Trump accused the DOJ of "secretly attacking" his Twitter account.
Sanctions were applied after the social media platform delayed compliance with a federal search warrant that required Twitter to hand over Donald Trump's Twitter data without telling the former president about the warrant for 180 days.
If he'd held out one more day it would have been 700k. 2 more days, 1.4M. 3 more, 2.8M.
i.e. Musk caved before it became consequential.
1.4B if he'd waited 2 weeks more. 23.4T (that's Trillion) if he wanted to shield Trump for a month. I'd say it was a heavy fine that worked as intended.
Inconsequential for Musk sure, but not Twitter. Twitter is a company that didn't make money, lost half of its ad revenue, can't afford to pay its rent, can't afford to pay its cloud providers, and was saddled with huge debts that have $1b in interest annually. The clock is ticking for Twitter.
I think the issue is it can become failure of compliance and obstruction of justice at some point or can be tried as that. Elon could really get himself fucked if am investigation found members of the company discussion rejection to oblige.