Elon Musk is About to Screw Up

Elon Musk’s famed/lampooned $44 billion takeover of Twitter is finally complete after a half-year saga. Musk’s schizophrenic involvement with the company lurched from his potential launch of a competitor, to purchasing an enormous stake in the company and taking over a board seat, to suddenly being off the board and suggesting a friendly takeover… which then became kind of a hostile takeover… which he then tried to back out of… followed by what — kitchen sink PR stunts aside — is more than likely a begrudging acceptance of the deal to keep himself and his investors from getting schwacked in court.

Over the last six months the calculus of the deal has shifted heavily away from a can’t-lose bid to own a massively popular but financially/operationally troubled social media platform, and into Twitter’s favor. Musk has now admitted out loud to the press that he and his investors are massively overpaying for the bird app and playing a “long game.”

Musk tried to back out of the deal last summer as that calculus tipped out of his favor, citing Twitter’s supposed failure to disclose the extent of fake accounts on the platform (which is funny, because the enormity of this problem was precisely the thing Elon said he wanted to buy the company to fix, in addition to turning his…