Fifteen years or so ago, the sportswriter Bill Simmons coined the phrase “The Tyson Zone,” which refers to a rare situation in which you would believe absolutely anything someone told you about a person. (The stories about Mike Tyson are still horrifying and wild to read about.) It’s a high bar to clear because for someone to enter the Tyson Zone, you have to be willing to believe the sentence “Did you hear that he ___” no matter how the sentence ends. Charlie Sheen did a stint in the Tyson Zone during his “WINNING” era. Lindsay Lohan was there for a while. Dennis Rodman married himself and then went to North Korea and practically built a house in the Tyson Zone. Nilay Patel, The Verge’s editor-in-chief and my boss, flirts with the Tyson Zone on a daily basis.

Elon Musk is currently living large in the Tyson Zone. We should rename it the Elon Zone, honestly. Is there anything you wouldn’t believe he said or did? The man has more money than some countries, more Twitter followers than the Kardashians, and a 13-year-old boy’s sense of humor.

Which is how, I suppose, it came to pass that a bunch of people took Musk seriously when he tweeted he was planning to buy Manchester United, the controversial Premier League soccer club that you could fairly describe as “the New York Yankees of English football.” It became a news story! The club’s stock, which is publicly traded, jumped more than 10 percent! The team’s actual owners apparently said they’re willing to sell a minority stake in the company! And all this keeps going on, even after Musk literally said the words, “I’m not buying any sports teams.”

The best part of this story is that it’s just Musk recycling an old joke. He tweeted back in April that “Next I’m buying Coca-Cola to put the cocaine back in” and has spent the months since telling anyone who will listen about how it’s the most-liked Twitter post of all time. (I can’t vouch for that fact, but 4.8 million likes is certainly a lot, and Musk does have the Twitter firehose, so I suppose he’d know.) The idea of restoring Manchester United to its former football glory isn’t as funny — only 855,000 likes on the tweet, sorry pal — but it fits. And it’s not like it’s an impossible idea, right? Buying Manchester United would probably cost Musk about $5 billion or so, which I suspect is less than the Twitter deal will end up costing him even if he gets to walk away. And given that all sufficiently rich men eventually decide they want to own a sports team, Musk buying the club wouldn’t even qualify as much of a surprise.

But there’s a critical way in which the Elon Zone is not like the Tyson Zone: Musk deliberately cultivates the uncertainty and chaos that swirls around him. As a result, there’s really only one way to respond to Musk’s antics in these cases. You should believe his legal filings — not his tweets — because Elon Musk is many things, but on Twitter, he’s mostly a shitposter.

So when it comes to his tweets, you should always look at what’s happening right before he tweeted because Musk is usually trying to redirect your attention. In this case, Musk even told us exactly what he’s trying to hide! His Man U tweet was actually a reply to a seemingly unrelated tweet from five minutes earlier. It said: “To be clear, I support the left half of the Republican Party and the right half of the Democratic Party!” So, if we apply the Rule of Musk Tweets, this one is pretty clearly a response to the leak that Musk had been glad-handing right-wingers at a party in Wyoming hosted by Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. Even though Musk reportedly told everyone in attendance to deny that he was there, everyone promptly started taking selfies with Musk and pretty much ruined that.

The news that Musk is a Republican — or, at the very least, happy to act like one if it helps his companies — shouldn’t surprise anyone. Publicly, he continues to paint himself as, like, the reasonable guy in a country full of eccentrics, but privately, he seems to happily play whatever side suits him, which, at least recently, has been leaning ever harder toward the right. Musk knows better than anyone that if his audience is forced to choose between “Elon Musk hobnobs with the Republican elite” and “OMG, is he seriously buying a soccer team?” most people will focus on silly soccer shenanigans. Even the numbers prove it out: Musk’s “I’m a centrist!” tweet got less than half the engagement as the Man U reply, and the soccer joke sparked a much bigger news cycle (congrats, Reuters!).

Musk even gave it a little more fuel: a half-hour after acknowledging that it was a joke, he seemed to want to subtly imply he might actually be serious after all. “Although, if it were any team, it would be Man U. They were my fav team as a kid,” he tweeted in response to his “long-running joke” tweet.

Again, let’s be super clear here: Elon Musk is not buying Manchester United. I don’t think? See, this is the problem. I can’t really blame anybody who still thinks he might! Because it’s the kind of thing he does! Usually, he stretches the bounds of belief in much lower-stakes ways, like when he randomly decides to release a song called “Don’t Doubt Your Vibe” or sells “the world’s most boring hat.” Sometimes, what looks like whims — like when Musk created the hyperloop apparently in a move to defeat a movement for high-speed rail in California — are actually once again calculated redirections. Sometimes he actually tries to buy Twitter. And knowing what’s what can be damn near impossible in the moment.

