Elon Musk’s attempted Twitter buyout hits major new snag
Elon Musk announced out of nowhere today that he’s laying off 75% of Twitter employees. Musk was obviously trying to hand the media a juicy storyline that it could plug into a headline and get instant ratings and page views, so long as the media was willing to go along with the premise that Musk’s increasingly troubled attempted Twitter buyout is a done deal.
As expected, most of the media eagerly took the bait, and ran with headlines that – even if they criticized Musk for the imaginary layoffs – nonetheless helped reinforce the perception that Musk’s attempted buyout is a done deal. We wondered what had motivated Musk to try to get these headlines out there. Was he just bored, or was he trying to distract everyone from something else?
Sure enough, not three hours later, Bloomberg is reporting that the Biden administration is discussing whether to subject Elon Musk’s attempted Twitter buyout to a national security review process. This isn’t a big surprise. There were always going to be regulatory hurdles in this deal, and it was never a given that Musk – a bizarre person in general – was going to be able to get his act together and pass those hurdles. And Musk’s recent stunts have only increased the governmental scrutiny that this deal was going to be subjected to.
Musk proposed a ‘Ukraine peace plan’ that was highly favorable to Putin, and then a major news outlet reported that Musk had spoken with Putin before announcing that plan. Musk denies he spoke with Putin about it, but that alone is enough to trigger a national security investigation, given that Musk is allegedly colluding with Putin while trying to buy Twitter.
In addition, after Twitter itself revealed in a court filing that the federal government is investigating Musk’s financial moves in relation to the attempted Twitter buyout, Musk responded by publicly threatening to pull the plug on Starlink in Ukraine, which would have forced the federal government to pick up the tab for national security reasons. Musk relented not long after. But if Musk’s response to learning he was under federal investigation was to threaten to cost the federal government a bunch of money, that has shades of obstruction of justice, and – at the least – was always going to trigger a national security probe into Musk’s attempt at buying Twitter.
This is on top of the fact that even after Musk recently offered to go back to the originally agreed upon buyout price, Twitter refused to accept it, suggesting that Twitter no longer wants the deal to happen.
It’s still far from clear how the Musk-Twitter saga will ultimately play out. But it is abundantly clear that the proposed buyout is anything but a done deal. Even as Musk is busy using the Trump playbook to goad the media into falsely portraying it as a done deal, it turns out the real story is that the deal is in more trouble than ever. The media needs to stop willfully taking this kind of dishonest bait from people like Musk. It may be good for ratings, but it’s bad for the public discourse.
