Most of us have been tuning out when it comes to Elon Musk's most recent antics, and for a pretty simple reason: When it comes to immensely powerful people throwing public tantrums because the world around them is not bending to their every petty whim, we can get our fill of that Literally Freaking Anywhere, using any form of media, at any given moment of the day or night. Listening to a rich social misfit drone on about how he alone can fix what ails society is the foundation of our current media economy, requiring our sociopathic betters to invent new ways of being loathsome if they want to stand out from their weird loathsome competitors.
This is also why Republican primaries of late have gone from mere circuses to their most current form, with every far-right candidate promising that they own the monster truck that can efficiently crush socialism-loving kittens, or whatever the J.D. Vance wing of the party is going on about now.
We still have to check in on Musk, though, because his current tantrum threatens to undermine society in an “Abbott is poisoning the baby formula” sort of way, rather than a mere “self-driving vehicle plows through bus stop” sort of way. Musk still claims he's buying Twitter, the currently dominant social platform if you don't count the one already owned by a fabulously rich sociopath willing to wreck the nation for just a bit more cash—but he's also quite obviously attempting to damage Twitter with a series of unending troll tweets questioning everything from the company's honesty to metrics to individual executives.
Washington state Sen. Emily Randall and RuralOrganizing.org's Matt Hildreth talk about what they're seeing and hearing while knocking on doors this week on Daily Kos’ The Brief podcast
Musk is currently engaged in an unsubtle effort to harm Twitter's stock price and destabilize its ability to survive in its current form. Why is he doing this, if his intentions are to purchase the company for $44 billion? Good question!
The only obvious answer is that he never really intended to purchase the company. It was all a performance, from beginning to end. Musk's true goal may only be to do as much harm to the social network as he can, akin to fellow rich sociopathic asshole Peter Thiel's successful destruction of Gawker Media after that media company published things about him that the hyperweirdo super-didn't like.
In the process, Musk keeps firing off claims of company malfeasance that seem clearly intended to sabotage his own bid for the company. In theory, Musk will have to pay one billion dollars to Twitter if he backs out of the deal; in practice, numbers like "one billion dollars" written into contracts are totally irrelevant. It's placeholder language meant to do nothing unless the two parties begin filing lawsuits against one another, at which point the "real" contract will turn out to be whatever the two sides negotiate after approximately one hundred lawyers have all gotten a good chunk of billable hours in.
There are two bits of new news hinting at where things are headed. The first is that the Twitter board is now making it very clear that they intend to hold Musk to the contract regardless of his current sabotage. Musk is, they say, now obligated to buy Twitter and if he tries to back out they're going to go to court not to get a mere billion dollar penalty paid, but to force Elon Musk to pay the full $44 billion he promised and take on Twitter as his own company.
If that sounds confusing, remember that whether Twitter lives or dies here is, when it comes to the "fiduciary responsibility" of company heads, completely irrelevant. The best "fiduciary" outcome is for current shareholders to take Musk's absurdly high offer and walk away. Musk promised Twitter's current stakeholders that he would throw money at them to the tune of $54.20 per share and the people in charge of this deal do not intend to let Musk off the hook unless they get both that money and their contractually obliged golden parachutes. For Twitter's board, this is an exit strategy in a business that has seen yesterday's social media giants turn to sand on a regular basis.
The second bit of news, also from the fine people inside Twitter who want their damn money, is a Twitter proxy statement publicizing the terms of Musk's offer that specifically notes Musk waived doing any pre-deal due diligence on Twitter's internals. "Mr. Musk did not ask to enter into a confidentiality agreement or seek from Twitter any non-public info regarding Twitter," Twitter noted, which is a very important bit of phrasing that emphasizes that Elon had every opportunity to investigate the questions he's now trolling the company with publicly and he specifically refused to do it.
So if Musk is having second thoughts now about how many Twitter accounts might be "bots," or whether advertisers are getting their money's worth when they pay Twitter money, he can pound sand. He could have made his $44 billion offer contingent on those concerns, and he didn't because he's a performative screw-up. So he's still got to pay the money.
That Musk did no due diligence, burped up an offer ending in $4.20 as a continuation of a long-running and adolescent game in which he assures the public that various parts of his empire have values ending in The Marijuana Number and is now engaged in what can only be described as a very aggressive effort to tank the company's reputation and value all suggests that Musk's offer was not sincere—and that Musk may have plotted out this whole event as a stock manipulation scheme.
Whether it's a scheme that was intended to make him money or was just intended to use his own billions to do as much damage to Twitter as he could before running away again remains a mystery, but there's nothing in Musk's behavior that suggests he intends to make money from Twitter.
So that's where we're at. Musk is now tweeting skepticism both about Twitter's value and about his own offer, publicly suggesting that he'll be withdrawing the previous offer and putting in a much lower bid. Twitter is informing their stakeholders that Musk's contract very clearly puts him on the hook for the original price and that whatever bullshit he's currently engaged in is irrelevant because Give Us The Damn Money.
It's almost certainly going to end up in court, but only as a fight between a very prominent company and a very prominent rich sociopath. Whether Twitter survives is secondary, and if it doesn't, well, get ready to move to the next big thing. Do you have a Myspace account? No, you do not. We've all been here before and have learned how to move on.
