Here’s How the Right Is Spinning Elon Musk’s Twitter Withdrawal as a Victory

In a letter filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission Friday night, lawyers for Elon Musk announced that the billionaire wanted out of his deal to buy Twitter.

The move was widely expected, but it still sent Twitter’s already cratering stock price plummeting even further in pre-market trading Monday morning.

For the right-wing media, lawmakers, and talking heads who were banned or had abandoned the platform—and who had spent weeks celebrating a deal they believed would herald their triumphant return to tweeting—Musk’s withdrawal was a devastating blow.

But rather than going into mourning, they’ve managed to twist logic to the point where they now claim that Musk planned to scupper the deal all along—and it’s actually a really good thing.

And what better way to show their contempt for Twitter than by sharing their views on Twitter.

“Holy shit. The party is really over here. The purge is coming,” Dave Rubin, a conservative political commentator tweeted after news of Musk’s withdrawal was announced.

The main gist of the argument from the right is that Musk was correct to pull out because he had successfully exposed the level of spam accounts on the platform.

“Elon musk is terminating his agreement to buy Twitter: So basically Twitter has a huge amount of spam accounts—way more than they let on—and has gotten busted for it,” Donald Trump Jr. tweeted. “As I said weeks ago spam accounts are probably 50% not 5% of Twitter users.”

In the letter filed with the SEC on Friday, Musk’s lawyers claim that Twitter was “in material breach of multiple provisions” of the $44 billion deal he struck to buy the social network. On Saturday, in an appearance at the Sun Valley Conference, Musk repeated his claim that Twitter’s estimation that just 5% of its accounts are spam or bots is wrong, though he has provided no evidence to back up this claim.

Twitter has said that they will force Musk to go through with the deal, meaning it’s all going to play out in court—something Musk tweeted about on Sunday night.

Now, conservatives who had hoped a Musk-owned Twitter would become some sort of haven for them are trying to decipher what exactly the Tesla founder is up to.

“Dude. Huge fan here,” Brandon Darby, who works for right-wing outlet Breitbart, tweeted to Musk. “I use Starlink and I drive one of your cars. If you’re playing some price negotiation, OK. But otherwise, super uncool to give hope to free speech advocates and then bail like that. It actually meant something to a lot of people.”

Others suggested that this had been Musk’s plan all along. “Maybe Elon never intended to buy Twitter at all,” Charlie Kirk, right-wing commentator and founder of Turning Point USA, tweeted. “Maybe he just wanted to expose it.”

Even though Musk was never actively involved in running the platform since agreeing to buy Twitter, some believed that he had already changed the way the company censored conservative voices—even though all the evidence shows there is no such phenomenon.

Over on Telegram, the QAnon channels, which had similarly viewed Musk’s takeover as a sign that their Twitter accounts would be restored, were also trying to figure out exactly how this move was a victory for them.

Thankfully, an account called Ultra Pepe Lives Matter, which has 200,000 followers, figured it all out.

“Elon Musk was playing 5d chess this entire time,” they wrote. “He’s trolling them with memes now showing exactly what he planned to do. The deep state is getting hit from every angle. His plan to expose and destroy Titter [sic] is playing out perfectly. Winning.”

But all these efforts by far-right and right-wing voices to justify Musk’s withdrawal from the deal are at odds with the views of former President Donald Trump, who on Saturday called the Tesla founder a “bullshit artist” during a campaign-style rally in Alaska.

“You know, he said the other day, oh, I’d never voted for a Republican,” Trump told the crowd. “I said: ‘I didn’t know that. He told me he voted for me.’ So he’s another bullshit artist, but he’s not going to be buying it.”

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