Elon Musk said to offer to buy Twitter, again, for $54.20 a share, again

Musk and Twitter have been battling for months now about the Twitter takeover. After offering to buy the company, Musk tried to cancel the deal, claiming that Twitter had lied about the number of bot accounts on the platform. Twitter sued Musk to try to get him to abide by the contract he negotiated, and a trial date has been set for October 17th.

Last week, an embarrassing tranche of text messages was released in court filings. The messages were notable for what wasn’t in them: any discussion of concerns about bots. Instead, what seemed to have caused Musk to lose interest was a conflict with Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, who had asked Musk to stop tweeting negative things about Twitter.

Also, last week, at a pretrial hearing, Musk’s argument about being given bad data by Twitter suffered a blow. He’d hired some companies to do analysis on Twitter’s bot numbers. One company confirmed Twitter’s numbers; the other suggested that 11 percent of Twitter users were inauthentic… but that analysis wasn’t statistically strong.

It got worse for Musk at that hearing. He’s a well-known proponent of Signal, a privacy-focused messaging app that allows users’ messages to autodelete. That’s sort of a problem when you’re meant to preserve your messages for, let’s say, a lawsuit. It’s unclear how many relevant messages may have been destroyed. Twitter has asked the judge in this case to censure Musk for those lost messages.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.