People always forget he was literally sued into buying twitter. He never wanted to buy it, he was just playing stupid games like he always does.

Until this point, his reputation had him as some kind of infallible tech messiah

I mean.. only on terms of his PR team.

When you actually look at what Twitter has cost him, it's a lot more than the 44bn ticket price.

He had to sell off a LOT of Tesla stock in a very short period of time to fimance the deal. Tesla was already in a weird place where a lot k of investors were starting to worry that it was overpriced. The combination of the sudden sell-off and the reputational damage that came from him being outmanuevered by the Twitter board led to a huge slide in the stock price. Since the majority of Musk's fortune is Tesla stock, this absolutely annihilated huge amounts of his net worth.

On top of that those financial deals he made with the Saudis did not come with friendly terms. He's paying about $0.7billion a year in interest, plus Twitter's operating costs, which come direct from his pocket now. That requires more stock sell offs, which further depresses the Tesla share price.

In all, Musk is about 200bn poorer now as a result of this deal. It's probably one of the single most expensive things any one person has ever bought.