The board called his bluff and said "sold!", then Musk spent a great deal of time and effort trying to wiggle out of the deal. He failed, and now he's stuck with it.
Everything he's doing now is trying to minimize the amount of financial damage this debacle will cause him.
He didn't just "pitch" it, he made a buyout offer with all the attendant SEC filings. Not the sort of thing you can accidentally do with a slip of the tongue!
Is this really a good assumption for a guy who has started so many successful companies?
The only companies he actually founded was SpaceX, and Boring if that even counts.
Plus it's not at all clear how much credit he should get for the companies he invested in, aside from being a good fundraiser and hype man. There are plenty of stories about employees having to manage him to avoid him stepping on critical work.
And you don't have to understand contract law to start a company (or in the majority of Musk's cases, invest in an existing company), that's what lawyers are for.
If your name is Elon Musk, you may convince yourself you can walk away unscathed, or with only a slap on the wrist (see the many SEC encounters).
It's true though that if it loses a bucket of money and he never wanted it in the first place he might not consider it as successful as I'm guessing. We can't know his mind, but thinking of it in this way explains a lot of his behavior around twitter that is difficult or impossible to explain from a pure financial standpoint, so I'm going to stick with it for now.
In any case, I suspect that the GP comment by giraffe_lady, explains why he was interested in Twitter at all -- why bothering trying to get leverage over the board.
Or, if he wants to eventually become the President of the US, then that's an alternative explanation (of why he cared)?
That would require a constitutional amendment in order for him to be eligible. He’s revealed himself to be pretty dumb, but even I give him enough credit to not be so stupid as to think he will one day he President.
There's very little doubt in my mind. The bot thing was always just rhetorical. he didn't suddenly "discover" something he wasn't already well aware of.
Yes. This has been covered widely and was a key reason he had to follow through with the purchase. The bot thing was an attempt to get out of buying Twitter, not something he actually believed. You need to realize that he's like Trump: lying is kind of beside the point. He'll say whatever he thinks will get him what he wants, which ultimately public adulation, however hollow that is.