Mildly Infuriating

My theory is that he's not. Imo what happened was:

• Buy a shitton of twitter shares secretly
• announce that you are buying all available twitter shares for a total $44B, significantly pricier than what you bought
• share price shoots up to whatever you're offering as a price, because in theory by buying a twitter share you are now guaranteed that price at some point in the future.
• go "lol actually I'm not doing that" and sell all your shares for profit (keep in mind this would be blatant market manipulation but he already had Elon money to defend himself in court that "well you see there was many bots")
• at this point Elon and Twitter go their separate ways, Elon having defrauded many investors.
• but Elon is a jackass and didn't read the contract he signed properly and actually has to go through with it
• spend $44B of mostly loaned money for a website worth significantly less
• your best bet is now to run twitter into the ground, sell it to whoever wants at a massive loss, and write off the purchase as "failed investment", which is that much taxes your company has to pay next fiscal year. Since his company would have have at least that much tax to pay, this effectively means the purchase was free and you can reimburse loaners with the money you saved doing that.

Ultimately, you still lose money, but in the meantime you: removed the jet-tracking account, destroyed twitter (priceless), got to have an extreme amount of publicity now and forever (articles will still say "Elon's previous Endeavour" or whatever once he sells it).

Obviously the part where you make a large amount of money would have been more ideal but this is damage control for his stock fraud scheme that failed.