Life in the Elon Zone has often been really good. Musk can say wild-sounding things about changing the car industry and building a city on Mars and the value of humanoid robots and have investors, governments, and fans believe him and fund him against all odds.

But as scrutiny on Musk and his companies has grown, the “anything seems possible” effect is starting to work against him. Did Musk promise a woman a horse in exchange for sexual favors and sleep with Sergey Brin’s wife? He denied it, but it doesn’t seem impossible. Is Tesla a toxic company full of toxic people with “full self-driving” tech that is actually hugely dangerous? Seems on-brand! Will he actually go to trial with Twitter and risk $44 billion just out of pride and anger? Sounds like Elon!

One thing that has worked for Musk is that most of his promises are both so far out and so enticing that it’s often both hard and a buzzkill to try to prove him wrong. Plus, he’s a big and rich enough bully to win most fights. And maybe Musk can happily live his chaotic Elon Zone life as long as Tesla keeps making cars and he keeps making money. But a reality check is coming at least in one way: we’re almost exactly two months away from the Twitter / Musk trial in Delaware Chancery Court, and if you think you know what’s going to happen between now and then, I think you’re wrong. But I’d believe almost anything.

I’m sorry for what I’m about to do here, but let’s talk about some divorced men. I think Sergey Brin is attempting to smear his ex-wife, and I think he’s using his history with Elon Musk to do it.

Musk allegedly had an affair with Brin’s wife, leading to their divorce. (ALLEGEDLY.) Then, at a party, Musk fell to his knees, begging for Brin’s forgiveness, “according to people with knowledge of the incident,” The Wall Street Journal writes. What a story!

Except: I find this sourcing weird. How many people? Two sources are different from 10 sources on this, or 30, you know? And what kind of knowledge? Were they there? I understand wanting to protect one’s sources, certainly, but I need more context on this to understand how seriously to take it. Can I be certain that Musk, who is often late to trends, was not simply attempting to Ice Brin?

I’m asking these pointed questions because I notice that Brin’s still duking it out with his soon-to-be ex-wife Nicole Shanahan in court. Brin’s lawyers contend she is asking for too much — a rumored $1 billion, according to the WSJ. I don’t know how the WSJ sourced this story, but I do think it’s more likely to benefit him than her. If he demonstrates she’s unfaithful, he gets to keep more of his money. And if she’s afraid of further news about their marriage making it into the papers, she might be more likely to settle quickly.

Shanahan has denied an affair with Musk, and an anonymous source close to her has told the New York Post that she’s a “pawn” in “billionaire playboy games.” I am a little skeptical of single-source anonymous reporting, but NYP rarely misses in celebrity coverage, possibly because of its extremely strong relationships with publicists. (Page Six isn’t what it was, but it’s still formidable.)

If Brin’s people are indeed behind the leak, that makes Musk’s reaction funnier. Musk says he’s seen Shanahan twice in the last three years — and never alone. “Haven’t even had sex in ages (sigh),” he adds. After all, he may have been denied entry to a Berlin sex club just last April.

To prove that things are copacetic between himself and Brin, Musk posted a photo of them at the same party in reply to a Wall Street Journal editor who’d tweeted the story. An odd choice. I remember an earlier picture Musk had been asked about: one of him with Ghislaine Maxwell, the right-hand woman to Jeffrey Epstein who received a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking. Musk says she “photobombed” him.

It’s a little weird to deny that a photograph is evidence of a friendship, then post a photograph as evidence of a friendship. Musk had it right with the Maxwell photo denial: a photo of two people at the same party doesn’t mean much.

Look at the photo with Brin: Musk in the foreground; Brin in the background, not making eye contact with the camera, possibly not even aware he was being photographed. The two are under a tent, and Brin is holding a plastic cup — a party of some sort. There are two other people in the photo who appear to be either children or very short adults. One is wearing Overwatch cosplay. I have spent too much time trying to identify the trees in the background to figure out a location. (Yes, I emailed experts. They said the trees were too low-res to identify.)

It is certainly proof Musk and Brin were at the same party, which Musk says was on the afternoon of Sunday, July 24th. Whether it is proof of friendship is harder to say.

As for the date and location: according to the Twitter account that tracks its movements, Musk’s jet flew into San Jose’s airport on July 23rd and left on the evening of July 24th. In response to Musk’s tweet, a chef named Andrew Gruel (cool aptonym, very Dickens!) says that he could attest to Musk and Brin’s attendance at the party together, where they were served lobster deviled eggs. Gruel is based in Huntington Beach, California, where he left the patio at one of his restaurants open during Governor Gavin Newsom’s stay-at-home order, perhaps a point of commonality with Musk.

