E76: Elon vs. Twitter

Sacks’ prediction was conditional: if Twitter’s board rejected Elon Musk’s $54.20/share offer in April 2022, the stock would fall back to roughly its pre‑offer level (mid‑$30s to ~$40) shortly thereafter.

What actually happened:

1. Pre‑offer trading level. Twitter closed at about $39.31 on April 1, 2022, the last trading day before Musk’s stake was disclosed, consistent with the “high‑30s/around $40” baseline Sacks referenced. (chartexchange.com)
2. Board’s initial response. On April 15, 2022, Twitter’s board adopted a poison pill rights plan in response to Musk’s bid, which analysts and the company itself described as a defensive measure that did not constitute a formal rejection but was meant to fend off a hostile takeover and buy time. (cnbc.com)
3. Board ultimately accepted the offer. On April 25, 2022, Twitter announced it had entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Musk for $54.20 per share, meaning the board accepted the same price Sacks was discussing rather than rejecting it. (cnbc.com)
4. Stock behavior in April 2022. Around and after the poison pill, Twitter’s stock traded mostly in the mid‑ to high‑$40s (e.g., up to ~$48.51 on April 18) and did not drop back to the mid‑30s during that period; the average April 2022 price was about $49.02. (stockinvest.us)
5. Later scare when the deal looked likely to fail. When Musk announced his intention to terminate the deal on July 8, 2022, Twitter’s stock did fall to about $36.86 (and ~$34.61 after hours), near its pre‑offer trading range, but this was months later and tied to Musk’s termination attempt, not an April 2022 board rejection. (fortune.com)

Because the key condition he specified (“if they turn down this proposal” in April 2022) never actually occurred—the board instead accepted the offer at $54.20—the prediction remains a counterfactual. Even though we have plenty of time and data, we cannot directly observe what would have happened to Twitter’s share price under the exact scenario Sacks described. Therefore, the correctness of the prediction cannot be determined from real‑world outcomes, and the appropriate classification is “ambiguous.”

Chamath’s prediction, in substance, was that no higher competing bid for Twitter would materialize against Elon Musk’s April 2022 offer.

What actually happened:

• On April 25, 2022, Twitter entered into a definitive merger agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk for $54.20 per share in cash (about $44 billion).(cnbc.com)
• The merger agreement included no‑shop provisions (Twitter could not solicit alternative bids) but did contain a fiduciary out allowing the board to consider and engage with any unsolicited superior proposal if one appeared.(secform4.com)
• Despite the deal being public and markets/speculators actively watching, no alternative buyer ever emerged with a superior offer; contemporaneous reporting noted there was “no white knight with a better offer.”(fortune.com)
• The original deal ultimately closed on October 27, 2022, at the same $54.20 per share price, and Twitter was delisted from the stock exchange.(theguardian.com)

Technically, Twitter did not run a formal, broad go‑shop process; instead it agreed to a standard no‑shop with a fiduciary out. However, because the key factual question behind Chamath’s prediction—whether any higher bid would appear—was answered in the negative, his underlying forecast that no superior competing offer would emerge was borne out by events. Hence the prediction is best scored as right, with the caveat that the literal go‑shop condition did not occur.

As of December 1, 2025, Twitter (now X) was acquired by Elon Musk in October 2022 and taken private; it was not acquired by Apple, Meta/Facebook, Google, ByteDance, or Amazon, and there is no public record that any of these companies formally attempted to acquire Twitter and were blocked by regulators.

Because Chamath’s prediction is essentially counterfactual and open‑ended (these firms “can never get it done” due to regulators), it would be validated only if:

1. One of these companies successfully acquires Twitter/X (showing the prediction was wrong), or
2. We had clear evidence that one of them tried and was blocked on antitrust grounds (partially right about feasibility), or
3. A reasonable, explicit time horizon passed where we could say the opportunity window definitively closed.

None of these conditions are met. The actual buyer was Musk, not a big tech platform, and regulators were not tested on an Apple/Meta/Google/ByteDance/Amazon–Twitter deal. So the prediction hasn’t been falsified, but also hasn’t been strongly confirmed—it remains consistent with what happened but not directly tested.

Therefore the correct assessment with current evidence is ambiguous rather than clearly right or wrong.

