The Spicy Texts Between Elon Musk and Parag Agrawal

On October 4 — in a plot twist — tireless Tesla tycoon and richest person in the world Elon Musk said he would carry out the original $44 billion buyout of Twitter, which he had first proposed in April. In the intervening months, Musk has been flaky at best, insidious at worst — flip-flopping between doing the deal and completely backing out, blaming everything from Twitter spam accounts to not liking the market conditions. To be fair, tech stocks have tanked considerably since his April proposition. By sealing the deal, Musk would effectively kill a lawsuit that Twitter has brought on that could have forced Musk to do the deed anyway.

Musk originally committed to buying the company back in April after purchasing a 9% stake, and the board hungrily accepted. But in July, Musk backed out of the deal, accusing Twitter of fraud for undercounting fake spam accounts and not doing enough to remove them. Twitter responded that the data they shared was accurate, with CEO Parag Agrawal presenting a data breakdown in a tweet thread — and Musk responding with a simple poop emoji. All of this led to the company filing a lawsuit against Musk soon after to push the acquisition through. If Musk agrees to complete the purchase of Twitter, the trial that was set to begin on October 17 is moot. As things stand, both sides are still actively negotiating the terms of the new agreement. He now has until October 28 to finish the transaction.

To summarize, one might simply call this: mess.