A tweet too far

The story of how the world’s richest man came to acquire Twitter played out like a reality TV show. On March 25, Elon Musk tweeted a poll question:

 Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?” Meaninglessly, 70% of people who saw the tweet clicked No”.

Musk later revealed he had already bought 9.2% of the company. He accepted, then declined, a place on Twitter’s board, signed an agreement to buy the whole company at an astounding valuation of USS44 billion, tried to back out, claimed to have been misled, was sued to enforce the deal, countersued and then, shortly before a court case he would very likely have lost, finally agreed to buy at the original valuation. In the midst of it all, he replied to a tweet from Twitter boss Parag Agrawal with a poo emoji. The emoji formed part of the Twitter board’s court filing.