The prediction was conditional on Google seeking to acquire Twitter instead of Elon Musk in 2022. In reality, Twitter accepted Elon Musk’s $44 billion offer on April 25, 2022, and the acquisition was completed on October 27, 2022, with no competing takeover bid from Google or Alphabet reported during that period. (techcrunch.com)

Analysts at the time merely speculated that companies such as Disney, Google, Salesforce, Microsoft, or Verizon might make a rival bid if Musk’s deal fell apart, but there is no record that Google actually made an offer for Twitter. (fortune.com) Because Google never formally sought to acquire Twitter, the Biden administration and FTC Chair Lina Khan were never put in the situation described, so we cannot observe whether they would have “put Lina Khan on pause” to allow such a deal.

Since the key triggering condition (a real Google–Twitter acquisition attempt in 2022) did not occur, the claim about how the administration would have behaved remains counterfactual. Enough time has passed to know the events of 2022, but the hypothesis itself cannot be tested against reality, so the correct classification is ambiguous.

Sacks predicted that “it’s not going to happen”—that Twitter’s board would not ultimately accept Elon Musk’s initial $54.20 per share offer as structured in April 2022, and that the economically correct outcome of taking Musk’s best bid after a process would not occur.

In reality, Twitter’s board did accept Musk’s offer at $54.20 per share in cash. On April 25, 2022, Twitter announced it had entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk for $54.20 per share in cash, valuing the deal at about $44 billion. (cnbc.com) This was the same headline price and all‑cash structure as his April 14, 2022 bid. (cnbc.com) The board also publicly described its process as a “thoughtful and comprehensive process” focused on value, certainty, and financing, and recommended the transaction to shareholders. (cnbc.com)

Because the board ultimately accepted Musk’s $54.20‑per‑share cash offer after running a process and recommended that shareholders take it, the core assertion that this outcome "is not going to happen" was falsified.

Available evidence shows that Twitter/X did lay off well over 50% of its employees after Musk’s 2022 takeover, but key business metrics clearly did deteriorate, contradicting Sacks’s claim that there would be “absolutely no impact to the business” and that it would probably “run better.”

Layoffs condition was met (≥50% of staff)

• In November 2022 Twitter cut about 50% of its ~7,500‑person workforce in one round of layoffs. (goodmorningamerica.com)
• Subsequent cuts left about 1,300 employees vs. 7,500 pre‑takeover (roughly an 80% reduction) by early 2023. (cnbc.com)
  So the scenario Sacks described (firing “half … or more”) did in fact occur.

Uptime / reliability: more and larger outages, not “no impact”

• Since the takeover, X has had multiple major global outages, including the largest user‑reported outage since Musk’s purchase in December 2023 (over 94,000 reports). (business-standard.com)
• 2025 saw repeated large disruptions: in March 2025 outages hit tens of thousands of users multiple times in a single day; in May 2025 another outage drew ~25,000 reports, prompting Musk to admit that recent “uptime issues” showed “major operational improvements need to be made.” (cnbc.com)
• Reporting in early 2024/2025 explicitly links these recurring technical problems to drastic staff cuts and loss of institutional knowledge. (businessinsider.com)
  This is inconsistent with the idea that firing half or more of staff caused no operational impact and that the service “probably [runs] better.”

User activity: stagnation and decline in key segments

• Just before the acquisition, Twitter reported 237.8 million monetizable daily active users (mDAU) in Q2 2022, continuing pre‑Musk growth. (twinstrata.com)
• Third‑party data show global daily active app users down ~15% from Sept 2022 to Sept 2023, and U.S. app usage down about 20%. (theguardian.com)
• A 2025 Pew study finds the share of U.S. adults using X fell from 25% in 2021 to 21% in 2025, indicating erosion of its U.S. user base rather than growth. (thedailybeast.com)
  Overall, user activity at best stagnated and in important markets declined, contradicting the claim of no deterioration.

Revenue: sharp, sustained drop vs. pre‑layoff baseline

• Twitter’s revenue peaked around $5.0–5.1 billion in 2021 and was about $4.4 billion in 2022 before going private. (stockanalysis.com)
• Under Musk/X, revenue fell to about $2.9 billion in 2023 and $2.5 billion in 2024, roughly a 50% drop from the 2021 peak and a steep decline from 2022. (businessofapps.com)
• Advertising, the core business, plunged from $4.5 billion in 2021 to about $2.3B in 2023 and $1.7B in 2024, a fall of more than 60%, amid widely reported advertiser flight. (businessofapps.com)
  These are clear, multi‑year deteriorations in a central “business metric” Sacks claimed would be unaffected.

