His personal contribution was $20 Billion. The rest was other investors and loans Twitter is responsible for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon...

He was actually forced to buy Twitter.

So the judiciary forced him to acquire his own propaganda machine. Activist judges once again to blame?

Whether he was serious about buying Twitter or not, he put himself in the position where he was legally required to complete the offer to purchase. Nobody forced him into that blunder.

I didn't say anyone forced him to make the original offer.

Huh? Some magic mushrooms forced him to make a bid to buy Twitter? Give the guy some agency!

Who knows what prompted him to make the bid. The judges forced him to follow through on it when he was trying to get out of it.

do you understand how bids work?

"Bid" was hypothesis's word, not mine, so whatever "gotcha" you think you're springing on me, send it elsewhere.

Yes, I know how bids work, at least approximately. It wasn't a bid in the strict sense. It was an offer to buy, which Twitter accepted, and then Musk tried to withdraw the offer (because of too much of the traffic being bots, IIRC). The judge did not allow Musk to withdraw, because there was no such "subject to" in his offer.

The only reason he tried to get out of it was because tech stocks tanked shortly after the bid and he knew he could have gotten it for far cheaper than the $44B. The entire time it was happening I was convinced that if he could get out of the bid he would immediately make another one for around $30B and still buy his favorite addiction. People like him and their motivations aren't that hard to read.

He wasn't _forced_ to buy anything. He was forced to pay what he promised for it.

In what world is requiring someone to fulfill the terms of a legally binding contract judicial activism?

It was a joke.