Hello and welcome. You are listening to Patrick Boyle on Finance, a podcast exploring ideas from quantitative finance, examining events occurring in markets right now and financial history to see what lessons can be taken away, including interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world of finance. To learn more about the podcast, visit onfinance.org.

Okay, I'll cut to the chase. There's one simple way in which Twitter could save this whole

buyout deal and force Elon Musk to honor the contract he signed. The obvious strategy is to permanently

ban him from Twitter and tell him that the buyout price is now $69 billion. One of my favorite

journalist Matt Levine came up with this idea a few months ago and it just simply makes sense. Without access to Twitter, Elon would

probably have to start paying for advertising for Tesla. He'd have to torment the SEC by

fax. He'd have to pump Dogecoin by taking out ads in newspapers. And worst of all,

he'd have to hit on Canadian pop stars in person.

I think we all know he'd cave in pretty quickly.

A few of you are probably thinking that he could get around such a ban

by having the dancing Tesla bot open a Twitter account,

but this wouldn't work for two reasons.

One, because the Tesla bot is not real.

I'm sorry to break this to some of you.

It's kind of like the hyperloop, but with a lower CGI budget.

It's basically Kimball Musk in a Spandex sued.

And number two, as we all know, Twitter doesn't allow bots.

Anyhow, it doesn't appear that this is what's happening.

Instead, it looks like Twitter is suing for a specific performance,

which means that they're asking a Delaware judge to order Musk to pay the full $44 billion

and actually close the deal and buy Twitter, an asset that it appears he no longer

wants to own. Okay, so possibly the best way to understand the nature of modern merger contracts

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