Operational performance / profitability

• Some estimates suggest that after deep cost‑cutting, X’s EBITDA and net profit margins improved (e.g., reports of ~$2.7B revenue but ~$1.3B EBITDA in 2024, and positive net income in 2024–2025). (deepnewz.com)
• But these margin gains came together with lower revenue, advertiser loss, more outages, and user declines in key markets.

Sacks’s prediction was that massive layoffs (50% or more) would cause no deterioration in critical business metrics (uptime, user activity, revenue) and that Twitter would “probably run better.” In reality, while cost cuts improved some profitability metrics, the platform experienced more frequent outages, reduced usage in important segments, and roughly halved revenue. That is a substantial negative impact on the business, so the prediction is best classified as wrong overall.

Evidence shows that Elon Musk did, in fact, bring a substantial number of Tesla Autopilot/software engineers into Twitter (now X) immediately after the October 28, 2022 acquisition—more than 50 Tesla employees, mostly Autopilot software engineers, were authorized to work on Twitter’s code and systems, not just a single engineer or a team of three. (cnbc.com) This is a much stronger version of the scenario Jason described ("drop one of the AI people working on self‑driving" into Twitter), so if the prediction were realistic, we would expect the spam/bot problem to be largely resolved within at most a few months of the takeover.

However, years later, bots and spam remain a major, widely‑reported problem on X. In 2024, X launched a public "bot purge" and anti‑spam initiatives, but even sympathetic coverage framed these as attempts to deal with an ongoing, persistent bot problem rather than a solved one. (forbes.com) Third‑party analyses have estimated very high levels of fake or automated accounts: for example, a 2024 5th Column AI study estimated that around 64% of analyzed X accounts exhibited bot‑like behavior, far above Twitter’s earlier internal claims. (twitter.com) X’s own transparency figures and public statements emphasize that hundreds of millions of accounts are being suspended for spam and manipulation and that large bot purges continue into 2024–2025, which by itself implies the problem is ongoing rather than “substantially solved.” (twitter.com) As late as September 2025, U.S. Representative Ro Khanna was publicly criticizing Musk at a major policy summit for failing to eliminate bots on X, underscoring that the platform is still perceived as heavily bot‑infested. (axios.com)

Given that: (1) Musk actually used many Autopilot engineers at Twitter/X, i.e., a stronger condition than the podcast scenario; and (2) credible studies, news coverage, and public officials all indicate that bots and spam remain a large, visible problem well beyond any 30‑day or single‑weekend window, the prediction that such engineers could "solve the bot problem, the spam problem" that quickly is not borne out by what happened. Therefore, the prediction is wrong.

1. Condition met: Musk did gain control of Twitter/X.
   Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter on October 28, 2022, later rebranding it as X.(en.wikipedia.org) So the conditional (“if Elon runs it…”) is satisfied and can be evaluated.

2. Harassment / ‘problematic content’ did not decrease; measured hate speech and abusive content went up.

• A 2025 peer‑reviewed PLOS ONE study that tracks English‑language content from early 2022 through June 2023 finds that, after Musk’s purchase, the weekly rate of hate speech on X was about 50% higher than in the pre‑acquisition months, with increased racist, homophobic, and transphobic slurs, and a ~70% increase in likes on hate posts—indicating more engagement and exposure. It explicitly concludes there is a long‑term increase in hate speech on the platform.(journals.plos.org)
• Earlier work by the same research group (“Auditing Elon Musk’s Impact on Hate Speech and Bots,” ICWSM 2023) found that hate speech rose dramatically immediately after the acquisition.(arxiv.org)
• A synthesis on Twitter under Elon Musk notes that multiple independent organizations (Center for Countering Digital Hate, Anti‑Defamation League, Tufts researchers, ISD, BBC) documented a rise in hate speech: anti‑Black slurs nearly tripled; homophobic and transphobic slurs rose 52% and 62%; antisemitic tweets doubled; weekly hate‑speech rate ended up ~50% higher than when Musk took over.(en.wikipedia.org)
• The same article reports that posts associating LGBT people with “grooming” increased by 119%, and GLAAD rated Twitter/X the “most dangerous platform for LGBTQ people” on its Social Media Safety Index.(en.wikipedia.org)
• Watchdog data on actual enforcement cuts the same way. A CCDH/​Axios analysis found that X failed to act on 86% of sampled hate‑speech posts (including Nazi imagery and Holocaust denial) a week after they were reported; a prior CCDH report during the Gaza war found 98% of reported hate and misinformation content remained up after seven days.(axios.com)
• Regulators and major institutions have reacted accordingly. The EU halted institutional ads on X in 2023 citing an “alarming increase” in hate speech and misinformation,(en.wikipedia.org) and in 2025 Dutch public broadcaster NOS quit X, explicitly citing disinformation and hateful responses to its posts as reasons the platform was no longer suitable.(reuters.com)

