Seriously you went on trying to make a point of the various ethnic tensions that are around the world and how to police that to giving up and laughing while you do it. It is one of those tasks that we must at least try not to fuel those tensions. Because the modern genocides after world war two has been result of ethnics tensions feeding into tribalism to end up in genocide by lies and mass media. It is not okay to throw ones hands up in the air and say that we are going to have arbitrary “american neoliberal centered”-enforcement of what is bigotry, no if you are responsible for a global mass media like reddit and/or twitter it is your job to make sure that you don’t contribute to ethnic tension.

Elon could have backed out, for a reverse break-up fee, plus additional expenses & damages that Twitter could have finagled. Not cheap– the breakup fee would have been at least a billion, and contract lawyers I work with have dropped numbers from $6-15 billion on top of that. Given how he’s shedding money now, though , iit beats the hell out of $44B.
The more salient question for me is, why? I think you touched on a lot of good points. Ultimately, I suspect that it’s Elon’s unwarrantedly huge ego, plus pressure from his rightwing mentors like Thiel. Thiel undoubtedly would love to control Twitter (remember his Gawker stalking) but he’s smarter than Elon & probably realized that his name was poison if he made an offer directly. All he needed to do was fluff up Elon’s ego & point him in the right direction with a “go get’em tiger” backslap.