By Walter Isaacson
Compiled by: czgsws, BlockBeats
The personal biography of Elon Musk, the world's richest man, founder of OpenAI, SpaceX, owner of X (formerly Twitter), and CEO of Tesla, "Elon Musk: The Biography" will be officially published and sold on September 12. The book is written by Walter Isaacson, the author of "Steve Jobs" and a well-known contemporary American biographer. The Wall Street Journal excerpted part of the "Twitter War" and released it in advance. BlockBeats sorted it out and compiled it as follows:
Game addict
In April 2022, everything is going amazingly well for Elon Musk. Tesla’s stock price has risen 15-fold in 5 years, more than the next 9 car companies combined. SpaceX launched twice as many rockets into orbit in the first quarter of 2022 as all other companies and countries combined. And Starlink satellites have just successfully created a private internet that provides network services to 500,000 users in 40 countries, including Ukraine.
If Musk can get through 2022 safely, it will be a great year, but this is clearly not his nature.
Shivon Zilis, an executive at Neuralink, Musk’s company working on implantable brain-computer interfaces, and the mother of Musk’s two children, noticed in early April that Musk was like a video game addict who couldn’t unplug and felt restless despite having won.
Shivon Zilis once advised Musk: "You don't have to be in a state of war all the time, or, when you are in a war, will you find greater psychological comfort?"
“It’s part of my default setting where I always want to push the chips back on the table or move to the next level of difficulty in the game,” Musk responded.
As fate would have it, this period of unsettling success coincided with the exercise of some of his expiring stock options, leaving him with about $10 billion in cash.
“I didn’t want to leave it in the bank,” he said, “so I asked myself what product I liked, and it was a simple question: Twitter.” That January, Musk confidentially told his personal business manager, Jared Birchall, to start buying Twitter stock.
The way Musk aggressively acquired Twitter and renamed it X foreshadowed the way he operates now: impulsive and irreverent. It was an addictive playground for him. It had many of the hallmarks of a schoolyard, including taunting and bullying. But in the case of Twitter, the smart kids earned the following. They weren’t pushed down the steps and beaten, as Musk was as a child, and owning it would make him the king of the schoolyard.
Elon Musk, right, and Peter Thiel's companies merged to form PayPal in October 2000. Photo credit: PAUL SAKUMA/AP Landscape Open
More than two decades ago, Musk founded a company called X.com, which he hoped to build into a "universal application" that could handle all of a person's financial transactions and social relationships. When it merged with Paypal, a payment service co-founded by Peter Thiel, Musk fought to keep X.com as the name of the combined company, but his new colleagues resisted. PayPal had become a trusted brand name, as recognizable and branded as Twitter is today, while the name X.com was reminiscent of a "dirty website." Musk was ousted, but he remains steadfast to this day.
Musk said: "PayPal is a good name if you just want to be a niche player, but if you want to take over the world's financial system, then X is a better choice."
When he started buying Twitter stock, Musk saw Twitter as a way to realize his original idea, and he also felt that Twitter's name was too small.
“Twitter could become what X.com should have been, and we could help save free speech in the process,” Musk said.
By then, a new concern was surfacing: Musk’s growing worry about the dangers of what he called the “woke culture” that he believed was infecting the United States.
Musk said seriously: "Unless the virus of "woke culture" is stopped, civilization will never develop into a multi-planetary model."
Musk’s anti-woke sentiment was sparked in part by his oldest child, Xavier (then 16),’s decision to transition.
“Hey I’m trans and my name is Jenna now,” the child texted the Musk brothers’ wives. “Don’t tell my dad.”
Jenna later severed all ties with Musk, believing that anyone rich is evil and unwilling to spend time with Musk despite his repeated advances. He attributes this in part to the ideology Jenna absorbed at Crossroads School, a progressive school she attended in Los Angeles. Twitter, he believes, has been influenced by left-wing voices.
"What Twitter needs is a fire-breathing dragon"
One night after his Twitter stock purchase became public, Musk called then-Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, and they decided to meet secretly for dinner on March 31 with Twitter board chairman Bret Taylor.
Musk found Agrawal likable. “He’s a very nice guy,” he said. But that’s the problem. If you ask Musk what qualities a CEO needs, he wouldn’t include being a genuinely nice person. One of his maxims is that managers shouldn’t aim to be likable. “What Twitter needs is a fire-breathing dragon, and Agrawal is not that,” he said after the meeting.
Musk hadn’t thought about taking over Twitter himself at the time. During their meeting, Agrawal invited him to join Twitter’s board of directors, and he agreed, but the lull was short-lived.