Taken together, independent measurements and institutional behavior all point to more, not less, harassment and hateful/“problematic” content under Musk.

3. Bots and inauthentic accounts were not eliminated at scale.

The prediction’s mechanism was that harassment would fall because Musk would “get rid of all the bots.” Available evidence does not support that:

• The long‑horizon PLOS ONE study cited above explicitly finds “no reduction (and a possible increase) in activity by inauthentic accounts”—including bots and coordinated accounts—after Musk’s purchase.(journals.plos.org)
• The earlier ICWSM 2023 audit also found that “the prevalence of most types of bots increased” after the acquisition, even as hate speech spiked.(arxiv.org)
• A summary of Twitter/X under Musk notes that as of April 2023 there was no evidence that Musk’s policy changes had decreased the overall number of bots, only some sign that a subset of spambots had fallen slightly.(en.wikipedia.org)
• In 2024, The Intelligencer documented a mass proliferation of “pussy in bio” sex‑spam bots on X and reported that Musk himself eventually conceded that “fighting bot and troll farms is hard,” acknowledging that the problem persisted despite his efforts.(en.wikipedia.org)

X’s own transparency reporting also doesn’t show a clean “bot‑free” or harassment‑free environment: in H1 2024 the platform suspended 5.3M accounts and removed or labeled 10.6M posts, with about 5M flagged for “hateful conduct,” yet suspensions for hateful conduct were down ~97–98% versus pre‑Musk Twitter, suggesting a shift toward tolerating more such content rather than eradicating it.(thewrap.com) This is not consistent with “less harassment because the bots are gone.”

4. Net evaluation.

The scenario the predictor sketched—Musk takes over, successfully eliminates bots at scale, and as a result harassment and “problematic content” decrease overall—is contradicted by:

• Multiple independent, peer‑reviewed studies (short‑ and long‑term) showing higher levels of hate speech and engagement with it after the takeover.(journals.plos.org)
• Empirical findings of no reduction, and in some respects an increase, in inauthentic/bot activity, despite Musk’s stated anti‑bot campaign.(journals.plos.org)
• Watchdog and regulatory assessments describing X as more hostile and less effectively moderated, not safer.

Given that the condition (Musk control) has been met for several years and the metrics move in the opposite direction of the prediction, the best overall judgment is that this prediction was wrong.

Board / poison pill outcome:

• Twitter’s board adopted a poison pill (shareholder rights plan) on April 15, 2022, in response to Musk’s bid, but the plan was explicitly structured so it would not prevent the board from accepting a future acquisition offer it approved. (cnbc.com)
• On April 25, 2022—within 10 days of April 16—the board unanimously accepted Elon Musk’s offer to acquire Twitter for $54.20 per share in cash, signing a definitive merger agreement that would give Musk control of the company. (cnbc.com)
• The acquisition ultimately closed on October 27, 2022, with Musk taking Twitter private, confirming that the poison pill did not “win” in the sense of permanently blocking his control; it served as leverage but was effectively set aside once the deal was agreed. (en.wikipedia.org)

Stock-price path within 30 days:

• The 30‑day window after April 16, 2022 runs to May 16, 2022.
• A Bloomberg report on May 16, 2022 notes that Twitter shares fell 8.2% that day to close at $37.39, below the $39.31 closing price on April 1 (pre‑stake disclosure), but not back to the roughly $35 level Sacks described. (bloomberg.com)
• Monthly price data show Twitter averaged about $49.02 in April 2022 and $39.60 in May 2022, again indicating the stock sagged but did not return to the mid‑$30s level in that 30‑day period. (digrin.com)

Assessment: Sacks’ scenario was that the poison pill would prevail and Musk would be blocked, with Twitter’s stock “back in the dumps” around $35 within 30 days of April 16, 2022. In reality, the board quickly agreed to sell Twitter to Musk at a substantial premium and he went on to acquire full control. While the stock did decline later in May, it did not cleanly revert to the ~$35 starting level, and the governance outcome was the opposite of what he predicted. Therefore the prediction is wrong.

