What's concerning to me is that this Australian court is considering the intricate details of Nevada's merger law at all. From reading this article, it sounds to me that if Nevada changed its merger law so that an acquiring company didn't keep legal liabilities imposed by other countries on the acquired party, the Australian court would have decided that indeed, X doesn't have to pay Twitter's fine. Which is an insane takeaway IMO.
We should be looking at this through the lens of Australian law only, and trying to figure out what Australian merger process is mostly closely related to the Nevada one which was used.
The article mentions that the fine will stand and likely be doubled, but I feel like for arguments that are especially stupid, like this one, it should be doubled again.
There are enough corporate loopholes as it is, I can only imagine the chaos if this were allowed.
I might just be misremembering, but I don't think the fine itself increased, it's just that their total costs have increased since they have to pay the legal costs for both sides.