Elon Musk's Twitter deal is back on - but will he follow through?

Like most of its regular users, Elon Musk loves to hate on Twitter, usually via the medium of Twitter.

Early on the morning of 9 April 2022, he sent a tweet observing that some famous people don’t post very often, asking: “Is Twitter dying?”

It was a valid, if overblown, question, but at that point, Musk was in talks to join the social network’s board of directors, which made it an odd opinion to fire off in public.

So, later that day, Twitter’s new chief executive, Parag Agrawal, politely asked Musk to stop.

“You are free to tweet ‘is twitter dying?’ or anything else about Twitter,” he texted, “but it’s my responsibility to tell you that it’s not helping me make twitter better in the current context”.

To an outside observer looking back, this seemed like a calm, adult response to trying circumstances. At the time, Musk didn’t think so.

He threw what can only be described as a tantrum, texting Agrawal, “What did you get done this week?” and writing “I’m not joining the board. This is a waste of time,” before vowing to buy the company instead.

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These text messages were released as part of the court case between Musk and Twitter, which was launched when – spoiler alert – Musk’s eventual purchase failed to go through.

After initially committing to buy Twitter for $44bn (£38.4bn), he quickly backed out, citing concerns about the number of spam bots on the platform.

You might say – well, that’s what happens when you sign a contract without doing any due diligence.

Or you might say – if you’re worried about spam bots, prove that they’re having a “material adverse effect” on the business, the high bar you need to demonstrate to wriggle out of the deal.

And indeed, that’s what Twitter did say, suing Musk to enforce the contract.

The court case wasn’t going especially well for Musk, not least because it was leading to embarrassing disclosures about his personal contacts.

Now he’s had yet another change of heart, saying he will honour his contract and buy Twitter, and throwing off a tweet to his 107 million followers about his plans to turn it into “X, the everything app”.

No doubt this gnomic statement will inspire many thousands of words of earnest analysis, but given recent history, why should we take it seriously?

If he was really going to go through with the deal, wouldn’t Musk have put out a joint statement with Twitter? If he was serious about his plans, wouldn’t he have developed them, at least to the point of coming up with, well, a plan?

Reading Musk’s public statements and private texts, it’s hard to avoid the impression of a man who made an expensive purchase in a fit of pique, before having second thoughts when he realised what he’d got himself into.

The context here is that the recent downturn in the markets means Musk has not only lost a substantial portion of his personal wealth, but also made the price he paid for Twitter in April seem embarrassingly high.

Yes, Musk has agreed to buy Twitter, but he said that before and then declared the deal he’d signed “on hold”.

Don’t bet on a deal going through just yet.

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If you’re shaking your head or rolling your eyes at this point, spare a thought for Twitter’s employees, who have had to endure months of uncertainty and barracking from their possible future boss. Imagine how they feel.

And yet, behind the posturing and the tantrums, Musk does occasionally have a point. Twitter certainly has lots of problems, not least the fact that it’s known in tech as the place where nothing ever gets done.

When Musk texted Mr Agrawal, “What did you get done this week?”, he was expressing a widely held view in Silicon Valley. Twitter should be a titan. Instead, in the words of Mark Zuckerberg from over a decade ago, it’s “a clown car that drove to a goldmine and fell in.”

Musk is a social media troll, an unreliable investor, and an entrepreneur of true genius, who specialises in taking spares and parts and putting them together into something that really works.

Buying a $44bn company in a fit of pique and then backing out of it twice would be an incredibly Elon Musk move.

So would using that same pique to turn it into something brilliant.

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