| On July 9, Bloomberg Opinion's Matt Levine weighed in on the news that Elon Musk was backing out of his plan to buy Twitter Inc. Things have, of course, taken some turns since Musk announced his intent to take over the social media platform. (Bonus reading: Matthew Winkler's take in April on Musk's management style.) Yet Matt's insight in July is extremely re-readable and remains relevant in the waning days of December. It was also Bloomberg Opinion's most-read column of 2023, based on web readership. So this April, Musk announced that he wanted to buy Twitter Inc. Why not? Musk seems to get a lot of joy out of using Twitter, and pretending to buy Twitter is a good way to create drama on Twitter. At the time, I assumed that, as with Tesla, he was doing a bit. "Ordinarily," I wrote, "if a billionaire chief executive officer of a public company offers to buy a company, the odds that he is kidding are quite low. When it's Elon Musk, the historical odds are, like, 50/50." But he surprised me by quickly lining up financing (paying millions of dollars of fees to banks for commitment letters) and signing a merger agreement with Twitter. If he was pretending he was going to buy Twitter, those were pretty elaborate lengths to go to? But he frequently goes to elaborate (and expensive) lengths for a joke — he sold 20,000 branded flamethrowers to make a joke about flamethrowers, and also founded Boring Co. to make a joke (???) about tunnels — so who knows. Would he line up billions of dollars of financing and sign a binding merger agreement with a specific-performance clause and a $1 billion breakup fee as a joke? I mean! Nobody else would! But he might!
Read the whole thing. Say Goodbye to Self-Isolating, WFH Mandates, Mass Testing (Jan. 12) — Therese Raphael and Sam Fazeli How Often Do We Have to Get Covid to Stop Getting Covid? (April 30) — Justin Fox Millennials Are Finally Spending Like Grown-Ups (Jan. 2) — Rachel Rosenthal Walmart Flashes a Warning Sign to the Entire Consumer Economy (May 17) — Andrea Felsted Putin and Xi Exposed the Great Illusion of Capitalism (March 24) — John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge Putin Misunderstands History. So, Unfortunately, Does the US (March 22) — Niall Ferguson The Second Wave of the Russian Oil Shock Is Starting (April 21) — Javier Blas The Wheels Have Come Off Electric Vehicles (June 29) — Anjani Trivedi Notes: To contact the author of this newsletter, email Brooke Sample at bsample1@bloomberg.net. Sign up here and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook. | 
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