Elon Musk, an erratic visionary, revels in contradiction

As the uproar over Elon Musk’s $44 billion buyout of Twitter reaches a crescendo, another Musk drama, still chaotic four years after it began, has been back in court.

Ironically, that spectacle started with a Musk tweet about doing an audacious deal. Then, with Wall Street awaiting his next move, the Tesla CEO changed directions, admitting that his plan to buy all the electric car maker’s stock might be too much trouble. As regulators prepared to sue the billionaire for defrauding investors, he pondered his position in the corporate universe in a livestreamed interview while puffing on pot.

The episode made for a confounding, but now familiar, study in both Musk’s manic ambition and his delight in contradiction.

It's no wonder then that, as the world’s richest man pursues a Twitter takeover described by one investment firm as veering “from comical to surreal,” even those who’ve watched him for years remain flummoxed about what he has up his sleeve.

“This is a guy who’s more transparent than 99.99 percent of other CEOs and yet he’s harder to predict because he has the confidence to be able to publicly change his mind,” said Erik Gordon, a University of Michigan business and law professor.

“Would Musk be more successful if he toned it down? I think the answer is no, because he wouldn’t be Musk.”

This week Musk is again keeping people guessing. First he embraced a European measure to keep hate speech and misinformation off social media. Less than 24 hours later, he announced that he’d reverse Twitter’s ban of former President Donald Trump, who was kicked off the platform for inciting violence.

Meanwhile, doubt remains about whether Musk will even go through with the deal. He could still walk away by paying Twitter a $1 billion termination fee, a huge figure yet a...