Perhaps the strongest indicator that mercurial Elon Musk is really really serious about going through with his on-again off-again purchase of Twitter this time is that he didn’t announce it on Twitter.

Instead, he did so by way of an old-fashioned letter.

That letter was disclosed by the company “in a filing Tuesday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission,” reports the Associated Press. “It came less than two weeks before a trial between the two parties is scheduled to start in Delaware.”

And there’s the other part: the trial. We suspect — actually, the experts suspect — that the Tesla CEO’s lawyers told him he has about as much chance of success at trial as Donald Trump has of prevailing over CNN in his $475 million defamation lawsuit. Odds somewhere between “slim” and “none” not being to Musk’s liking, he decided to move forward.

Another indicator that this deal is finally going to happen is the degree to which Big Tech and the mainstream media are heading for the fainting couches. As Fox News reports:

Media pundits initially voiced their displeasure at the Twitter purchase back in April, when the deal was first announced. Many of their accusations included personal attacks against Musk, calling him a “sociopath” or “bro-fascist” who was only interested in protecting free speech for White users. The New York Times went as far as to claim that Musk grew up in South Africa “detached from apartheid’s atrocities and surrounded by anti-Black propaganda” that could influence the company.

NBC News’s Ben Collins sounded a deliciously ominous tone on — where else? — Twitter: “For those of you asking: Yes, I do think this site can and will change pretty dramatically if Musk gets full control over it. No, there is no immediate replacement. If it gets done early enough, based on the people he’s aligned with, yes, it could actually affect midterms.”

To which former Politico Magazine editor Garrett M. Graff replied, “Be afraid, be actually afraid.”

BBC journalist Dickens Olewe was even more hysterical: “Huge changes anticipated on this bird app after it goes private. Guardrails will be dropped, misinfo and conspiracy theories will thrive. No functional alternatives available, this is it: a complete destruction of the global public square. Been nice y'all.”

If only.

Back at headquarters, the leftist peasants may be revolting. “Virtually every Twitter employee I’ve spoken to in the last six months has told me that he or she plans to leave if Mr. Musk takes over,” wrote New York Times tech reporter Kevin Roose. “It’s also worth noting that Mr. Musk may not mind if thousands of Twitter employees show themselves the door.”

Omar Navarro, a Republican House candidate from California helps put things in perspective: “China and Bill Gates buying all sorts of farmland in America should be way more concerning than Elon Musk buying Twitter!” he tweeted.

As proof of Musk’s malevolence, though, the speech-suppressing Left no doubt recalls his comments about the company’s treatment of Donald Trump. “Even though I think a less divisive candidate would be better in 2024,” he tweeted back in May, “I still think Trump should be restored to Twitter.”

Also in May, he said: “Permanent bans should be extremely rare and really reserved for accounts that are bots, or scam, spam accounts. … I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump. I think that was a mistake because it alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice. Banning Trump from Twitter didn’t end Trump’s voice. It will amplify it among the right, and that is why it’s morally wrong and flat-out stupid.”

That commitment may or may not matter to Trump, who asserted back in April that he won’t return to Twitter but instead will stay on his own platform, Truth Social. “I hope Elon buys Twitter because he’ll make improvements to it, and he is a good man, but I am going to be staying on Truth.”

Our sense, though, is that Trump will ultimately want to be where the action is, especially if he decides to run for president again in 2024. If at that time everyone else is batting it back and forth on a newly free and non-censoring Twitter platform, how likely is it that Trump will stay away?

As for the business aspect of the deal, the scribes at The Wall Street Journal are decidedly unimpressed. The headline reads, “In Twitter, Musk Buys the Walking Dead,” and the article takes it from there: “In a sobering turn of events, Elon Musk prepares to eat his own words. He had better hope they act as a corpse reviver. … For a man who has very publicly criticized the speed and direction of innovation on his favorite social-media network, the seemingly sudden reversal is a surprising capitulation to the status quo. For reasons at this point publicly unknown, Mr. Musk will not only own the supposedly bot-riddled network he has spent the last several months deriding — he will pay a premium for it.”

We think the Journal should lighten up. After all, we’re talking about free speech. And besides, it’s only $44 billion.