Twitter shareholders overwhelmingly approved Elon Musk’s offer to buy the company for $44 billion. The decision was made during a brief conference call with investors from the company’s headquarters in San Francisco.

It means that Twitter will now go to court to force Elon Musk to buy the company.

The meeting came after explosive testimony before the US Senate from Twitter’s former head of security, Peiter Zatko. In April, Twitter agreed to sell the company to Elon Musk, the world’s richest person.

However, the deal fell through after Musk claimed Twitter misled him about the number of spam and bot accounts on the platform.

In May, he stated that he no longer wanted to buy the company, but Twitter claims that Musk cannot back out of the deal.

According to the social media platform, bots account for less than 5 per cent of its monetizable daily active users (those who can view advertisements). Mr. Musk claims it could be much higher.

Twitter is currently valued at $32 billion, far less than Musk’s $44 billion offer.

Today’s vote could have signaled the end of Twitter’s legal pursuit, but shareholders have now approved the company’s legal pursuit of Musk.

In October, the two will appear in front of a Delaware state court. During the hearing, a judge will decide whether Musk is required to buy.

Twitter whistleblower Pieter Zatko was in Washington just before the shareholder decision, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee about alleged security flaws.

He told US lawmakers that the company was “misleading the public” about the platform’s security.

Twitter, according to the firm’s former head of security, was “a decade behind” in terms of security standards. Twitter claims that Mr Zatko Twitter shareholders approve $44 billion Musk deal was fired and that the claims are false.

Zatko has previously backed Elon Musk’s claim that the platform has more spam and fake accounts than it admits, though he did not elaborate on this on Tuesday.

A judge ruled last week that Musk’s lawyers could use the Twitter whistleblower’s testimony in court.

It was mostly about national security issues and had nothing to do with Musk’s attempt to back out of the deal to buy Twitter.

(Adapted from DeccanHerald.com)