Elon Musk v. Donald Trump v. Twitter: Someone is going to pay, and it's going to be big

In March, Elon Musk began to make hints that he wanted to buy Twitter. In April, he made that offer formal, extending an offer that valued the company at $54.20 a share. Yes, that is a 4/20 joke in the middle of a $44 billion business deal.

Why did Musk make such an offer? For the same reason he does anything: Because it amused him to do so. As Bloomberg points out, this is a man who has both sold flamethrowers and bought a tunneling company to complete a joke. Everything Musk does is to satisfy a whim, and this isn’t the first time he’s made noises about plunking down cash for a publicly traded company only to change his mind when the impulse had passed. It didn’t seem to have taken long after that initial offer before Musk realized that running Twitter looked like a lot of work, and rather than working to buy the company, he began looking for ways to break his own deal.

But there’s a third party to all this. Along the way, Musk promised that when he had the keys, he would let Donald Trump drive again. One chaos agent to another, it amused Musk to let Trump return to Twitter—not incidentally adding many of Trump’s former Twitter followers to his own in the process. Only now that Musk is trying to walk away from his deal, those followers are turning on Musk. So is Trump.

Even as Musk tries to avoid paying $44 billion on a joke he no longer finds funny, he’s also becoming part of a heavyweight troll-on-troll fight. Twitter is absolutely done humbling itself to please Musk. Trump is unloading on him. Musk is hate-tweeting everyone on the same platform suing him to go through with his promises. And at the moment it’s not clear if Musk will pay the price, or if everyone will.