Yea, he weaseled out of the trial like he does everything. I wish the judge would have instead forced the trial to move forward no matter what, making him pay both financially and politically/socially.

This might be semantic quibbling, but although it never came to decision, everybody with any legal knowledge whatsoever knew that the decision would be in Twitter's favor, and I assume eventually Elon's lawyers got it across to him that he had no chance of winning the case. IMO it's likely that, rather than discovery, prompted the surrender - if I could avoid paying $44 billion for Twitter with a couple embarrassing text leaks, I'd take that deal. So in that sense I don't think it's inaccurate to say he was forced by the judge, albeit indirectly.