Thompson: How unusual is Elon Musk’s behavior?

Quinn: It’s really weird. The public-disclosure provision of the original merger contract is typically never negotiated. But here, and I was shocked, they seem to have added a sentence in Section 6.8 protecting Musk’s ability to tweet. Except he was not allowed to disparage “Twitter or its representatives.”

And then he proceeded to use that power to tweet poop emojis about Twitter and criticize the company and its executives. That’s just very weird. The lawyers who wrote the Twitter lawsuit must have had a really good time, because they used Musk’s tweets against him, hoisting him on his own petard, over and over. Every single one of those tweets is a possible violation of the disparagement provision. And now Musk is in breach of the contract, Twitter says, which means he can’t take advantage of termination provisions.

Thompson: And it wasn’t just vague poop emojis. Musk tweeted about Twitter’s alleged left-wing bias and called out Twitter’s banning of the New York Post as being “obviously incredibly inappropriate.”

Quinn: It’s very damaging for Musk that he’s potentially provided evidence of being in violation of the contract. If you have unclean hands, if you’ve done the wrong thing, you can’t race to the contract and seek the protections of the contract. If you want to avail yourself to the terms and protections of the contract, you can’t have abused it.