For months, everyone knew how Elon Musk felt about buying Twitter because he was constantly tweeting about it. This week, we heard from Twitter.

In a scathing 62-page complaint, the social media company asserted  that Musk's effort to derail the $44 billion deal was an act of "hypocrisy" and "bad faith."

Twitter's allegation that Musk merely invented a complaint about spam bots to get out of the deal links him in with a growing crowd of dealmakers who are having second thoughts about their investments during a market rout for tech stocks.

For all the obvious reasons, the Musk-Twitter saga is like nothing we've ever seen. There is nobody in the world quite like Musk and no company quite like Twitter—so the clashing of the two is business-news poetry.

But the imperiled deal is also emblematic of this moment. In fact, of a moment in every business cycle when euphoria gives way to regret and dealmakers everywhere scramble for an escape hatch.

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Signs of regret are popping up everywhere, nowhere more obviously than in the SPAC market.

Panera Bread called off its deal to merge with a blank check company led by restaurateur Danny Meyer. Online broker eToro and a SPAC headed by The Bancorp founder Betsy Cohen have also shredded their agreement. Several others have canceled or postponed their deals.

Bill Ackman's $4 billion SPAC threw up its hands and simply decided this week to give shareholders their money back.

In the buyout world, Thoma Bravo convinced software maker Anaplan to accept a lower purchase price for being taken private. The official reason given was that Anaplan had overpaid new workers, but that came against a backdrop of double-digit declines on the Nasdaq.

Software company Dye & Durham reportedly may walk away from an agreement to buy data services provider Link Administration Holdings after striking a deal for C$3.2 billion (about $2.45 billion) in December 2021.

Indian edtech company Byju's is short $250 million of an $800 million funding round because it says a pair of investors, citing economic conditions, have failed to make good on their capital commitments.

Buy now, pay later startups Zip and Sezzle abandoned merger plans, also blaming market and economic gloom.

Video game company IronSource went public in a Thoma Bravo-backed SPAC deal that valued it at $11 billion in March 2021. Apparently, its new shareholders decided that was a bad idea: The company sold itself to Unity for $4.4 billion this week.
  Regret aversion The problem with regret isn't just how it affects past investments, but also how it impacts future ones.

In behavioral economics, regret theory is the idea that we try to avoid the regret that comes with making the wrong decision. Ironically, our aversion to regret frequently causes us to make poor decisions.

In a bear market, investors may act overly cautious to avoid making a bad investment. The bull market corollary is fear of missing out while others get rich.

Some market actors are more risk-averse than others, and therefore more susceptible to regret.

Venture capitalists are loath to renege on a term sheet, no matter how poorly priced the deal is in retrospect. They know that doing so could ruin their reputation, and they accept the risk that many investments will go to zero.

Bankers and debt lenders, on the other hand, have less tolerance for deals gone bad.

When Musk received an agreement from banks to provide debt financing for his deal, they did so at a rate that was far too low by today's standards. At the market's current debt yields, Musk's bankers would take a loss on the $3 billion in promised debt financing, Bloomberg reported.

The Twitter deal is emblematic of wider loan problems for US banks, which are building up reserves to cover bad loans. The practice is currently eating into the profits of JP Morgan Chase and others.

Beyond banking profits, the danger of this so-called hung debt is that it may create an atmosphere of regret aversion that has a chilling effect on future deals.

But that may be an irrational mistake, according to regret theory. Investors who act on fear of regret tend to make mistakes like selling winning stocks too soon or holding onto losers too long.

Dealmakers would be better off if, rather than being overcome with fear of regret, they accept it as an inevitable consequence of making decisions in uncertain times. Better to act in line with strategy and objective facts than fail to act because you may regret it later.

This article originally appeared on PitchBook News