The prediction described a specific alternative outcome to Elon Musk’s bid for Twitter:

1. Claimed outcome: Twitter’s board would defeat Musk by finding another buyer at the same or higher price, likely a large incumbent (e.g., Disney or Google), and place Twitter in that buyer’s hands.
2. Additional conditional claim: If Google bid for Twitter, the Biden administration and FTC chair Lina Khan would allow the acquisition to proceed by standing down on antitrust enforcement.

What actually happened:

• On April 25, 2022, Twitter’s board accepted Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share, in a deal valued at about $44 billion. No competing acquisition offer from Disney, Google, or any other buyer materialized at the same or a higher price.
• The transaction eventually closed on October 27, 2022, and Musk took Twitter private. There is no record of a serious rival acquisition bid from Disney, Google, or other incumbents during the process, nor of any regulatory review of a hypothetical Google–Twitter deal (because no such deal was proposed).

Since the core predicted scenario—Twitter’s board blocking Musk by selling to another acquirer such as Disney or Google, and regulators then allowing a Google–Twitter deal—did not occur at all, the prediction is wrong.

Evidence from the 30 days after April 16, 2022 does not match the prediction that Twitter’s board and political/regulatory actors would “do anything to stop Elon from acquiring this company, even if it means violating their fiduciary duty or violating antitrust law.”

1. Twitter’s board briefly resisted, then quickly accepted the deal.

   • On April 15, 2022 (just before the podcast date), Twitter’s board adopted a standard “poison pill” shareholder-rights plan explicitly aimed at making a hostile takeover more difficult, a conventional and generally lawful tactic in U.S. corporate governance. (cnbc.com) This is some resistance by the board, but it is not extraordinary or clearly a fiduciary breach; it is a common mechanism designed to give the board time and leverage.
   • Within the 30‑day window, on April 25, 2022, Twitter announced it had accepted Musk’s offer to buy the company for about $44 billion at $54.20 per share, with the board unanimously approving the transaction and presenting it as the best path for shareholders. (cnbc.com) This is the opposite of “doing anything to stop” the acquisition.

2. Antitrust and regulatory authorities did not try to block the acquisition.

   • Contemporaneous reporting and later summaries note that analysts and former officials expected little or no antitrust basis to challenge Musk’s purchase of Twitter, and that regulators were unlikely to oppose it. (fortune.com) The U.S. antitrust waiting-period process under the Hart–Scott–Rodino Act ran its course without a move to block the deal; later coverage explicitly stated that U.S. antitrust regulators decided not to further scrutinize the acquisition, making it unlikely to be stopped on those grounds. (straitstimes.com)
   • Instead, regulatory scrutiny focused on Musk’s own conduct (e.g., his late disclosure of his stake), leading to FTC/SEC inquiries and, eventually, an SEC lawsuit over his stock-disclosure timing—not on regulators bending antitrust rules to prevent him from buying Twitter. (thegatewaypundit.com)

3. No clear evidence of fiduciary or antitrust violations by the board or regulators to block the deal.

   • There was public debate over whether the poison pill was in shareholders’ best interests, but no court or regulator has found that Twitter’s board violated its fiduciary duty in handling Musk’s bid. The final outcome—accepting a large premium offer and completing the sale in October 2022—fits the standard pattern of a board negotiating terms, not an illicit effort to stop the transaction. (en.wikipedia.org)
   • Likewise, antitrust and other regulators did not engage in actions that “violate normal antitrust principles” to thwart the acquisition; the deal ultimately closed after routine review.

Because the observable events in the 30 days after April 16, 2022 show (a) the board agreeing to the sale on favorable terms and (b) regulators not using antitrust or other tools to block the acquisition, the specific forecast that we would soon see law‑breaking, politically driven efforts to prevent Musk from buying Twitter did not come true.

