2. Sued into the acquisition
Musk began publicly discussing the possibility of buying Twitter in early 2022. His tweets sent the company's stock price yo-yoing, causing one shareholder to sue for stock manipulation.
In April, Musk, the physical embodiment of a meme, offered to buy the company at $54.20 a share (thought to be a reference to cannabis culture, where 420 is used as slang for consumption), or $44 billion. He secured funding from banks and his own reserves, and registered three holding companies under the name - what else? - X Holdings.
So far, so standard, at least for any Elon business deal. But then it took a turn. Musk, who was banned from disparaging Twitter until the transaction completed, began openly tweeting about his goals for the company. They included open-sourcing the ranking algorithm, authenticating all users as real humans and turning the San Francisco HQ into a homeless shelter. He was also publicly critical of Twitter's management.
In May, Musk took the first step in a long-running saga - putting the deal "on hold" while he investigated the number of spam and bot accounts on the platform. This carried on for months, with no evidence to contradict Twitter's claims that about 5% of accounts were bots.
In July, Musk said he would pull out of the deal, citing spam accounts as a reason. Days later, Twitter threatened to sue the billionaire into concluding the transaction. By that point its shares were worth $37, about two-thirds of what Musk had committed to paying.
Increasingly desperate, Musk made several attempts to dismiss the lawsuit, and also offered to buy Twitter at new reduced prices of $31 billion and $39.6 billion. Both were rejected, and he finally agreed to hand over the cash - again - in October.