Musk's X.com Vision
On the afternoon of April 6, the day after Musk announced he was joining Twitter’s board of directors, Musk’s close friends Luke Nosek and Ken Howery expressed their alarm at a gathering. “This could cause trouble.” Musk happily admitted at the meeting, “It’s clear that the asylum is run by the prisoners,” he said of Twitter’s staff.
A Twitter logo on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in November 2021. Photo credit: RICHARD DREW/AP
Musk reiterated his simple point that it would be good for democracy if Twitter stopped trying to limit user speech. Although Howery agreed with Musk's libertarian views on free speech, he gently pushed back. "Should it be like a telephone system, where what goes in on one end comes out exactly the same on the other end? Or do you think this is more like a system for managing the world's discourse, and maybe there should be some intelligence built into the algorithm to prioritize or de-prioritize things?"
“Yeah, that’s a tough question,” Musk responded. “There’s also the question of how much free speech should be promoted or amplified, and maybe the way promoted tweets are promoted should be more open, maybe it’s an open source algorithm on GitHub so people can filter through it.”
Musk then tossed out some other ideas. “What if we charged people a small fee, like two dollars a month, to be verified?” he asked. Musk figured that having access to users’ credit card information would eliminate “bots” and provide a new revenue stream, as well as further his goal of turning Twitter into a payments platform, like his vision for X.com, where people could send money, distribute tips, and pay for stories, music, and video content. Because Howery and Nosek had worked with Musk at PayPal, they liked the idea.
“It would fulfill my original vision for X.com and PayPal,” Musk said with a laugh.
The next day, Musk’s brother Kimbal told him over lunch that it would be a good idea to start a new social media platform based on the blockchain. Musk was intrigued and went into a state of dizziness. He half-jokingly said that maybe it could have a payment system using Dogecoin (DOGE), a semi-serious cryptocurrency that Musk had been quietly funding. After lunch, he sent Kimbal a few text messages, elaborating on the idea of a blockchain social media system that could do both payments and text messaging like Twitter.
He then flew to the Hawaiian island of Lanai, a trip meant for a quiet date with a woman he occasionally dates, Australian actress Natasha Bassett. But rather than treating it as a relaxing mini-vacation, Musk spent four days figuring out what to do with Twitter.
Musk lay awake for much of the first night, fretting about the problems facing Twitter. When he looked at a list of users with the most followers, he saw that they were no longer very active. So at 3:32 a.m. Hawaii time, he posted a tweet: “Most of the ‘top’ accounts rarely tweet, and post very little content. Is Twitter dying?”
About 90 minutes later, Twitter CEO Agrawal sent Musk a text message: "You are free to tweet 'Is Twitter dying?' or anything else about Twitter, but I have an obligation to tell you that this does not help me make Twitter better in the current environment." It was a restrained text, carefully worded.
When Musk got the text, it was just after 5 a.m. in Hawaii, but he was still in high spirits. He fired back sharply: "What have you done this week? I will not be joining the board, it's a waste of time, and I will be making a proposal to take Twitter private."
Agrawal was shocked. “Can we talk?” he asked plaintively.
Parag Agrawal, who was CEO of Twitter when Musk bought it in July 2022. PHOTOGRAPHY: KEVIN DIETSCH/GETTY IMAGES
Within three minutes, Taylor, the chairman of Twitter’s board, texted Musk, requesting a similar conversation. “Can you give me five minutes to figure out what’s going on?” he asked Musk.
“Fixing Twitter by chatting with Agrawal is not going to work,” Musk responded. “Drastic action is needed.”
Musk's "A Proposal"
Musk said that by the time he arrived in Hawaii, it was clear to him that he would not be able to fix Twitter or turn it into X.com by joining the board: “I decided I didn’t want to be wooed and be on the board, and I didn’t want to be some kind of people-pleaser on the board.” There was another factor. Musk was in a frenzy and acting impetuously.
As usual, his thoughts fluctuated wildly with his mood. At the same time he was pushing to acquire Twitter, he was texting with Kimbal about their idea of starting a new social media company. “I think there needs to be a new social media company that is built on the blockchain and includes payments,” he wrote.
But by late that afternoon (Saturday, April 9), he had settled on the idea of buying Twitter. “It already had a user base and needed this boost to launch X.com,” he texted Birchall, his personal business manager.
Musk then flew to Vancouver to meet his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Claire Boucher, a performance artist known as “Grimes.” She had been pressing Musk to come to her so she could introduce their son, X (yes, X), to her parents and elderly grandparents. But she decided to leave Musk at the hotel while she drove to see her parents. “I could tell he was in stress mode,” she said.
