Elon Musk’s troubled $44 billion deal to buy Twitter has inspired many tweets chewing over the drama. One of the most perceptive came in the form of a cartoon posted last week by one of the company’s own software engineers.
Manu Cornet joined Twitter last year after 14 years at Google, where he used his hobby of drawing cartoons to poke fun at his employer’s culture and scandals. His latest three-panel drawing depicts an anthropomorphized version of Twitter’s bird logo delivering a monologue. “Your strategy is a model of hypocrisy and bad faith,” it says, seemingly addressing Musk. “You’ve trashed me, disrupted my operations, and destroyed shareholder value.” The angry bird then pivots to a plaintive question: “Will you now finally agree to adopt me?”
Cornet’s cartoon gets to the heart of the illogical situation that has ensnared Twitter. In April, Musk signed a deal to buy the company, but this month he announced he was pulling out, claiming the company had withheld information needed to count the number of bots on the platform. Twitter fired back with a lawsuit saying Musk made false claims in a strategy “of hypocrisy” that showed he considered the company “an elaborate joke”—and should be forced to become the owner of Twitter.
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