“Nicole and Sergey’s divorce has absolutely nothing to do with me,” Musk emailed the New York Post. (This is also, for what it’s worth, the second celebrity divorce in which Musk has been accused of homewrecking; Johnny Depp claimed that Musk began a relationship with his now-ex-wife, Amber Heard, a month after Depp and Heard were married.)

Brin invested at least $500,000 in Tesla, according to Tim Higgins’ book Power Play. Brin may have invested an unknown amount in 2006, according to Insider. According to the recent WSJ story, Brin “has ordered his financial advisers to sell his personal investments in Mr. Musk’s companies,” though the story did not determine the size of the investments or if any sales had occurred.

I think I know why! Because all of those investments, if sold, would then be part of the negotiations that Brin and Shanahan are engaging in around their divorce. The point of the WSJ story is to smear Shanahan, not tell her where all the money is! Brin might still party with Musk, but it sure seems like his lawyers hung Musk out to dry just to get to Shanahan.

Why that aggression toward Musk? They have history. There’s the possibility Musk nicked the name “Autopilot” from Google, first of all. Apparently, Larry Page and Brin were thinking of buying Tesla while letting Musk stay in charge, according to Ashlee Vance’s biography of Musk. This didn’t come to pass, largely because of Musk’s P.T. Barnum-like self-promotional abilities. “With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that Musk was⁠—at a minimum⁠—either inspired or scared” into self-driving cars, wrote Edward Niedermeyer, another Musk biographer.

By 2018, before Brin left Google, it was clear that rivalry was brewing between Tesla and Google’s self-driving car division, Waymo. In January 2021, Waymo’s CEO John Krafcik said, “For us, Tesla is not a competitor at all.” Waymo even ditched the term “self-driving” to refer to its autonomous vehicles in 2021, saying, “It may seem like a small change, but it’s an important one, because precision in language matters and could save lives.” This does seem like a dig at Tesla, which calls its driver-assistance program “full self-driving.”

Now, to be clear, the majority of the Waymo / Tesla beef started after Brin left Google. And Brin and Musk definitely do seem to be at the same party. But I gotta say — unless Brin and Musk agreed on leaking the WSJ story together to screw Shanahan as part of a tech-bro conspiracy — they seem a lot more like frenemies, particularly since Brin hasn’t said anything publicly to clear this up.

Tech-bro frenemies are a staple of Silicon Valley. Musk’s long relationship with Peter Thiel, who manufactured the coup at PayPal that shoved Musk out is a prime example. All of these guys need each other and maybe also kind of low-key hate each other. Seems stressful! But it kind of looks like everyone will get what they need here except possibly Shanahan, which is also very Silicon Valley.

As for Musk’s woe–is-me tweets about attention: lol, lmao. His entire game with retail shareholders is about capturing attention. My guy loves it! Remember the McLaren? Remember the song, “Don’t Doubt ur Vibe?” The fake robot? Musk seems like an obvious student of NASA scientist (and Nazi) Wernher von Braun, and Twitter is where he does his version of “Man Will Conquer Space Soon.” He needs attention. After all, isn’t that what he’s buying Twitter for?

Which may mean Brin and Musk are still friends after all. I am fairly sure at this point that Musk can’t tell the difference between good attention and bad attention. As long as he’s the center of attention, he’s happy — because attention sells Teslas.

So it was a troll after all.

Look, I was willing to believe I’d called it wrong after the merger agreement went through. Maybe Elon Musk was serious for a change! Maybe he really did want to own an also-ran social network! Maybe Musk was really looking forward to giving himself ulcers dealing with content moderation issues! People have done weirder shit for power, and I think we can all agree that Elon Musk is deeply interested in power. Why else would he be busy testing how well Americans enforce their laws?

A quick recap: Musk is attempting to do a runner on the Twitter acquisition, and Twitter isn’t having it. Twitter lawyered up in the rudest possible fashion: with the firm that came up with the poison pill. That firm then filed a lawsuit against Musk to try to force the merger to go through.

When the Twitter complaint dropped, my impression, on the first read, was that someone really had a lot of fun putting it together, not least because the screenshot of Musk’s poop tweet got included:

I love a good lawsuit. Can Twitter win? “He signed a contract, it says what it says,” says Tom Redburn, the chair of securities litigation at Lowenstein Sandler, after he finishes laughing at my exasperation. Because Musk waived due diligence — that’s the thing when you do some research on the company you’re acquiring before you agree to an acquisition — his ability to walk away from the deal is constrained. “That’s a tough position for a buyer to be in,” Redburn says.

