I don't sympathize with Twitter, at all, I truly hope it disappears one day. But this is a bit too much for Musk.
The pedo tweet, the "funding secured" incident, then this, coupled with his erratic behavior overall. No one would ever trust or want to do business with him again.
Btw, he's not screwing up just Twitter, but also all other banks and investors that went along with this bid. Musk is rich but he's not "40B in cash" rich, next time he goes to Morgan Stanley or any of the big banks asking for leverage he won't be as well received.
Elon won’t even have to fight the battle let alone win it. Others may (note “may”, not “will”) do it for him.
EDIT:
Here’s one finding on fraud in an M&A transaction that also adds to Elon’s leverage: https://www.huntonak.com/en/insights/de-court-addresses-frau...
This, combined with Elon's apparent lack of willingness to engage in a professional and appropriate manner (i.e. his willingness to publicly disparage Twitter during negotiations and closure, and to respond to what appear to be good-faith responses with childish responses like poop emojis) along with his past behaviour, suggest to me that a judge might find it difficult to believe that Elon entered into the purchase contract in good faith and instead might find it easier to believe that he was entering into the agreement in order to extract value from Twitter at Twitter's expense.
The random groups that have tried to measure bots, have measured 9-20% of *users who posted recently* as bots. We know that most users are lurkers by like a factor of 10x, I take this as strong support of twitter's <5% mDAU number. Those independent estimators wouldn't even know how many twitter counts as monetizable. Remember that their number is about percent of users causing revenue that are bots. Not amount of fake discourse, etc.
The whole "but the bot percent!" is just distraction. Musk is trying to get out of the deal, or at least pay a shitload less, after noticing that the markup he's paying has grown by like $9 billion.