this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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I’ve heard this before, but I don't know where this comes from. Why was he forced to buy Twitter?
He said he'd do it. He paid them to begin the process. He then tried to back out with a variety of tactics, including trying to say that Twitter was mostly bots.
The Twitter lawyers forced him to complete the sale because he has no valid reasons to cancel the contract.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/twitter-elon-musk-timeline-what-happened-so-far-rcna57532
This is a pretty good overall timeline.
The TLDR is that he got pissy at Twitter, made some threats to buy it out, accidentally made some legally binding business decisions (making an offer to buy a majority stake of Twitter), and got sued when he tried to back out. So he had the choice of going through with his offer (which was about 45 billion) or get fined several billions and walking away. That's the way I remember it all going down.
He just did to fuck with the stock price like he is known to do but he went too far with the stunt and when he tried to back out he legally wasn't allowed to; he was contractually obligated to buy it at the inflated price he claimed it was worth.
So I’m not the best to ask, but I’ll put down how I understood it. Basically musk put a “joke” offer on Twitter that he wanted to purchase it for x amount of money. The “joke” offer was for much more than Twitter was valued at and because musk had the means and funds to carry through with the deal it was considered a genuine offer. The board of investor meet and say “yes I want money” and take musk to court over his statements. He loses in court and they find him accountable for his tweet “joke” offer. And the rest is history. If I’m wrong please correct me
That’s not exactly true. He’s talked about buying it for a little bit and was trying to buy enough shares to be on the board. The board essentially made that impossible so that’s when he put out the joke offer to buy it outright. But then he entered legitimate legal proceedings making that offer official and agreed to pay a certain amount in damages if he withdrew the offer. Then he tried to withdraw the offer saying it was a joke. Then they said “ok, pay us the damages you agreed to” and he tried to pretend that wasn’t real. Then eventually agreed to buy to get out of paying damages (and getting nothing out of it) because he knew his excuse would never hold up in court.
So he wasn’t forced to buy it, he was forced to meet one of the two stipulations he agreed to in a contract, one of which was buying it.
Used 45 billion so he wouldn't lose 1 billion.
The man is a genius of a level only seen giving mortgages in 2007.