In fact, Delaware’s Chancery Court, which is widely used by businesses, tends to be fairly unsympathetic to buyer’s remorse, Redburn says. There’s one high-profile case where a buyer successfully got out of a transaction — and it was because of fraud. In 2018, medical group Fresenius, best known for its US dialysis service, successfully did not buy drugmaker Akorn because Akorn hid a whole bunch of business problems. “Fresenius was able to prove Akorn was making up its data,” Redburn says. That would put something of a damper on a merger!

This is kind of different from a half-baked assertion that Twitter’s accounting for inauthentic activity is wrong. Musk’s transparently bad-faith rationale for getting out of the deal with Twitter is that there are too many spambots, and the company won’t give him the data he needs to determine exactly how many there are. Pathetic. Even if that is true — and I have no reason to believe it is — Musk’s team still has to demonstrate that it matters in some material way to the business.

“If you take the antics out of it, this is not an atypical kind of lawsuit,” Redburn says. “We’ve seen a fair amount of this over the last few years.” During the pandemic, for instance, private equity firm Kohlberg & Company tried to weasel its way out of a $550 million agreement to buy a cake decoration company called DecoPac. The presiding judge, Kathaleen McCormick, decided against Kohlberg, which became the proud(?) owner of DecoPac in May 2021. McCormick is now the chancellor, which is what Delaware calls the fanciest judge in chancery court.

Now, I don’t know that the Twitter case is necessarily going to go to trial. It seems possible Twitter is willing to settle, perhaps by demanding a higher payout than the $1 billion specified in the contract from Musk if the transaction didn’t go through. I suppose Twitter could renegotiate the transaction at a lower cost, but if I were Twitter’s board, I certainly would not do that because then you’re still in an agreement with Elon Musk, and that shit is for suckers. Though I suppose there’s empirical evidence at this point that the board composition is exclusively suckers.

But the mechanism for those outcomes is the lawsuit Twitter filed — it has to remain committed to the bit of being purchased by Musk in order to get any kind of consolation prize. So the next fun part will be discovery. All it takes is one email or text where Musk admits he’s not serious about the deal to nuke his entire position. And because of Musk’s lack of impulse control, it strikes me as possible that someone goaded him into saying so.

So what are Musk’s chances? Noted short sellers Hindenburg Research — you may remember them as the ones alleging fraud at electric car companies Nikola and Lordstown Motors, resulting in SEC investigations — have gone long on Twitter, effectively shorting Musk. Plus, Bloomberg’s Matt Levine, an actual lawyer, has combed through the specifics of the suit, and I’m not going to do a better job. What I am interested in, however, is a very annoying conversation I have had with people over the last several weeks: what dumbfuck nonsense made Twitter’s board take Musk seriously in the first place?

Whenever I have asked this question, I have gotten some manner of gibberish about fiduciary duty. Basically the idea is that maximizing shareholder value means that Musk’s obviously unserious offer must be taken seriously because, gee whiz, it would be a lot of money for shareholders if it were real.

But that is exactly what I mean!!!!!! Elon Musk famously says he’ll do a lot of things and does about a quarter of them — maybe less — and usually not on time. If you are being wooed for a buyout by someone with a history of poor impulse control, violating agreements and launch licenses, ignoring regulators (remember “I do not respect the SEC”?), and bluffing that he’ll take his company private, your standard commonsense fiduciary duty is to tell him to get lost. Wait and see if he’ll do that tender offer he was threatening or if he’ll lose interest because something else new and shiny comes along. I mean, this guy sired 10 known kids with how many women? This doesn’t exactly suggest a knack for commitment or, frankly, much of an attention span.

Man, the more I think about it, the angrier I get about the dumb little lectures about fiduciary duty. Anyone who’s followed Musk knows about his attempt at starting a media company, not thinking about how to monetize, and then immediately shutting it down because, I guess, it bored him? I’m referring to the short-lived Thud, which was kind of like MSCHF but without a business model. Musk came up with it because he didn’t buy The Onion when it was for sale; Thud folded before it ever had a chance to do anything exciting.

So what’s the real thing Twitter’s board should have done?

Well, obviously they have to consult with their financial and legal advisors. The board probably should have heard Musk out. But one thing that board can then do is say “no ” and go about its business!

Like yes, sure, maximizing value is very important for shareholders, but let’s look at how the dumbfuck nonsense Twitter’s board chose to do is working out:

• Firings of key personnel
• Rude tweets by Musk about Twitter employees, prompting harassment from his flying monkeys
• Stopping long-term product development
• Distracting employees and making the company a more unpleasant place to work
• Expensive litigation

This is not what I would call maximizing shareholder value; it is running the business into the ground, screwing the shareholders in the process. Do you know what probably would have actually maximized shareholder value and also been very satisfying? Telling Elon Musk to fuck off.