Maybe Elon Musk just likes a good joke

Elon’s Out — Matt Levine Elon Musk is the richest person in the world, and, like many other rich people, he has some unusual and expensive h [Bloomberg]( Follow Us [Get the newsletter]( [Elon’s Out]( — Matt Levine Elon Musk is the richest person in the world, and, like many other rich people, he has some unusual and expensive hobbies. One of his hobbies is that he sometimes likes to pretend that he will acquire public companies. He seems to find this fun, and why not? When he pretends that he’ll buy a public company, it creates a big drama with him at the center of it. He gets to boss people around, mobilize legions of bankers and lawyers and financing sources and random hangers-on hoping to get the deal done, and then when he gets bored he can tell all those people to go home. So this April, Musk announced that he wanted to buy Twitter Inc. Why not? Musk seems to get a lot of joy out of using Twitter, and pretending to buy Twitter is a good way to create drama on Twitter. At the time, I assumed that, as with Tesla, he was doing a bit. “Ordinarily,” [I wrote](, “if a billionaire chief executive officer of a public company offers to buy a company, the odds that he is kidding are quite low. When it’s Elon Musk, the historical odds are, like, 50/50.” But he surprised me by quickly lining up financing (paying millions of dollars of fees to banks for commitment letters) and signing a merger agreement with Twitter. Shortly after he signed the deal, the market went down. Twitter is now worth less than Musk agreed to pay for it, and Musk is less rich than he was when he agreed to buy it. These are not valid reasons for Musk to get out of the deal: The legally binding merger agreement that Musk signed with Twitter does not allow him to terminate the deal due to changes in the stock market or his own wealth. But they are reasons that Musk might want to get out of the deal, even if he wasn’t kidding when he first signed it. [Anyway](: “Elon Musk said he’s terminating his $44 billion agreement to acquire Twitter Inc. and take it private, triggering a legal fight with the company.” Read the [whole thing](. [Putin’s New Weapon of Mass Disruption: Kazakh Oil]( — Julian Lee [Europe’s Natural-Gas Crisis Is Worse Than It Looks]( — Javier Blas [Inflation Is Raging Because Globalization Is Fading]( — Stephen Mihm [How Worried Should You Be About Omicron BA.5?]( — Faye Flam [Inflation Alarm Bells Are Actually Getting Softer]( — Matthew Winkler [The Cost of Taming Inflation Will Be Exorbitant]( — Kevin Muir [Presidents Aren’t Kings. Remember That, Democrats.]( — Jonathan Bernstein [Crispr for the Masses Gets a Little Closer to Reality]( — Lisa Jarvis [RIP to the LSAT? Let’s Kill the Bar Exam, Too]( — Stephen L. Carter This is the Weekend Edition of Bloomberg Opinion Today, a roundup of the most popular stories Bloomberg Opinion published this week based on web readership. Like getting this newsletter? [Subscribe to Bloomberg.com]( for unlimited access to trusted, data-driven journalism and subscriber-only insights. Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal. Find out more about how the Terminal delivers information and analysis that financial professionals can’t find anywhere else. [Learn more](. You received this message because you are subscribed to Bloomberg's Opinion Today newsletter. [Unsubscribe]( | [Bloomberg.com]( | [Contact Us]( [Ads Powered By Liveintent]( | [Ad Choices]( Bloomberg L.P. 731 Lexington, New York, NY, 10022