A longtime Wall Street banker friend wrote to me on Friday night, after the news that Elon Musk had finally pulled the plug on his $44 billion all-cash deal to buy Twitter, to express his distaste for the whole 10-week spectacle. “This is like watching a train wreck in slow motion,” he wrote. “What a clown.”
I asked if, in his forty-plus years of M&A experience, this banker had ever seen anything before like what Elon had just done: thoroughly embarrassing and discrediting himself by signing a merger agreement to buy a company and then reneging on that deal in a fit of buyer’s remorse. “Yeah,” he replied. “When he tried to take Tesla private,” a reference to Elon’s last pathetic M&A failure, in 2018, when he tweeted that he was going to buy Tesla for $420 a share and that he had “funding secured” to do it. Elon did not, of course, have “funding secured,” and paid a $20 million fine, among other penalties, for misleading shareholders.
