Texas AG strides into Twitter takeover drama to bolster Musk

WASHINGTON (AP) — State officials across the nation have taken on Big Tech companies in the courts and state legislatures, and federal regulators have nipped at Twitter over alleged violations of users’ data privacy.

Now, one state attorney general with an outsize personality and edge-skating stance nearly in the league of Elon Musk is striding into the maelstrom of Musk’s $44 billion now-tenuous bid for Twitter. He is launching an investigation of Twitter for “potential false reporting” of bots on its platform to bolster complaints Musk himself made this week in threatening to walk away from the deal.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced his investigation of Twitter on Monday just hours after Musk, the billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO, accused Twitter of refusing to disclose the extent of its spam bot and fake accounts.

The unexpected turn in the months-long drama of Musk and Twitter sent that company's shares down 1.5%, likely angering shareholders who had filed suit against Musk last month, accusing him of deflating the stock price. Twitter's shares have tumbled more than 20% in the last month.

Paxton's unusual move struck observers as singular and possibly inappropriate, though he likely has the legal authority to pursue it. In launching his investigation, Paxton suggested that Twitter might have violated Texas' Deceptive Trade Practices Act.

The state attorney general's move against Twitter is far different from the growing legal actions taken by groups of states that have joined to target alleged anticompetitive practices by Google and Meta, for example, or to investigate TikTok and its possible harmful effects on young users’ mental health.

Individual state attorneys general don't normally investigate a major publicly traded company over its regulatory...