Or are those partners as legally bound to providing him with the loans as he is to buying Twitter?
Again, that makes absolutely no sense at all. Elon Musk signed a contract that either forced him to execute te merger at the expense of tens of billions of dollars, or at best a no-questions-asked escape hatch at a price tag of a billion euros.
Does anyone remotely sane would ever risk losing that sort of cash just to peek at the number of active users of a social network?
Ridiculous.
b) And yet... given the reported clause that he is only on the hook for the 1B if he pulls out, but not if he loses his loans, then the only way I see to make the hypothetical even slightly feasible is if he knew he could get the financing to fall through in a way that he then wouldn't be on the hook for the $1B.
But yes I agree it's a highly unlikely motivation.
No, not really. The Bloomberg article goes into great lengths about the implications of a lower than expected number of active users accounts, and points out in no unclear terms that the claim does not even hold if that number is significantly large, mentioning even half the number of users.
This hypothesis lacks any credibility given that, according to Bloomberg's article, "The [merger] contract gives Twitter the right to force [Elon Musk] to close, and put up the $27.5 billion of equity 1 that he has committed to the deal, as long as his debt financing is available."
No one in their right mind signs a contract binding them to pay up billions just to check how many active users does a social media service have.