I think people are overly focused on the legal proceedings here. Obviously the only option Twitter has when it goes to court is to say "Hey, he breached the con

I think people are overly focused on the legal proceedings here. Obviously the only option Twitter has when it goes to court is to say "Hey, he breached the contract, we want you to force him to comply with the contract" but they don't have to take that line when actually negotiating with Elon Musk. It may well be that Twitter thinks that their case is strong but that the legal proceedings present risk and damage the company's ability to operate in the short term so it's more in their favour to cut a deal where they get some payout from Musk. The only really strong thing I think they'll need (other than cash) is that Musk agrees not to attempt to buy twitter again. The reason I say that is because without the deal TWTR's fair market value is probably in the $20Bn region, and so almost any amount of money they can extract from Musk to walk away would allow him to come back and buy the company cheaper than the current deal - and that would just look absurd for twitter. Say for example they say "give us $10Bn to walk away" Musk could pay that, turn around and offer to buy the company again at $25Bn and probably succeed. So the only real way to protect themselves is to prevent him doing that.