Reminds me of Target's Canada launch. It's literally a case study in business textbooks of how to do everything wrong.

My totally wild idea here is that he's trying to glitch the banking system by incurring the largest possible personal loss (though it's all levered) in history so that he never has to pay taxes for any of his space adventures in the future

To be clear I don't fall into the "5D Chess Genius Elon Musk" trope

However he's smart and a sociopath who has shown expertise in financial engineering using any sources he can with no regard to the fallout so long as it pushes the "Musk as space leader" narrative

Musk doesn't have to pay taxes on his stock unless and until he sells it, which ironically is what he has been forced to do in order to finance the Twitter deal. So if he wanted to avoid paying taxes, purchasing Twitter was the dumbest idea ever. But I seriously doubt that was his reason.

Losing $X money in order to not pay taxes on up to $X income, where you could've just not lost $X in the first place, isn't exactly financial engineering.

I said it before and I'll say it again: If Musk's goal was to destroy Twitter from the inside, he seems to be succeeding. What fascinates me the most is that all of this was worth so much money to him.

He tried to back out of the deal, but his hand was forced. , wasn’t it?

He basically bought it by accident. Maybe he thought he could really do something to improve and then sell for a profit.

But really… it’s like the alcoholic who buys the distillery.