No, the courts never forced anything.

It was looking like he would lose and the courts would force the sale, but the case was settled without a judgement by Elon fulfilling his initial obligation of buying the website.

No, he wasn't forced to buy Twitter, but he didn't want to pay the $1bn deal failure fee, so instead he spent $44bn to buy Twitter and drive it directly into the ground. But he COULD have just paid $1bn and walked away.

Nah he wanted the narrative power. Twitter is, he argues, the newspaper of record of the internet and he is its editor.

He says that now, but he tried to back out of the deal, so we know he at one point realized the buy wasn't a good move.

I think this is downvoted because (and I could be wrong) he could have paid a breakup fee instead of buying the business. So he wasn't compelled to actually own and operate the business.

No. He couldn't back out as he had already agreed to the 44B. The breakup fee was for if the deal fell through for other reasons, such as Twitter backing out or the government blocking it. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/12/technology/twitter-musk-l...

You are wrong, I’m afraid. The breakup fee is reimbursement for outside factors tanking the deal. A binding agreement to buy means that if you arrange financing and the government doesn’t veto it, you’re legally obligated to close.

> I think this is downvoted because (and I could be wrong) he could have paid a breakup fee instead of buying the business.

No, he couldn't, the widely discussed breakup fee in the contract was a payment if the merger could not be completed for specific reasons outside of Musk’s control.

It wasn’t a choice Musk was able to opt into.

OTOH, IIRC, he technically wasn't forced to because he completed the transaction voluntarily during a pause in the court proceedings after it was widely viewed as clear that he would lose and be forced to complete the deal.

It's a thread about OpenAI. Some people seem to spend their days looking for ways to make every thread about their angst over Musk purchasing Twitter and will shove it into any conversation they can without regard of its applicability to the thread's subject. Tangent conversations happen but they get tedious after a while when they're motivated by anger and the same ones pop up constantly. Yes, the thread is about Musk, that doesn't mean his taste in music should be part of the conversation any more than some additional whining about him buying Twitter should be.