He was trying to do a pump and dump. Buy shares, say he is going to buy at a huge premium, sell when the price shots up. He had already done something similar.

Twitter said they would take the deal and the SEC said follow through or go to jail. So he borrowed heavily against his Tesla stock to buy Twitter at the ridiculous price.

Twitter didn't make enough to pay the interest even before he ran it into the ground. So he has to keep his creditors happy. Saudi Arabia is one if the big ones and they hated people being able to say whatever they wanted on twitter.