People are missing the obvious story. He locked himself into a price, then the price of things crashed. It has crashed so much that he's honestly better off just walking away and losing the billion dollars... but he doesn't want to lose a billion dollars so he's gonna do whatever he can do to get out of it.
Oh it's definitely not about a billion dollars. He'd pay that out in an instant if he could. The contract he signed and the law itself is not on his side, he may yet slither out of his commitments, but Twitter would never settle for a mere $1B when they've lost so much more in value due to him.
Twitter hasn't lost anything due to him? Their share price would likely be lower if not for his dumb shenanigans. The contract is pretty clear that he can walk away for $1B, which is a lot of money.
That's not what the contract says. The $1B breakup was only if bank financing fell through, which it did and has not. The banks are still bound by their commitment letters to provide the required financing, and it doesn't look too plausible they could back out of those contracts.
No it doesn't say that, it says that if his third party funding falls through then he's on the hook for a billion dollars instead of buying the company.
There's nothing in the contract about a billion dollars fee for any other reason of the sale not going through.
Of course, a judge could choose to take that number as the amount to punish with, but it's not a price Musk can just choose to pay to get out of the deal.
Only if the deal fails outside reasons like regulatory action. Simply changing your mind, or claiming that you should have done due diligence after you explicitly waved it, doesn't count.
Personally, I want the court to rule for specific performance (ie. Pay the $44 billion) He fucked up.
He offers to buy twitter on a whim, then changes his mind after signing a contract. That doesn't really seem like a good way of getting to the top.