ÜDonald Trump has been said to want to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral and the baby at every christening. In other words, the former American president’s thirst for attention cannot be quenched. Elon Musk seems more and more like a soul mate in this regard. Apparently it’s not enough for the richest person in the world to run electric car maker Tesla and space company SpaceX while fighting a dispute over the takeover of Twitter.
He also likes to be a Twitter provocateur and willingly fills the gap on the platform that has arisen after Trump’s ouster. He called current President Joe Biden a “wet sock puppet”. This week he tweeted a proposal to end Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine and asked his more than 107 million followers to vote on it. His “peace plan” provided for Ukraine to remain neutral and for Russia to be formally allowed to keep the Crimean Peninsula, which it annexed in 2014. There should be another referendum on the four regions in eastern Ukraine that have just been annexed by force, this time under the supervision of the United Nations. Musk’s move met with little sympathy, the majority of votes were against. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi countered with his own poll suggesting that Musk had sided with Russia. Andriy Melnyk, the outgoing Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, found even heartier words: “Fuck Off”.
Hit like a bomb
Musk’s Twitter foray into geopolitics came when he actually had something else on his mind. Because that same evening he had his lawyers send out a letter that was supposed to hit like a bomb. It said he wanted to buy Twitter after all, at the originally agreed price of $44 billion. After months of drama, he suddenly agreed to do exactly what he had agreed to do in the April purchase agreement, only to vehemently resist. He backed down from backdown, and while negotiations between him and Twitter are still ongoing and disagreements persist, there are now many indications that he will indeed become the owner of one of the world’s most important online platforms. In any case, the eagerly awaited exchange of blows in a court case in Delaware, which was supposed to start on October 17, has been suspended.
This marks the end of a Hollywood-ready takeover spectacle that Musk showed in all its unpredictability and in which even the supporting roles were prominently cast, for example with Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer. In early April, it was announced for the first time that Musk had bought a larger block of Twitter shares. He initially presented it as a passive investment, but it quickly grew into much more. It was agreed that he would be given a seat on Twitter’s board of directors, which also soon lapsed. Instead, he made an unsolicited offer to buy the entire company, which Twitter initially resisted, only to accept a short time later. Just weeks after the deal was signed, Musk backtracked and declared the transaction “temporarily on hold.” In July, he canceled the purchase agreement entirely, whereupon Twitter started the legal dispute and sued him. All the twists and turns made your head spin. Right from the start, legal experts gave Musk little chance of winning in court. After all, he had signed a binding contract, and previously he had expressly waived a thorough “due diligence” by Twitter.
