, who agreed to help fund the purchase, cannot back out either. Technically, they could back out of their promise, as Adam Badawi, a law professor at the University of California, says, but it would destroy their reputations and other companies would not trust them.

According to The Washington Post, Musk will pay 33.5 billion out of the 44 billion dollars needed to buy Twitter, and the banks would loan him the rest of the money. Now, Musk wants to back out, and the banks don’t want to loan him money.

“Musk doesn’t want to own Twitter, the banks don’t want to fund it. We’re in this weird ‘Alice in Wonderland’ situation trying to force this guy to buy a company he doesn’t want to buy,” Tom Henderson, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.

The Washington Post also claims that Musk’s attacks on Twitter have lowered its reputation, and that many employees and users don’t want Musk in control of Twitter. The Washington Post claims that Ev Williams, one of Twitter’s founders, said that he would “be asking if we can just let this whole ugly episode blow over.”