Elon Musk terminated his offer to buy TWTR 0.00%↑ at $54.2 (or $44B for the total deal value). I was in shock and disbelief when he announced the deal. Twitter is a platform that is fun to be a user but is a nightmare to be the platform moderator. Why does he want to go to hell? Elon Musk is the greatest innovator of our time. I have a lot of respect for him for making amazing things like Tesla cars and SpaceX rockets. But his action here is causing himself and Twitter unnecessary giant trouble and it doesn’t appear that he could get out of this mess easily.
He had plenty of opportunities to get out of this deal when it was first announced. But he pushed forward and signed an agreement with the Twitter board. I even got pitched for participating in the deal as a private syndicate investor. We know he is an against-the-grain kind of person but I think this time he simply took it too far. I suppose this outcome is still slightly better than him actually buying twitter though. His Tesla and SpaceX stocks could have been liquidated if he got a margin call for the loans he used to purchase Twitter if the market keeps tanking. Money aside, Twitter is a big hot potato. The Twitter purchase would have caused him an extreme amount of agony. Sure he likes Twitter a lot and he is a super active user with many followers. He is also so rich that if he really wants, he could really afford the $44B price tag. But the fact he could doesn’t mean he should. He shouldn’t have got involved in the first place. Well, I suppose sometimes when people have too much money, they start to do wicked things that make no sense. This is just an extreme version of it.
Now he finally came to his senses. But Twitter board is having none of this BS. Even if Bret Taylor (The Twitter board chair) and other directors on the board did not want to pursue damage personally, they have to do that for the shareholders. Twitter shareholders deserve better. They are suing Elon to force through the merger. The final outcome of this lawsuit would be an interesting precedent. My bet is that he would have to pay way more the the $1B breakup fee to get out of this mess.