If he were smarter and/or not a walking ego then yeah, that would have been the move. Though if he were smart he probably wouldn’t be in this mess.

It’s not. He never wanted to buy twitter, he just wanted to pump and dump the stock, but because he is stupid and the plan was obvious they sued him to make him honor the deal.

So if he just turned around and shut the company down, it would give the SEC legal grounds to argue that his intention all along was market manipulation.

My understanding is that the SEC would have fucked him if he just shut it down, because it would indicate that he never intended to buy it in the first place and instead was just trying to manipulate the stock market (which is definitely what he was doing).