Like a bad marriage, Elon Musk’s relationship with Twitter has faded from impulsive courtship to buyer’s remorse and now to increasingly desperate antics to renegotiate the price of a company for which he clearly overpaid and (finally) knows it. Earlier this week, Musk asked for more data about the multitude of “bots” and fake accounts on the platform, and Twitter played along, offering him direct access to the “firehose” stream of millions of real-time tweets. It was also reported that Elon’s latest efforts to arrange new equity financing—from a group led by Apollo—have been put on hold “until there is clarity about the future of the acquisition.” Neither Elon’s posturing about bots nor the alleged financing issue would allow him to walk away cleanly, but presumably they provide some cloud cover as he works to retrade the deal. 

Honestly, the whole thing has become a joke, except for the members of the Twitter board, or for the Twitter shareholders or employees or the bankers or lawyers still advising Elon, the latter of whom probably thought they were working on an important $44 billion deal and heading toward a big payday.