The fee was paid by pre-Musk Twitter to the law firm hours before the acquisition. This is less damning that it may appear, because Musk instructed Twitter to

The fee was paid by pre-Musk Twitter to the law firm hours before the acquisition. This is less damning that it may appear, because Musk instructed Twitter to explicitly not pay Wachtell, but those instructions don't mean anything to pre-Musk Twitter. The best time to pay Wachtell would be right before the acquisition (to ensure that the legal matters are complete without Musk halting payments). It's unclear what the company papers show. The Matt Levine article [1] goes into pretty good detail about the case. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-07-11/matt-levine-s-money-stuff-elon-musk-blames-the-lawyers https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-07-11/matt-l...