In what may turn out to be the single most relatable thing he’s done in his entire life, Elon Musk appears to be seriously regretting a decision related to Twitter. Which is to say that that car manufacturer/“primary generator of headlines that feature the phrase ‘secret twins with a co-worker’ in recent weeks” is attempting to terminate his ongoing merger agreement with the social media company, valued at $44 billion, and also some fairly decent chunk of Elon Musk’s ego, which is, of course, priceless.
Given that Musk’s entire plan to purchase Twitter, which he’s been fulminating for months at this point, appears to have been spawned by a desire to up the number of galaxy brain memes he gets featured in on the daily, it’s hard to parse his exact motivations for pulling out of the deal. The stated reason is that Musk is contending, as he has for several weeks, that the company has failed to give him a full accounting of how many of its accounts are bots, which would hypothetically affect the service’s value to advertisers. But the honest truth is that Musk’s purchase of Twitter has never made much sense from a business point of view anyway—he’s on the hook to pay nearly twice what its shares are worth—so it’s not clear why sound fiscal reasoning suddenly matters now.
Unless, of course, the whole point of the endeavor was to generate more of the live-giving (non-secret-family-related) headlines that Musk so clearly craves, in which case, mission accomplished. (He might also just be trying to shake the share price down, presumably after someone pointed out what a frankly stupid amount of money he’s spending on a project entirely built around his conception of himself as the Tony Stark of Tweets.)
In any case, Twitter’s not happy: Per Deadline, company chairman Bret Taylor has stated that the company plans legal action against Musk, presumably involving the billion-dollar penalty embedded in the current deal that will go against whichever party tries to terminate it.