Musk’s period of unnerving calm in early 2022 coincided, fatefully, with a moment when he suddenly had a lot of cash in his pocket. His stock sales had left him with about $10 billion. “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.” In January, he confidentially told his personal manager Jared Birchall to start buying shares.
