This is not the story of some happless kid swindled by a brown ice cream vendor. This is a sophisticated business person who has, prior to signing a legally enforceable contract to buy the brown icecream as-is, talked publicly about how the ice cream is just brown and not chocolate.
Why did the buyer made that contract to be written and then signed it? The potential buyer of the brown ice cream was not taken seriously initially. Everyone, including the seller, assumed that he is going to flake out and not go through with the transaction. The buyer has seen that he is not taken seriously, but he really really wanted to own the brown ice cream at that time. So the two parties willingly went into a written agreement that the buyer is going to pay a lot of money for the brown ice cream. Since the seller had concerns about the flakyness of the buyer, they both instructed their lawyers to write the contract as ironclad as possible. And what gives teeth to contracts like that, is that they can be enforced through the court system.
Because they agreed to buy it? And because you stand to make a lot of money. Doesn't seem that complicated to me.
How isn't this win-win? Musk gets a company for a price he considered acceptable. It's the same company. It's the same price. How was this win-win before when he made the agreement, but not win-win now?
> When you force people against their will, wtf business practice.
Against their will? He made an agreement to buy it. Does canceling the agreement against Twitter's will somehow not matter at all?
> What is the good thing to celebrate about that ? Also when selling companies, employee depend on that. You cannot have an owner who is hostile to your employees. The new owners become hostile because they are not financed enough (because they didn't want the deal), or because the board was hostile and forced the take-over.
If Musk really no longer wants Twitter and wants to reach an amicable resolution, he could start by offering $44 billion minus the current market value of Twitter. Twitter might very well accept that or something close to that. Then Musk wouldn't need to own something he doesn't want, but Twitter would still roughly be getting the overall value agreed upon with Musk.
Nobody gets to the point where they either have significant control over Twitter or have the money to buy Twitter by being ethical.
An ethical person would not have signed an agreement to almost definitely buy Twitter, intentionally giving up several common buyers’ rights on this sort of thing, and then spend the next month and a half trying to get out of it.
Assume positive intent and work ethically and in good faith, but if they clearly demonstrate to you that they don't have positive intent, you don't need to be a punching bag.
Also, letting them renege on the deal they agreed to would likely put you in a worse situation than had they not offered the (bad, for them) deal in the first place, making it harder to feel bad for them.
Ultimately, if a business made a binding agreement, letting them out of it to be nice is nice, but neither required nor financially sensible.