Elon already knew this of course. Buying Twitter was just an excuse to sell Tesla stock at a peak while avoiding suspicion. Now he’s teeing up his excuse to pull out. /conspiracy
This is what I was thinking too. People would panic if he sold that much stock. But if he's just taking out a loan to buy another company it's no big deal.
Or he actually wants to own Twitter and drives up its value by making Twitter known to every person on the internet. Bad news are good news.
It doesn't matter if 5% or 20% or even 40% of Twitter users are bots. If Musk manages to double the number of subscribers by making Twitter a household name then the purchase was a good investment.
Elon pledges Tesla stock as collateral, Tesla stock goes down. Announces deal 'on hold', Tesla stock goes up. Unless he can get the price of Twitter down to where he does not have to use Tesla as collateral, its just a bad purchase decision.
I don't think this is the simplest explanation. The simplest explanation is this: Musk's primary source of financing is Tesla stock. The sudden market downturn took a big chunk out of Tesla stock, which made his financial situation more difficult.
The delay in closing the deal is just that, a delay, in the hope that the market will recover and the price of Tesla stock will recover, thereby making Musk's financing position much easier.
Nobody anticipated the downturn, otherwise Musk never would have made a $54 per share offer for Twitter in the first place, because obviously it's much lower now, as is much of the tech market.
It's hard to believe that making a binding $54 offer on a stock that's only $39 a month later was "4D chess". I do think $54 was a reasonable, maybe even lowball offer a month ago. Twitter itself hasn't changed much in a month operationally speaking, but the whole market changed in valuation.
