[chaseideas]

Definitely seems like there was some creative liberty in the submission title.

I suppose a "refusal" could be inferred by the lack of their acceptance on the initial buyout offer and their (apparent) rebuttal of a $2.5bil valuation.

For instance, if I offered you a million dollars cash for your house and you came back to me with an appraisal saying it was valued at $20mil... I think it would be clear (or at least strongly insinuated) that you refused my offer of a million dollars.

Thinking that's kinda what happened here? Seems like Elon didn't take to their method of countering and called the whole thing off.

Just my $0.02 and I'm not privy to all the inside-details. Could've gone down entirely different than any of us know.

Plus, it seems like there's a LOT of infighting among the co-founders and previous team. Will be curious to see if more information emerges.

[Alexx]

In the UK at least, under case law (Hyde v Wrench, 1840), if you give a counter offer it legally voids the original offer. So if you offer to buy something for £1m and the seller responds that they will sell it to you for £2m, the original £1m offer is legally terminated - so in the UK, legally speaking, this would count as a refusal.

Unfortunately I'm not familiar with how this translates over to US law, but I'd be interested to find out.

[dietrichepp]

That's an interesting question about US case law, but my guess is that the negotiations had lots of clauses like "this supercedes any prior offer" and in this case things are a bit cut and dry, legally speaking. That's why we have lawyers, after all.

[SamReidHughes]

I remember learning that this was how things work in the US, too.