Will Elon Musk-owned Twitter end up as a “deal from hell”?

description of families, mergers and acquisitions that end happily do so for a variety of reasons. It’s the unhappy ones that are alike. This is particularly true of & deals done at the top of the business cycle, when hubris runs amok, lofty valuations make acquirers sloppy with their money and the most radical ideas are made to sound plausible. In this category sits Elon Musk’s , once again in the offing after a judge gave both sides until October 28th to consummate it. Mr Musk’s latest attempt to justify it is to describe it as a step towards a Chinese-style “everything app”. It is just as likely to go down in history as a top-of-the-market “deal from hell”. The annals of business have colourful examples of such Stygian mishaps. Sony’s ill-fated acquisition of Columbia Pictures in 1989 occurred when Japan’s bosses thought they were invincible, the bubble economy made any price appear worth paying, and dreams of the convergence of hardware (consumer gadgets) and software (entertainment) were in the air. ’s merger with Time Warner, an even bigger mess, was first announced in 2000 at the apogee of dotcom frothiness. The bosses of both companies, one an internet upstart, the other a fading media giant, fantasised about creating a colossus of the internet age. They torched nearly $200bn of value in a matter of months. In 2007 Royal Bank of Scotland (), an acquisitive financial institution, led a consortium to buy , a sprawling Dutch banking group. It was the biggest banking takeover in history—yet done with little due diligence or oversight of gung-ho executives, even as the world was on the brink of the great recession. It occurred shortly before ’s spectacular demise and a bail-out from the British taxpayer.