This week may have been the worst one so far for Elon Musk in his attempt to get out of the $44 billion deal to take over Twitter. KevinTDugan writes as reports surface that there very well may be a deal on the table to avert a trial
The inter-celebrity messaging going on behind the scenes takes all kinds of weird forms. Joe Rogan cheers him on; Gayle King calls the deal “gangsta” — to which Musk responds by floating the idea of putting Oprah on the board. There’s Sam Bankman-Fried, the zhlubby FTX CEO, who pops up through a mutual friend to offer a few billion as a co-investor. The CEO of Axel Springer, the parent company of Politico, wants Elon to let him run it.
But those are exactly the four words that punctuated an order from Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick on Friday in response to Team Musk’s demands for more data. The orders today do not answer everything that Twitter and Musk brought up earlier this week during the omnibus hearing, but the two orders from McCormick show that, with just over two weeks to go, her tolerance for anything beyond the narrow scope of Twitter’s lawsuit is wearing out. To handle some of the more complex discovery issues, McCormick has appointed a special master — essentially saying she no longer wants to deal with them. It’s not good for anybody, but it’s especially bad for Musk.