I'm not convinced there was a goal behind all this. It smells to me most strongly of manic behavior on Musk's part.

He sold a giant chunk of Tesla shares weeks before the price cratered. It was ostensibly to raise cash to acquire Twitter. But now that he's trying to claim shenanigans and walk away, it's beginning to look more a way to evade insider trading charges.

Yup. Above a certain height, you start drinking your own kool-aid, the people in even your closest circles turn into yes-men, and the world increasingly appears to revolve around you. It's impossible to avoid the hubris that comes from this. And this effect resists even the best efforts to "stay grounded".

Eventually your answer to the "why" becomes simply: because you can.

Seems to me that he did / does want to buy Twitter (not because of free speech or whatever, but as a rich guy vanity project), but then the stock market crashed and now the price he agreed to is way too high so he's trying to weasel out of it or weasel the price down. Either way he's just being a weasel.

it’s been on its way down since November, he was well aware before making the offer.

Yes, but there was a step change in the market between when he signed the deal and now. The price looked generous when he signed (which is not irrelevant; it was an offer the board essentially couldn't refuse, once his financing came in), but it looks absurdly high now. He likely expected it to be flat-ish or down a bit as the deal progressed toward closure, but not nearly this far down.

My theory is that he wanted to threaten to buy Twitter (or actually buy it) to create political pressure on the Biden administration to stop stonewalling the Starship FAA license. There’s murmurings that the FAA is stonewalling Starship due to political reasons. The “threat” of allowing Trump back on Twitter could create leverage to force the FAA political impasse to be dealt with.

I heard this idea from a colleague in the space industry. Going to Mars is one of Musks main goals, and as crazy as it sounds I could see him doing all this Twitter craziness just to move that ball forward.

This one?

https://www.faa.gov/space/stakeholder_engagement/spacex_star...

The results of the review were pushed back by 2 weeks from the original date and it now appears to be on track for the June 13 release. It doesn't mean it's going to be positive, but your version of it is pretty damn far-fetched. Like really super contrived.

> The results of the review were pushed back by 2 weeks from the original date

This is just the most recent of a series of delays. The report was originally due by the end of 2021.