How is being concerned about fake user numbers irrational? It's rational to be concerned that the stats a company is being sold to you are correct.

I meant Musk's behavior generally. Trying to pawn off an employee in a suit as a robot, the DOGE pump and dumping, joking about taking tesla private at $420 a share, calling that guy a pedo to his massive twitter following, creating the fake hyperloop project just to attempt to knee cap high speed rail, etc

As for the fake user saga, my take is that it is a transparently weak reason to try to walk back from the deal. I think the real story was that after he lost some financial leverage with the crypto downturn he is no longer able to finance the deal without making significant tradeoffs and decided to walk it back. Everyone who knows the internet well (and Elon lives online 24/7) knows that all social media networks have lots of bots so it's impossible for me to think that this is some surprise to him.

I don't even think he cared much about the fake numbers in terms of the deal. I think he cares about them as a Twitter users.

He made a bet on the company that he clearly always and still does want. Then the price tanked so he made a gamble and used whatever he could to support his side.

From a purely business perspective it's not that big of a deal to risk some emails/messages leaking in discovery in exchange for a few billion dollars. And ultimately he gets what he wants regardless since it's as much a hobby as a business (like owning a sports team that loses money).