I called it. I’m allowing myself this gloat because I have been spectacularly wrong with predictions, some rather memorably. “The English aren’t going to cut themselves off from the trade and travel privilege of being in the EU,” I opined in 2016.
But this one I felt sure from his first public bellyaching on the bots issue in May: Elon Musk was going to try tanking his own Twitter deal, and then he’d gaslight the world about how everything went south so quickly.
Last Friday proved me right when he announced his intent to terminate the offer previously made to purchase Twitter at a ludicrous $44bn. His cited reasoning? Multiple breaches of the merger agreement. Twitter then confirmed at the weekend that it intends enforcing the deal via the courts.
It’s just the latest step in the awkwardly aggressive tango they’ve been dancing for months. But it’s important to keep the timelines and milestones clear in our minds, because there is no doubt that Musk would rather you swallow his version, and it’s simply not rooted in fact.
You see, like any savvy narcissist Musk has made a habit of seeding his ideas into the world before announcing them, and then using the seedlings he plants to triangulate his positioning. So when the big bust-up comes it looks to a casual bystander like natural progression.
That’s what Musk was doing in the first quarter of the year with his Twitter polls about changes on the platform while he was buying up shares, and it’s what he was doing in the second quarter by holding up the bots (and fake accounts) figure as a huge sticking point in the deal.
There’s another classic narcissistic trait on display here with Musk: gaslighting. He’s been reframing the narratives for weeks. Take this tweet of his, shared after Twitter confirmed it was pursuing legal enforcement of the deal: a meme of himself laughing, getting more and more hysterical, with the text, “They said I couldn’t buy Twitter. Then they wouldn’t disclose bot information. Now they want to force me to buy Twitter in court. Now they have to disclose bot information in court.”
Like any savvy narcissist Musk has made a habit of seeding his ideas into the world before announcing them, and then using the seedlings he plants to triangulate his positioning.
But let’s consider what happened from another perspective, like for example the perspective of this tweet from author and outspoken lefty Patrick S Tomlinson, just one of many people who have countered Musk’s version publicly: “You waived due diligence. They gave you all the data you asked for anyway. That’s not how discovery works. I thought billionaires were supposed to be smart.” It’s a little pithy, sure, but he does encapsulate what some of Musk’s critics feel: we see what you’re doing here.
The analysts almost uniformly agree that Musk’s offer for Twitter was an overbid when he made it. It’s not that Twitter isn’t a hugely important platform for news, opinion and debate, but rather that monetising Twitter has proven hard for various leadership teams over many years, and its challenges aren’t as simple as Musk seems to suggest with his banging on about edit buttons.
It was a premium bid from a man with so much money he could perhaps suck up the cost for the sake of a ludicrous pet project, but then came the mess that was May in the markets, with tech stocks in particular feeling the bear bite. Musk’s own worth — linked as it is to Tesla’s — has declined. CNN says shares of Tesla are down about 30% since the start of the buy-Twitter farce.
That’s when the buyer’s remorse hit. Ever since Musk has been seeking an exit. To extricate himself, commercial legal experts say he needs to show that Twitter misled him to the degree of having a “material adverse effect” on the company’s true value. Without that, experts say it’s likely he will have to pay a $1bn penalty to walk away, or proceed with the deal at his original bid.
As for the matter of the bots and how many there are or aren’t, Twitter has repeatedly stated that it estimates its bot count to hover at less than 5% of users, and it provided Musk with a large sample for his own investigation. Last week it told Reuters reporters that moderators are daily deleting as many as 1-million spam accounts from the platform.
Disdain
That’s not an insignificant number, and Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal has also explained why the number is so tricky to pin down. His opening gambit on his tweet thread (from mid-May) was a barely veiled critique of Musk’s table-thumping communications style: “Let’s talk about spam,” wrote Agrawal, “And let’s do so with the benefit of data, facts, and context … ”
Musk has treated this deal, Twitter staff and shareholders with disdain, starting with his initial (late) disclosure of his Twitter share acquisitions, in which he said he’d be a passive investor only, an outright lie. He’s repeatedly trashed the company publicly, despite that being against the terms of his purchase deal.
He’s used his huge Twitter following to elevate criticism of senior Twitter staffers. Even the bots issue itself is a red herring: the matter of bots and fake accounts was something he promised to fix once the deal had gone through, rather than something that could trip up the deal.
So one more time, for the record — and spinning off Agrawal’s tweet — let’s talk about Musk, and let’s do so with the benefit of data, facts, and context …
• Thompson Davy, a freelance journalist, is an impactAFRICA fellow and WanaData member.
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