Musk has decided to buy Twitter after all – so what happens next?

Take note of this: Twitter shares are still trading roughly 10 per cent off Elon Musk’s offer price. Wall Street continues to have doubts about this deal.

I know, I know, Musk seems to have decided that he’s going to buy the thing after all, with a trial looming over his attempt to get out of the deal.

He’s spent months alleging that Twitter misrepresented the number of real users on the site – bots aren’t of much interest to the advertisers who provide the bulk of its revenues – but most legal experts didn’t think he had much chance of using this to get out of the transaction.

I actually thought – and wrote – that the most likely outcome would be a settlement, with Twitter receiving a massive bung to agree to a divorce.

But billionaires aren’t overly fond of losing money like that. And this is Musk, too. You never know quite what he’s going to do next – partly because he doesn’t seem to know. One morning he wakes up and thinks: “Hey, I might buy Twitter. What a cool new plaything! Should be a laugh.” Sometime later he thinks: “Oh crikey. Big tech has taken a hell of a kicking. Maybe this ain’t such a good idea. It’s looking really pricey.”

Oops.

The forthcoming trial has been postponed, we are told, to allow the Tesla impresario time to secure the debt financing he wants to have in place ahead of the deadline to complete.

This bears watching. Lenders have started to get very twitchy and no wonder. They’ve seen what’s been happening to the global economy and they don’t want to be on the hook if this goes wrong while they’re putting out the other fires that have started up in any number of other locations.

There has been speculation that Musk may resort to selling more of his Tesla shares, a chunk of which he’s already disposed of to help with the acquisition of his new toy. The purchase price amounts to about 20 per cent of his wealth. Think of mortgaging a fifth of your home because you fancy flogging non-fungible tokens or something after you’ve finished your day job.

Which brings us to the, um, roughly $44bn (£39.4bn) question: what if it does go through?

Twitter is a highly influential platform, one of the world’s most influential media organisations. Anyone with the interests of humanity at heart might be inclined to ask whether it is in those interests to allow a quixotic billionaire to buy it on a whim, then to pull out on a whim, then to be forced to complete the deal to spare himself a courtroom kicking.

It sounds like the plot of a crazy satire. A twisted latter-day Citizen Kane. Or something. And yet here we are.

Musk has intimated that he wants to turn his libertarian guns on the moderators – who sometimes seem almost as erratic as Musk in the way the company’s policies are applied – and let users have at it.

Of course, the problem with the “neutral digital town square” concept, of making Twitter a beacon of uncensored free speech, is that it mightn’t work so well in practice.

The loudest and most threatening voices would likely come to the fore. There are already more than enough doxxing and death threats to go around on the site. Imagine more. Imagine the trolls being told there are no limits at all.

The fruit loops are delighted and get high as kites spinning lies about vaccines, and stolen elections in America that weren’t stolen, threatening to rain fire on anyone who calls bulls**t on that. Everyone else bolts.

How many liberals are there on Gab? Or Donald Trump’s TRUTH Social thingy?

There are a fair number of users who might be rather pleased if this were to be the outcome. Twitter isn’t known for its promotion of positive vibes, goodwill towards humanity and general mindfulness. A lot of us media types who basically have to use it wish we didn’t.

But we do. And it is in Musk’s interests to keep us there.

The world’s richest man is unpredictable, annoying, spoiled and overindulged like every billionaire is in the West, and most of the rest of the world unless they get on the wrong side of the autocrats where they live. But he’s also a talented businessman.

If he is ultimately forced to complete this deal, maybe he doesn’t run Twitter into a brick wall by turning it into Parler 2.0. Maybe not much actually changes, in terms of the user experience, and he concentrates instead on developing new sources of revenue and trying to keep up with the Joneses and the Zuckerbergs over at Facebook. Sorry, Meta.

I’ll say it again: billionaires aren’t, as a rule, overly fond of losing money.

Musk comes across as the sort of person who would rather enjoy giving the bird to critics of this deal. “Look who’s laughing, now that I’ve got even more billions in the bank!”

#ToughBreak for Twitter’s army of reluctant users who can’t pull themselves away from the thing at the witching hour (and yes, I’ve been there often).