It's been fairly obvious that he's been trying to find a way out or to renegotiate the deal after the recent pullback in tech valuations, and is grasping at the bot claims as an attempted excuse to do so.

It's been speculated. What if there's nothing to read between the lines here and he's just saying what he thinks?

What he said was he wants to renegotiate the price or leave the deal. So, it's less "reading between the lines" and more "reading what he wrote"

Are you using this Tweet as your source? Because that's not what he said.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1526465624326782976

No, I'm not basing it off that tweet. I'm basing it off (summaries of) his interview on the podcast "All-In" from mid-May.

I'd be interested in reading those summaries. Would you care to link?

You can find notes on the podcast here: https://podcastnotes.org/all-in-podcast/e69-elon-musk-on-twi...

There's always that possibility, but his history of market manipulation should incline people to distrust his stated motivations.

By history of market manipulation do you mean that his saying things moves markets or that he's actually engaging in criminal activity?

With Musk it's hard to know exactly what his plan is, but I think it's an attempt to either find a way to back out, reduce the overall price, or otherwise cause chaos as an intentional strategy.

More likely global stock markets took a dive which devalued Twitter (and Tesla) substantially making the offer over-priced.

He should have hedged then. If markets have gone up, he would've reaped the benefits and Twitter wouldn't be able to back out.

well maybe he should not have offered a price based on meme numbers then.

This is true, speaking from experience with bipolar people close to me.

No psychiatrist would diagnose someone based on public performances, and non-psychiatrists using pop-psychology to do so is very unpleasant.

This is a wider cultural trend too. The prevalence of Dunning-Kruger pop-psychology YouTube videos (again made by people with zero medical degree) nowadays "teaching" people to recognize "Narcissism", "Psychopathy", "Mania", "Manipulation" etc. is absolutely vile. Just teach people assertiveness and leave it at that.

I’m not diagnosing, I’m saying there is another possible reason. Nothing about Elon tells me he’s not bipolar.

Hypermanic

there is no such this as “hypermania”

there is mania (Bipolar I) and hypomania (“lesser mania”) (Bipolar II)

And for anyone wondering, the difference between the two is the presence of psychosis.

I think it's a character thing for Musk, he's simply the kind of person who does things like this because he can.

That is what Matt Levine has hypothesized for several weeks.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-09/elon-w...

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-06/elon-h...

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-17/elon-m...

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-13/elon-m...

Or maybe he is trying to force them do their jobs (reduce bots/spam) even before he officially takes over

Wouldn’t it be easier to close the deal and just do that thing?

Doesn’t make sense to buy the company to do things and… not just do that.

Especially given the big pitch was that he'd clean up the bots. If there are loads of bots, that would make it easy to get a cheap win and look like a hero.

if you can get the company to do things you think are valuable before you’re making interest payments on money you borrowed to buy it, that makes a lot of sense.

wtf knows if that’s what’s going on.

If it is important wouldn’t you want to do it?

It’s not like flipping a switch, how matters, as does following up on effectiveness and so on. I would think someone planning to run the company would want to do it right…

Twitters job is to make money, so if they can monetize bots nobody has any problem with those.