Key elements of Friedberg’s prediction did not match what actually happened:

1. Board reaction to Musk’s offer
   He predicted the Twitter board would reject Musk’s bid and run a long strategic process to seek a better price. In reality, after briefly adopting a poison pill, Twitter’s board unanimously accepted Musk’s $44 billion ($54.20/share) offer on April 25, 2022, and signed a definitive merger agreement—just 11 days after the public bid and within days of the podcast’s release. (en.wikipedia.org)

2. State of play three months later (mid‑July 2022)
   He said that three months from April 16, 2022 (i.e., around July 16, 2022), Twitter would still be in an open-ended sale process with “no real answer.” Instead, by that time there was already a signed merger agreement in place, and Twitter’s board was urging shareholders to approve the deal. Twitter set a shareholder vote on the Musk merger for September 13, 2022, and later that vote overwhelmingly approved the transaction. (cnbc.com) Although Musk attempted to terminate the deal on July 8 and Twitter sued to enforce it, this was litigation over an existing definitive deal, not an unresolved strategic sale process. (en.wikipedia.org)

3. Musk “trailing off” and the saga fading
   Friedberg expected Elon Musk to “trail off and do something else” and for the saga to fade. Instead, Musk remained central to the story: Twitter sued him in July 2022 to force completion, the dispute dominated business and tech news into the fall, and Musk ultimately closed the acquisition and took Twitter private on October 27, 2022, later rebranding it as X and remaining deeply involved in its operations. (en.wikipedia.org)

Because the board did not reject the offer, there was a definitive deal well before three months had passed, and Musk and the saga did not fade away but culminated in a completed acquisition, the prediction is best classified as wrong.

• April 16, 2022 plus roughly three months puts the target date around July 16, 2022 (a Saturday), so the closest trading days are Friday, July 15 and Monday, July 18, 2022.
• Historical price data for Twitter (TWTR) shows:
  • On 2022-07-15, TWTR closed at $37.74.
  • On 2022-07-18, TWTR closed at $38.41. (chartexchange.com)
• Friedberg’s prediction was that Twitter would be trading at about $37 per share in three months. A closing price of $37.74 on the nearest trading day to the three‑month mark is within about 2% of the predicted level and clearly in the $37–$38 range.

Given how close the actual price was to the forecasted $37 around the specified time, this prediction is best classified as right.

Within the 30-day window after April 16, 2022, there was major substantive movement in the Twitter–Elon Musk takeover.

• Elon Musk made his unsolicited offer to buy Twitter on April 14, 2022.
• On April 25, 2022—just 9 days after the podcast release—Twitter’s board unanimously accepted Musk’s offer and announced a definitive agreement for him to acquire Twitter for about $44 billion and take it private. This is documented in contemporary coverage and timelines of the acquisition. (en.wikipedia.org)

Although the deal did not formally close until late October 2022 and there was later legal conflict, the core takeover terms (buyer, price, structure, and a binding merger agreement) were all settled and publicly announced well within the 30 days Chamath was talking about.

Because a binding acquisition agreement was reached and announced in that period, the situation did not remain largely unresolved, and Chamath’s prediction that “not much is going to get figured out in the next 30 days” is wrong.

No higher bid in the 90‑day window
Musk’s offer of $54.20/share (about $44B) was accepted by Twitter’s board on April 25, 2022. Contemporary coverage notes that “no other bidders or white knights” emerged during the sale process before the board agreed to Musk’s deal, and analysts explicitly highlighted that the board’s “back was against the wall” because no rival offer appeared. (forbes.com) This matches Chamath’s claim that in the ensuing 90 days there would be no better bidder/offer.

Board initially resisting the bid
Right after Musk’s bid, Twitter’s board unanimously adopted a shareholder‑rights “poison pill” designed to dilute Musk and make a takeover prohibitively expensive, widely described as blocking or thwarting his takeover attempt. (pbs.org) This is an initial attempt to fend off/reject the bid, even though the board reversed course and approved the merger about 10 days later. Factually, the “first try to reject it” part of the prediction is borne out.