Indeed, Musk texted Taylor, Twitter’s board chair, to make his decision official later that afternoon. “After several days of careful consideration — and this is clearly a serious matter — I have decided to move forward with taking Twitter private,” he said.
That night, when Grimes returned to the hotel, she found Musk relaxing with a new video game, Elden Ring, which he had downloaded to his laptop. The game, with its elaborately rendered cryptic clues and strange plot twists, requires extreme concentration, especially when calculating when to attack. Musk spent a lot of time in the game's most dangerous areas. "He didn't sleep," Grimes said. "He played until 5:30 in the morning."
Shortly after the game was over, Musk tweeted: "I made an offer."
Musk jokingly walked into Twitter headquarters holding a sink shortly before his deal to acquire the company closed on October 26, 2022. Photo credit: Musk's personal Twitter account
Musk then began looking for outside investors to help him finance the acquisition. He asked his brother Kimbal, but Kimbal declined. The fundraising plan had more success under Oracle founder Lawrence Joseph "Larry" Ellison. "Yeah, sure," Ellison replied when Musk asked if he would be interested in investing in the deal.
"How much can you offer?" Musk asked. "Nothing is required of you, but this deal is oversubscribed, so I have to reduce or kick out some participants."
“A billion,” Ellison said. “Or whatever you want.”
Ellison hasn’t tweeted in a decade. In fact, he couldn’t remember his Twitter password, so Musk had to reset it for him. But Ellison thinks Twitter is important. “It’s a real-time news service, there’s nothing better than it, and if you agree that this is important for democracy, then I think it’s worth investing in.”
"My bullshit detector went off like a red alert"
One person eager to get involved in the deal was Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the founder of cryptocurrency trading platform FTX who quickly fell from grace. Morgan Stanley urged Musk to call SBF, saying he would "take charge of the social media blockchain integration engineering" and put $5 billion into the acquisition.
Despite discussing the idea of building a social network on the blockchain with Kimbal, Musk thought the approach was too slow to support fast-paced Twitter posts. So he didn't want to meet SBF. When his banker insisted that SBF "can pay $5 billion," Musk responded directly to the information with a "dislike" emoji. "Blockchain Twitter is impossible because peer-to-peer networks cannot support such high bandwidth and latency requirements." Musk said he might meet with SBF at some point, as long as it didn't have to get into a tough blockchain debate.
In December 2022, Musk rejected an offer from FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who texted Musk that he was “very excited about what we’re going to do with TWTR.” Photo credit: KENNY WASSUS/The Wall Street Journal
SBF then texted Musk directly that he was "very excited about what we're going to do with TWTR." SBF said he owns $100 million worth of Twitter stock, meaning his Twitter shares would convert into shares in the new company once Musk takes it private.
“Sorry, who sent this message?” Musk responded with a text. When SBF apologized and introduced himself, Musk responded curtly: “You’re welcome, welcome aboard.”
Musk's attitude led to another call from SBF in May. "My bullshit detector went off like a red alarm on a Geiger counter," Musk said. SBF started talking very fast, all about himself. "He was talking like he was sprinting, a mile a minute," Musk said. "I thought he was supposed to ask me questions about the deal, but he kept telling me about what he was doing. I was like, 'Man, calm down.'" However, the feeling was mutual, and SBF also thought Musk seemed crazy. The call lasted half an hour, and SBF ultimately did not invest.
Completed the acquisition
Musk successfully raised the money, and Twitter’s board accepted his plan in late April. That night, instead of celebrating, Musk flew to the Starbase rocket launch site in South Texas. There, he attended his regular nightly meeting about redesigning the Raptor engine and spent more than an hour thinking about how to deal with an unexplained methane leak they were having. Twitter’s news was the hottest topic in the world, but SpaceX engineers knew he liked to focus on the task at hand, so no one mentioned it. Then he met Kimbal at a sidewalk cafe in Brownsville that was featuring local musicians. They stayed until two in the morning, sitting at a table in front of the bandstand, just listening to music.
A SpaceX Starship rocket lifts off for testing in Boca Chica, Texas, in April 2023. PHOTOGRAPHY: PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
In the months between the deal being agreed and the deal closing, Musk’s emotions fluctuated wildly. “I’m super excited about finally making X.com happen, just as it was supposed to, using Twitter as the catalyst!”
