Anyway, these outcomes are bad — everything is bad — but they are better than the binary outcomes in court, and I suppose it would be good if one of them happened. 7 If Musk wrote Twitter a check that was much bigger than $1 billion, then Twitter’s shareholders would be, not made whole, but at least mollified. And he might be a little chastened, and might stop going around pretending to buy public companies just to cause chaos. And Twitter would remain Twitter, which, you know, could be better, but could also be worse.
Of course there are obstacles here. Elon Musk is rich, weird and stubborn, and might not settle even when it’s in his best interests. Twitter’s directors are in an awkward spot: They are under a ton of scrutiny, they have a good legal case, and they will probably be sued by disgruntled shareholders if they settle for anything less than specific performance at $54.20 per share, even if doing so is in shareholders’ best interests. Nothing about this deal has been especially rational so far, and there is no reason to assume that it will settle rationally now. But it would be nice.
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