This is how I remember things: Sometime in April, Elon tried to buy Twitter. Twitter adopted a poison pill. Someone conservative made a stern warning about something something something. (I don’t remember who it was, and googling “Twitter” “poison pill” “warning” isn’t helpful.) So at that point, Twitter (I think) felt like they had to give it the old college try to avoid being sued by people who had money and power. Hence, this merger.
I don’t personally know Elon, this is rank speculation, but everything he’s done makes me think that he’s deeply impulsive, incredibly reactive, hyperfocused when he’s on and completely uninterested when he’s not. So: in April, Elon, egged on by his muskrats, thinks that he can save free speech by buying Twitter and liberating it from wokeness and bots. He’s SUPER DUPER into being seen as this. Twitter negs him enough with the poison pill that now he really wants to show them. So now Twitter is negotiating, and Elon wants to get this deal DONE so that he can strike a pose wearing a cape as Free Speech Man.
Twitter…probably super doesn’t love the idea of Elon? But they also love not being sued. So they’re like, “okay, look, we’re negotiating, right? Let’s just make this contract language EGREGIOUS. And then we can say we didn’t come to terms etc etc etc.” But Elon doesn’t WANT to not come to terms. He wants to be Free Speech Man with a cape made of specific performance. So his lawyers are like, “yo, Elon, you REALIZE that if you want to walk away from this deal, you will be ON THE HOOK?” In this moment, Elon—remember, my head canon of him is both reactive and focused and impulsive, and I don’t actually know him personally!—says, “but I don’t WANT to walk away! Why do I care about this thing that will never come to pass?” So that’s how Elon signed.
And then reality set in. People weren’t hailing him as a defender of free speech—not enough of them. People were like “UGH Elon, he actually wants to DESTROY all our fun, he’s a fun hater who wants the NAZIS to take over everything." People were saying things like, “okay Mr. Musk is your position that people can just post endless photos of tubgirl to this bird app? Because that will destroy it completely.” And Elon’s advisors were saying things like, “um, yes, so what exactly IS your plan for dealing with things like tubgirl?” And he was like, “UGH this is hard can’t we just make it all free speech?”
No, Elon, not unless you want this app to become tubgirl spam. So he wasn’t getting praise and adulation and instead he was being asked to think about how to deal with the people who just take delight in being little shits. Not for free speech. Not for politics. Just to be little shits. In the mean time, people are questioning his judgement as Mr. Great Leader. Owning Twitter is becoming less like a beautiful, billowing free speech cape and more like spiked shackles where every spike is a minute detail that he truly does not care about. At this point, he wants out of the deal. And so he goes to his lawyers and says, “so how do we get out of this?” His lawyers very likely hang up the phone after the conversation and scream “AAAAAAAH!” at top volume for fifteen minutes straight, and then bill him for the time.
This is the point when he starts in on the bot stuff. He asks for an annoying level of information about bots. Some of what he asks for is very likely not actually generated or monitored by Twitter. But he asks for it. Retrospectively. Daily. “We don’t keep that level of detail,” Twitter says. This is great, from Elon’s perspective. He can say that he asked and ASKED and asked and Twitter didn’t provide. In the meantime, Tesla stock is tanking and Elon is probably realizing that it’s gonna be way more expensive than the thought to finance his purchase, and possibly it may not even be doable. But he ABSOLUTELY CANNOT say “I don’t have the money” because that will disrupt everyone’s view of him as the Deal Guy With Money. They’re going to think of him as the person whose check for Twitter bounced.
So he goes harder on the bot thing. He tells everyone he materially relied on Twitters statements about the bots, even though when the deal was inked he was like, “wow this place is FULL of bots, I’m gonna fix that,” which sure indicates he didn’t rely on that. He fucks around on Twitter, making fun of individuals and getting his followers to go after them, hoping that Twitter will try to back out of the deal first. Finally, when it’s clear that Twitter is just not going to let him off scot free when he signed a contract legally requiring him to pay 44 billion dollars, he claims they’ve materially breached the requirement to give him the data he wants.
Now: Do I know that this is what happened? No. Because I’m not psychic and I wasn’t there. But does this fit the facts and my profile of Elon as someone impulsive who loves praise? Yes. Very much.