Maybe Elon Musk will acquire Twitter before a court-appointed October 28 deadline to complete the $US44 billion ($70 billion) acquisition rolls around. Maybe the price of Tesla’s shares, currency that Musk may need to rely on to help pay for the deal, will bounce back from a grinding downturn. Maybe the seven banks that have arranged a $US13 billion loan — and stand to lose as much as $US500 million on the transaction — will hang tough. Maybe the coalition of rich guys and venture capitalists who promised to chip in $US7 billion to support Musk’s bid will stick around.

That’s a lot of maybes, however, even for an entrepreneur accustomed to vaulting past expectations while also peddling ill-informed bunk about a wide range of subjects, including COVID-19, reality TV, reproduction, Martian democracy and the fates of Taiwan and Ukraine. And this time, for the first time, Musk has the law closely corralling his shenanigans. (Previous tepid monitoring and slaps on the wrist from the Securities and Exchange Commission don’t count.)

The lying, spin and misdirection Musk has attached to his Twitter bid might have been fun when he first hatched the offer, but a judge is looking now. Yes, he’s the world’s richest person, but his sagging Tesla shares, among his most liquid holdings, lost 16 per cent of their value last week after the company’s car sales didn’t meet expectations. He may have to fork over more cash or sell assets such as part of his stake in Space Exploration to fully fund the takeover. Reality is catching up to Musk, and it’s all very Trumpy.

There are distinct differences between Musk and former President Donald Trump, of course. Musk hasn’t been running around fomenting coups, for example, so the fallout from his brinksmanship is less consequential. But he has run roughshod over business norms, securities regulations and the truth in his pursuit of Twitter, wasting a lot of other people’s time and money and toying with the fates of Twitter’s 7,500 employees. His penchant for doing as he pleases without worrying about the damage is in sync with Trump’s own mojo.

Both men are thin-skinned and unpredictable; they both revel in lashing out at their critics on social media; they both use social media to foster cults of personality; and they both seem to think they possess a universal intelligence.

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Musk and Trump have also both attracted flocks of courtiers and enablers who are eager to further their own ambitions, bask in their access to power or make a little money. Such sycophancy has produced rafts of tragicomic propaganda.

“Donald Trump is at his very best, at his very best, when he talks about the issues,” the former president’s adviser, Kellyanne Conway once said of the man who studiously avoided learning anything about most issues. Jack Dorsey, a Twitter founder and former chief executive officer whose mismanagement of the company helped make it a takeover target, waxed heroic about Musk’s attempted buyout: “Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.”

Extending the light of consciousness doesn’t really seem to be the animating force behind Musk’s Twitter bid. What is? Well, Musk will tell you that it’s “an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” Ah, yes, the everything app. As my colleague Parmy Olson pointed out, an app that meets every consumer need has enormous business appeal, and some already exist in places like China. But US regulators are unlikely to sign off on a venture like that and, as Olson also noted, “it’s probably not the best idea for someone as volatile as Musk to oversee an app on which millions engage in social commentary, payments, shopping, identification and more.”