It can be very disruptive to a company’s operations and stakeholders (employees, vendors, customers, etc.) for it to agree to sell itself. So it wants to have its deal, including price, locked down to the maximum extent possible. So if markets turn down in that interim period, 99.9999% of the time, it’s the buyer’s problem. And in any event, Twitter would have had to go back to the shareholders for another vote even if they had wanted to take a lower price.*
But there was no particular reason for them to, because they had a tight contract and there weren’t any compelling arguments that the buyer wasn’t required to close per its terms.
* An obvious question is, what if markets had gone up instead of down in that period? There was still a binding deal to acquire Twitter, but in this instance, it is at least theoretically possible that another buyer could have made an unsolicited offer for the company and the board would have had a fiduciary duty to the shareholders to accept that off. In that case, they can terminate the merger agreement, but then the buyer gets a termination fee and usually reimbursement of transaction expenses. But the reason for the asymmetry is that, barring a deeply distressed situation, a company doesn’t put itself up for sale without a high degree of certainty that a sale on the original or better terms will go through at the end of the day.
I stand by my opinion that he intended to close the deal one way or another, but wanted more favorable pricing. Your IPO profit is eaten away if you paid more than you could have when taking the company private.
I don't think Twitter truly was worth what the markets claimed it was worth, much the same as Tesla stock is still detached from the underlying asset. Mania in the markets will set the price at whatever people are willing to pay.
I firmly believe Musk saw a threat to the ability for healthy public discourse to be carried out and was willing to jump on the grenade that was an overvalued Twitter, until a point at which it became vastly overvalued.
That said: I do agree he has made a series of missteps at the helm of Twitter. He came in seeking to change far too much, far too quickly, and Twitter has a rough road ahead of it to get to even self sustaining, especially on the eve of an economic calamity.