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The thing is he's not trying to do that because he actually thinks he's doing a good job.
My theory is that he's not. Imo what happened was:
- Buy a shitton of twitter shares secretly
- announce that you are buying all available twitter shares for a total $44B, significantly pricier than what you bought
- share price shoots up to whatever you're offering as a price, because in theory by buying a twitter share you are now guaranteed that price at some point in the future.
- go "lol actually I'm not doing that" and sell all your shares for profit (keep in mind this would be blatant market manipulation but he already had Elon money to defend himself in court that "well you see there was many bots")
- at this point Elon and Twitter go their separate ways, Elon having defrauded many investors.
- but Elon is a jackass and didn't read the contract he signed properly and actually has to go through with it
- spend $44B of mostly loaned money for a website worth significantly less
- your best bet is now to run twitter into the ground, sell it to whoever wants at a massive loss, and write off the purchase as "failed investment", which is that much taxes your company has to pay next fiscal year. Since his company would have have at least that much tax to pay, this effectively means the purchase was free and you can reimburse loaners with the money you saved doing that.
Ultimately, you still lose money, but in the meantime you: removed the jet-tracking account, destroyed twitter (priceless), got to have an extreme amount of publicity now and forever (articles will still say "Elon's previous Endeavour" or whatever once he sells it).
Obviously the part where you make a large amount of money would have been more ideal but this is damage control for his stock fraud scheme that failed.
How Elon didn't get jailed for market manipulation when he first did it with crypto is beyond me.
At least this time it didn't work out... Probably because when you proclaim intent publicly like that you actually have to follow through, it's a verbal contract effectively. And I suspect that they told him he's either buying it or they're nailing him for manipulation.
He had to buy it because to be able to make these claims the company has to be ok with it, and you sign a contract. These contracts often have provisions that say that if the company is lying about its users, it's revenue etc then the deal doesn't go through. Musk tried to say that twitter lied about how many bots there were, and not go through with it, but the contract he signed said basically "I have decides to buy it regardless, so I waive my right to due diligence" and bob's your uncle.
There wasn't a verbal contract, very much a written one (but you're right that even if not he'd probably have been nailed for fraud anyway)
That's very depressing but probably accurate.