TheQuartering [7/11/2022]
Elon Musk took a victory lap by characteristically mocking the Twitter management on their very own platform, following up on his intention to call off the $44 billion acquisition of the social media giants.
In true Musk fashion, the entrepreneur posted a meme of him laughing at the thought that Twitter first rejected his advance before demanding he follows through with it at all cost.
In doing so, the company will now be forced to reveal what Musk believes is its most closely guarded secret: the real number of fake user accounts.
“Now they have to disclose bot info in court,” he tweeted on Sunday, in a post that garnered over a half-million likes.
Whereas any normal company with the usual governance procedures in place would refrain from commenting publicly beyond regulatory filings in an ongoing legal dispute, the comments are classic Musk.
While a $20 million fine imposed by the SEC for committing fraud in relation to his “funding secured” tweet is a lot of money for even the very wealthy, it constitutes barely 1% of his $200-billion-plus net worth.
That affords him the luxury of humiliating his opponents, in particular Tesla short-sellers, and is not above locker-room humor. Fans praised the post, arguing he outwitted Twitter’s board in a game of four-dimensional chess the company didn’t even know it was playing.
Once Musk let Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal know how little he regarded the latter’s lengthy thread explaining how he calculates bot metrics by dignifying it only with a smiling poop emoji.
To fans, this irreverence and a refusal to play by others’ rules is a fundamental part of both his appeal and his success.