This ad hominem has nothing to do with Elon's legal standing with regards to whether or not he can back out of the deal without paying a large breakup fee.

Yes Elon has done great work for humankind, but that doesn't absolve him of responsibility for bad behavior.

I think the above comment is largely targeted at the many character attacks against Musk and less so at commentary on the legality of this whole Twitter thing.

> Sure, he won't mind paying that I believe.

I strongly beg to differ. The purported damage may be in the low tens of billions. It doesn't mean that Twitter will get that much, but they'll certainly sue for that much.

> And he will likely create a new social media and crush twitter.

What makes you believe that that is likely? I don't see any evidence for it whatsoever. Twitter has an incredible moat. Just because Musk is going to start a twitter competitor (which I doubt he'd bother doing since he's already so busy) doesn't mean it will be successful, if it even ever gets off the ground. Most likely it will be a small niche community.

> I was talking about people attacking him just for being rich and accusing him of having an "inflated ego"

Clearly the man has an inflated ego if he thinks he can pull nonsense like this and get away with it. You could make a reasonable argument that he's "earned" that ego, but that's different from whether or not he has one.

In the ted interview he did recently he said he had a plan B. And that plan was clearly to create a new social media, if you watch the interview you will notice. I honestly don't think he was trying to pull anything. If you see a product that seems made of real gold and then when you ask the seller to prove it's gold, they go round and round not actually answering your question, why would you buy it? Better to put that money into another product. It's common sense, people should stop being so cynical. It's a distorted and sad world that one. As Elon said once "I prefer to be optimistic and wrong rather than pessimistic and right".

Elon says a lot of things that don't pan out. Unlike a TED interview, buying Twitter was made into a legal obligation.

Elon has a bad time prediction engine for predicting how much time something will take his companies to achieve. But please let me know of something that he said that turned out to be a lie or actually impossible by the laws of physics. Because I never heard him say anything like that. And he will pay whatever tens of billions he has to pay. He really doesn't care about money.

It's not success until the first long term mission dies a desperate unnecessary death.

Sure, let's wait until the sun expands and kills all life on earth. All because of the fear of a single accident killing a few people. Sound logic.

I am not saying that whatever attempted Mars missions should be delayed, I'm saying you should probably wait to reward the credit until it's a little closer to fruition.

I understand your point. But if you follow the achievements of spacex and the current progress of starship, they clearly are making the most progress of any group of people in this direction.

The IT industry is extremely left leaning on the whole. People who are intelligent enough to know better, it's a very strange phenomenon.

Twitter has one of the worst interfaces known to man, I'm amazed anyone uses it.

This is really strange! I'm a tech entrepreneur, but don't personally know many others. Critical thinking should prevail in the tech industry, not this nonsense.

I see your original comment is "flagged", there was nothing untoward about it. I don't know why the cowards can't just leave comments alone.

They flagged it because either the truth hurts or it went against their ideology.

The latter, they literally can't recognize the truth.

I hope for their sake a large portion of them break free of their ideological prisons during their lifetime.