Did Elon Musk Give Up Because His Rich Friends Were Mad?

Ignore the past few months of vicious legal battling.
Photo: Carina Johansen/NTB/AFP via Getty Images

The world’s richest man has capitulated in his quest to break his most expensive promise ever — spend $44 billion to buy Twitter — according to a Bloomberg report announcing the news. The news emerges after what was probably his worst week ever in the trial, a particularly rough one for many of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley, whose texts revealed that these supposed investment geniuses are a bunch of simpering yes-men trying to use Elon Musk to further their riches.

I’ve reached out to Twitter’s and Musk’s side — they’re not returning phone calls, but Bloomberg reports that a letter has been sent to Twitter. The letter was sent overnight, according to the Washington Post, and Twitter will likely take a day to consider whether or not to accept the proposal. (It appears that this isn’t technically a settlement, and there may be more litigation down the road to keep the deal from falling apart again). So all this legal back-and-forth ended up being for nothing. (At least we all got a good laugh out of it?)

Twitter v. Musk has been the biggest case in the business world in about a decade — a high-stakes and often confusing clash between one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful men and one of the most influential social-media companies in the world. In April, after Musk had quietly amassed a stake in the company, he offered to buy it outright for $54.20 a share, an amount that represented a premium above its stock price, and included his characteristic weed joke. It was a shotgun marriage: a deal signed after no due diligence from Musk that gave him very little room to terminate the whole thing. Soon after, markets tanked, as did the market value of Twitter. Since Musk’s personal fortune was caught up in his falling Tesla shares, his own wealth was on the line. Musk complained about spambots on the platform, and those complaints became his pretext for scuttling the deal entirely. The animosity on both sides grew, so by the time Twitter filed its complaint asking a judge to enforce the deal, the company was insisting that a man who it said was untrustworthy should buy it even though he no longer wanted to — a deal that would make only the shareholders happy. After that, it emerged that there was a whistleblower who had gone to Congress and the SEC to say that the company was rife with fraud, which Twitter denied.

It’s worth speculating on why this is happening now, with a trial scheduled to start in less than two weeks. It’s been apparent from early on, before the first complaint was filed, that Musk would have an extremely hard time getting out of this deal, and the odds of him winning only shrunk as time went on. The cost of actually financing this deal has skyrocketed since interest rates have only gone up since this past spring. Musk’s deposition is also scheduled for later this week. The crux of the trial revolved around…