Shareholder lawsuits and years of litigation
Within weeks, a Twitter stockholder (the Orlando Police Pension Fund) filed a putative class action in Delaware Chancery Court against Twitter, its board, and Musk, alleging breach of fiduciary duty and seeking to delay or constrain the merger under Delaware law. (cdn.yahoofinance.com) Additional stockholder litigation followed, including Crispo v. Musk, a class action by a Twitter stockholder over enforcement of the merger agreement; the Delaware Court of Chancery issued opinions in 2022 and again in 2023, showing that stockholder litigation over the deal persisted well beyond closing. (potteranderson.com)

After the acquisition closed and Twitter became X Corp., further lawsuits tied to the deal and its aftermath continued for years—e.g., large‑scale disputes over severance and layoffs of former employees and a major severance suit by former top executives, as cataloged in the running list of lawsuits involving X Corp. and in later federal cases, many of which remained active into 2024–25. (en.wikipedia.org) While not all of these suits are by common shareholders or solely about the board’s initial resistance, they confirm that Twitter/X was indeed embroiled in extensive litigation for years stemming from the Musk takeover.

Putting these pieces together: (1) no superior bid emerged in the 90 days after April 16, 2022; (2) the board initially tried to block the bid via a poison pill before accepting it; and (3) shareholder and related litigation over the deal and its consequences has dragged on for multiple years. That aligns closely enough with Chamath’s forecast that the overall prediction is best judged as right.

Twitter’s board did not ultimately decline Elon Musk’s bid; instead, it accepted his $54.20/share offer on April 25, 2022, entering a definitive agreement for a ~$44 billion sale.【2search0】 The deal later closed, and Twitter was delisted with a final recorded price of about $53.70/share in October 2022, so long‑term shareholders were bought out near the offer price, not left with shares in the mid‑$30s.【1search0】2search5】

It is true that, amid later deal uncertainty, Twitter’s stock briefly traded back near or below its pre‑offer level: by May 16, 2022, shares had fallen to about $37.39, below the $39.31 close on April 1, 2022 (the last trading day before Musk’s stake disclosure), and June 2022’s month‑end price was also around $37.39.【3search4】3search1】 That drop, however, was driven by Musk putting the deal “on hold” and raising doubts about closing—not by the board rejecting his offer.【3search0】

Because the board in fact accepted the bid and the company was ultimately acquired at roughly the full offer price rather than remaining an independent stock that “tanked back” to and stayed around its original mid‑$30s level, Chamath’s overall call—that this was a head fake, the board wouldn’t take the offer, and the stock would revert instead of being bought out at a premium—did not come true in the way he described.

Parts of the scenario were accurate, but a key element did not occur:

• Board fights the takeover: After Musk’s unsolicited bid on April 14, 2022, Twitter’s board unanimously adopted a shareholder‑rights “poison pill” specifically to fend off a potential hostile takeover, i.e., they initially tried to block or resist the deal. (forbes.com)
• Stock drops and skepticism about the deal: Twitter’s stock traded well below the $54.20 offer almost from the start, reflecting investor doubt the deal would close on agreed terms. For example, it traded around $45 rather than $54.20 right after the bid, and later, amid Musk’s attempts to put the deal “on hold” and walk away, the stock fell into the $30s—over 30% below the offer—while analysts openly questioned whether the acquisition would ever be completed. (cnbc.com)
• Market belief the deal might fail: Coverage at the time repeatedly noted that the trading discount and analyst commentary signaled a significant perceived chance that Musk would walk away and the deal would not close, matching the "nobody thinks it's going to get done" spirit of the prediction. (washingtonpost.com)
• Elon lowers his offer: This is the critical miss. Musk publicly floated the idea that Twitter should be bought at a lower price and analysts discussed the possibility of a renegotiated, cheaper deal, but the merger agreement was never amended; there was no formal, binding reduction in the $54.20 per‑share price. (washingtonpost.com)
• Acquisition by end of 2022: After months of litigation threats and Musk’s attempt to terminate, he ultimately closed the acquisition of Twitter on October 27, 2022, at the original price of $54.20 per share (about $44 billion), i.e., he did complete the takeover before the end of 2022. (en.wikipedia.org)

Because the prediction explicitly required Musk to lower his offer before winning the company, and in reality he closed at the original price, the overall prediction is best judged as wrong, despite getting the timing and some intermediate dynamics roughly right.