My timeline is of course oversimplified; the trigger of the $Billion is less important than it being a stiff penalty for not completing the deal. Generally governments acting in their sovereign capacity (i.e. regulators nixing the deal) is force majeure, but I suppose the seller could claim that, for this amount, the buyer should have performed sufficient due diligence to determine if there was going to be a regulatory issue.
Whether or not the penalty was because of Elno backing out, or external forces is moot, really, because
Not touched on in my timeline was Elmo’s “brilliant” strategy of publicly shitting on Twitter during the “negotiations”, driving the share price way down. I’m sure he thought this was a brilliant strategy to get Twitter at bargain basement prices, but anyone half competent knows you do this before you put your offer on the table. And you don’t make it obvious that you are the one who lowered the value.
At that point, Musk’s offer was especially sweet: it was wildly above current value, and there was no guarantee share prices would go up in the near to intermediate future.
Musk guaranteed that the board was going to fight to seal the deal, and not just let him walk away with a slap on the wrist.
Most likely. The deposition would also have reached into how he was leveraging Tesla and Space X to finance the deal, and shown just how incredibly stupid he was throughout the whole process. The results would probably have been extremely damaging to him and his other companies.
Furthermore, all signs from the chancery court suggested Musk was going to lose, bigly. This was a straightforward, and quite frankly simple, contract dispute. Short of bribing the ever living fuck out of the judge, there was no chance Elno was going to win.
I wish this were true, and this incident is only a footnote in textbooks about why due diligence is so important. But economists—especially from the Chicago School—love huffing billionaire farts, so we’ll be seeing tons of white papers and case studies about why Elno is actually a genius and Evil External Forces™ were really to blame for this debacle. Anything to obscure the fact that billionaires aren’t brilliant ubermensch, just incredibly lucky and often psychopaths.
