“The Real Story of Musk’s Twitter Takeover”, 2023-08-31 ():
In an exclusive excerpt from his new biography Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson offers a behind-the-scenes look at one of the most surprising and controversial decisions of the mogul’s career.
…It promised to be a glorious year, if only Musk could leave well enough alone. But that was not in his nature. Shivon Zilis, who manages Neuralink (Musk’s company working on implantable brain-computer interfaces) and is the mother of two of his children, noticed that by early April he had the itchiness of a video-game addict who has triumphed but couldn’t unplug. “You don’t have to be in a state of war at all times”, she told him that month. “Or is it that you find greater comfort when you’re in periods of war?” “It’s part of my default settings”, he replied. As he put it to me, “I guess I’ve always wanted to push my chips back on the table or play the next level of the game.” [Cycles]
This period of unnerving success coincided, fatefully, with a moment when he had exercised some expiring stock options that left him with about $10 billion in cash. “I didn’t want to just leave it in the bank”, he says, “so I asked myself what product I liked, and that was an easy question. It was Twitter.” That January, he had confidentially told his personal business manager, Jared Birchall, to start buying shares.
…Musk says that it became clear to him when he got to Hawaii that he would not be able to fix Twitter or turn it into X.com by going on the board: “I decided I didn’t want to be co-opted and be some sort of quisling on the board.”
[Manic phase] There was one other factor. Musk was in a manic mood, and he was acting impetuously. As was often the case, his ideas fluctuated wildly with his mood swings. Even as he was barreling toward buying Twitter, he was texting with Kimbal about their idea of starting a new social-media company. “I think a new social-media company is needed that is based on the blockchain and includes payments”, he wrote.
…But when it came time to drive to see her parents, she [Grimes] decided to leave Musk back in the hotel. “I could tell that he was in stress mode”, she says. Indeed he was. Late that afternoon, Musk texted Taylor his official decision. “After several days of deliberation—this is obviously a matter of serious gravity—I have decided to move forward with taking Twitter private”, he said. That night, after Grimes returned to their hotel, he unwound by immersing himself in a new video game, Elden Ring, which he had downloaded onto his laptop. Elaborately rendered with cryptic clues and strange plot twists, it requires intense focus, especially when it comes to calculating when to attack. He spent a lot of time in the game’s most dangerous regions, a fiery-red hellscape known as Caelid. “Instead of sleeping”, Grimes said, “he played until 5:30 in the morning.” [High social irregularity] Moments after he finished, he sent out a tweet: “I made an offer.”
…The Twitter news was the burning topic around the world, but the SpaceX engineers knew he liked to stay focused on the task at hand, and no one mentioned it. Then he met Kimbal at a roadside cafe in Brownsville [outside SpaceX Starbase] that featured local musicians. They stayed there until 2 a.m., sitting at a table right in front of the bandstand, just listening to the music.
…In the months between the deal agreement and the official closing, Musk’s moods fluctuated wildly. “I am very excited about finally implementing X.com as it should have been done, using Twitter as an accelerant!” he texted me at 3:30 one morning. “And, hopefully, helping democracy and civil discourse while doing so.” A few days later, he was more somber. “I will need to live at Twitter HQ. This is a super tough situation. Really bumming me out :( Sleep is difficult.” He was having doubts about taking on such a messy challenge. “I’ve got a bad habit of biting off more than I can chew”, he admitted in a long talk with me one night. “I think I just need to think about Twitter less. Even this conversation right now is not time well spent.”
…Throughout September, he was on the phone with his lawyers 3–4× a day. Sometimes he was in an aggressive mood and insisted that they could beat the lawsuit that Twitter had filed in Delaware seeking to force him to go through with his first offer. “They are s—tting bricks about the dumpster fire they’re in”, he said of the Twitter board. “I cannot believe that the judge will railroad the deal through. It would not pass muster with the public.” [!] His lawyers finally convinced him that he would lose the case if they took it to trial. It was best just to close the deal on the original terms.
By that point [in the cycle] Musk had even regained some of his enthusiasm about taking over the company. “Arguably, I should just pay full price, because these people running Twitter are such blockheads and idiots”, he told me in late September. “The potential is so great. There are so many things I could fix.” He agreed to an official closing of the deal in October.
[For context, here is how one person describes their bipolar relatives during a manic phase:
I, unfortunately, have had several family members with untreated bipolar disorder. There is no “swinging between mania and depression.” Rather, they start to show signs of mania—less sleep, nervous energy, fast talking, elevated mood, less eating, planning and scheming, etc.—and over the course of the next several weeks these increase slowly. Then the delusions and paranoia begin, the amount of sleep drops to near 0, coherence erodes, they spend every penny they can get their hands on, they become agitated and sometimes violent at the slightest provocation. This continues and progresses for up to 3 or 4 months until they either completely collapse, you successfully get them into a hospital where they fill them full of drugs, they get arrested and the police get them, they are treated in custody, or some terrible accident occurs.]
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