A few days later, his mood darkened. "I need to live at Twitter HQ. It's getting too hard to handle. It's really frustrating me. I can't sleep there." Musk was skeptical about taking on such a chaotic challenge. "I have a bad habit of biting off more than I can chew," Musk admitted during a long conversation. "I think I just need to think less about Twitter."
Revelations from a whistleblower and others had reinforced his belief that Twitter had lied about its actual user numbers and that his initial offer of $44 billion was too high. He wanted a better deal. Throughout September, he was on the phone with his lawyers three or four times a day. At times he grew emotional, insisting that they could beat Twitter’s lawsuit in Delaware. “They’re throwing bricks at the dumpster fire they’re in,” he said of Twitter’s board. “I couldn’t believe the judge was going to pass this deal through. It wasn’t going to pass through the public.”
Musk’s lawyers eventually convinced him that he would lose if they took the case to court, and that it would be better to just close the deal on the original terms. By then, Musk had even regained some of his enthusiasm for taking over the company. “I should pay the premium, arguably, because these people who run Twitter are fools and idiots, and the potential is so huge, and there are so many things I can fix.” Musk eventually agreed to officially close the deal in October.
Musk celebrates the closing of the Twitter deal with a bottle of Pappy van Winkle bourbon on October 27, 2022. Photo credit: WALTER ISAACSON “All these damn birds have to go”
Musk planned to visit Twitter in San Francisco on Wednesday, Oct. 26, to scout out the company and prepare for the official closing of the deal, which was scheduled for Friday. As he wandered around the headquarters, he seemed surprised. The headquarters is located in a 10-story Art Deco building built in 1937 as a merchandise mart that has been renovated in a tech-chic style, with a coffee bar, yoga studio, gym and game room. The spacious cafe on the ninth floor serves free meals, ranging from handmade burgers to vegan salads. A sign in the restroom reads "Gender Diversity is Welcome Here," and as Musk rummaged through a cabinet filled with Twitter-branded merchandise, he found a T-shirt emblazoned with the words "Stay Woke," which he waved as an example of the mentality he believes has infected the company.
There is a fundamental difference of opinion between Twitter and Musk’s business metaverse. Twitter prides itself on being a friendly platform where coddling is considered a virtue. “We are absolutely highly empathetic and care deeply about inclusion and diversity; everyone needs to feel safe here,” says Leslie Berland, who was chief marketing and people officer until she was fired by Musk. The company has instituted a permanent work-from-home option and allows one mental “off day” per month. One of the company’s go-to buzzwords is “psychological safety.” Be careful not to cause discomfort.
Musk gives a wry smile when he hears the term “psychological safety.” He disagrees. He sees it as the enemy of urgency, progress. His favorite buzzword is “hardcore.” He believes that discomfort is a good thing, a weapon against complacency. Vacations, work-life balance, and days of “mental rest” are not his thing.
He was amused, then disgusted, by the iconic blue bird logo that was everywhere at Twitter. Musk was not a lively person, preferring dark and stormy drama to crisp and lighthearted small talk. “All these damn birds have to go,” he told a middle manager.
The Twitter deal was scheduled to close on Friday. When the stock market opened that morning, an orderly transition was mapped out. Funds would be transferred, shares would be delisted, and Musk would take control. That would allow Agrawal and his top Twitter lieutenants to collect severance packages and receive stock options.
But Musk decided he didn’t want that. The afternoon before the scheduled close, he methodically planned a jiu-jitsu maneuver: He would force a quick close that evening. If his lawyers and bankers timed everything right, he could fire Agrawal and other Twitter executives “for cause” before their stock options vested.
The new X logo is seen on the roof of Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco on July 29, 2023. PHOTOGRAPHY: JOSH EDELSON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
It was bold, even brutal. But Musk justified it because he firmly believed Twitter’s management had misled him. “There’s a $200 million difference in the cookie jar between shutting down tonight and shutting down tomorrow morning,” Musk told the crowd late Thursday afternoon as the plan unfolded.
At 4:12 p.m. Pacific time, once they confirmed the funds had been transferred, Musk pulled the trigger to complete the deal. That’s when his assistant handed Agrawal and three of his top executives their termination letters. Six minutes later, Musk’s top security official arrived at the second-floor conference room to say everyone had “quit” the building and that their access to email had been cut off.
The instant email cutoff was part of the plan. Agrawal had prepared a resignation letter citing a change of control. But when his Twitter email was cut off, it took him several minutes to send the document to Gmail. By then, he had already been fired by Musk.
"He tried to resign," Musk said.
"But we beat him," his gunman's attorney, Alex Spiro, responded.