Everything about this deal strikes me as Elon trying to buy his way out of the fact he illegally acquired stock in a bid for a board seat. At the time, I'm sure he thought it was a clever way out of an immediate problem, and he certainly moved the conversation away from his stock buying shenanigans. I just don't know how he didn't see how the outcome would be...owning Twitter.

So many people have gotten very close to buying Twitter...even Disney. The surface appeal is high but once you think about it for more than ten minutes it's clearly a problematic platform with few solutions that don't drastically lower its value. If Elon ends up not closing this deal with Twitter, I suspect that Twitter will go the way of Tumblr...eventually getting bought by a second tier tech company before being mismanaged into irrelevance.