isnt it also possible he (some might say rather impulsively) decided to buy twitter, and then upon further investigating finds that his quick rationales no longer make sense if bot traffic indeed is way above 5%? that perhaps he feels that if it indeed is way above 5%, twitter is scamming?

is this just 100% unthinkable?

Good luck with that. He tweeted, early on: "If our Twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!"

Then, when you conclude a definitive agreement without any provision for an "out" based on an issue that you've already acknowledged knowing about (and hoping to fix post-acq)-- you're kinda stuck with it.

I think the big issue is that with the movement in equities, it requires him to overpay for Twitter with Tesla stock that is much less valuable. Financing the deal got much harder for him.

Wouldn’t he have made that part of the deal if that was a concern?

Fake followers and accounts and twitter’s battle with them is well known. Are we thinking he had no clue until after he signed on the dotted line?

but it is part of the deal, given that twitter says "bot % is <=5", now he may believe that not to be the case. I think its concievable he may have acted before he fully considered whether that number indeed is true

Would he need to show it isn’t true?

And prove that’s enough of a reason to end the deal?

one would think so, so it will be interesting to see how he argues that, but the contract does include more things, including twitter having to provide anything required to obtain funding, which one would probably strongly be able to argue covers data to independently verify this