[minimaxir]

> Musk could have paid a $1B penalty and backed out

That's not correct: the penalty was only for failure to complete the transaction, Elon still had to go through with it.

Elon tried to create cause to stop the transaction (the weird bot fixation) and eat the penalty but that didn't get to discovery.

[Zigurd]

That's correct. If it had been only a billion, he would have cut a check for that and been done with the whole thing. He somehow convinced himself he could flip Twitter for a profit, or at least for a smaller loss than a settlement would have cost. You have to have some kind of ego to think that way.