The way a contract works is one party offers something in trade for consideration.
Both parties must agree to the terms.
Let's say one piece of shit corporation (twitter) want's a shit load of money for their product.
The potential buyer wants some assurance the corporation is not just a scam.
The buyer wants proof that the product (subscribers) are in fact real.
Or, lets say that unsolicited, a piece of shit individual (musk) decides to offer a load of money for a product, based upon its share price.
This piece of shit, then sees the price plummeting, and realises they made a bad deal, and needs to make an excuse to lower the price.
Why would Elon purchase twidder at full price if it was full of fake accounts?
Because the trading price was already based upon those fake accounts existing.
The deal is based upon the public share price, based upon what the public knows.
A more pure twitter without the bots would be worth more.
Until there are two signatures on one document there is no contract.
The announcement by twitter certainly seems like they have reached a deal and signed.
They even called it definitive.
So, you have a copy of the signed contract and know what was in his head.
You know there is a NDA, right?
It is a publicly traded company.
That means the contract will likely need to be made public, for approval of the shareholders, rather than just being sold.
And it is:
https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001418091/e61e4376-e2c5-4d54-8782-d63fc5e096e9.pdfThe NDA is not for the merger, it appears to be for the information Musk gets Privileged access to before the merger is in effect.
There is also reputational damage should he ever want to bid for anything else in the future.
Given the exiting damage to his reputation from how many times he has already shown he cannot deliver what he promises, this wont do much.
There will still be a bunch of morons praising him and willing to do business with him.