Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

“woke-mind virus” that he believed was infecting America. He disdained Donald Trump, but he felt it was absurd to ban permanently a former president, and he became increasingly riled up by complaints from those on the Right who were being suppressed on Twitter.

“He saw the direction Twitter was heading, which was that if you were on the wrong end of the spectrum you were censored,” says Birchall.

At one point in March he conducted a poll on Twitter: “Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?” When more than 70 percent answered no, Musk posed another question: “Is a new platform needed?”

Within a few hours, the Twitter board backed down. They sent back a very friendly revised agreement that was only three paragraphs long. Its only major restriction was that he could not purchase more than 14.9 percent of Twitter stock. “Well, if they’re going to roll out the red carpet, I’ll do it,” he told Birchall.

Kimbal thought that it would be better for his brother to start his own social media platform based on the blockchain. Perhaps it could include a payment system using Dogecoin, Elon mused. After brunch, he sent Kimbal a few texts fleshing out the idea for “a blockchain social media system that does both payments and short text messages like Twitter.” Because there would be no central server, “there’d be no throat to choke, so free speech is guaranteed.”

He had already accepted, by text message and public tweet, the friendly agreement to join Twitter’s board. But after his brunch with Kimbal, he phoned Birchall and told him not to finalize anything.

He stayed awake most of his first night stewing about the problems Twitter faced. When he looked at a list of the people with the most followers—such as Barack Obama, Justin Bieber, and Katy Perry—he realized that they were no longer very active. So at 3:32 a.m. Hawaii time, he posted a tweet: “Most of these ‘top’ accounts tweet rarely and post very little content. Is Twitter dying?”

waste of time. Will make an offer to take Twitter private.” Agrawal was shocked. They had already announced he was joining the board. There had been no warning that he would instead attempt a hostile takeover.

“They would listen, nod, and then not do anything. I decided I didn’t want to be co-opted and be some sort of quisling on the board.” In retrospect, this sounds like a well-considered reason. But at the time there was one other factor. Musk was in a manic mood, and as often happens, he was acting impetuously.

“There is no way to fix the company as a 9% shareholder, and the public markets have trouble thinking past the next quarter. Twitter needs to scrub out the bots and scammers, which will seem like a massive drop in daily users.”

replied. “It is better, in my opinion, to take Twitter private, restructure and return to the public markets once that is done.”

I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy. However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.

As a result, I am offering to buy 100% of Twitter for $54.20 per share in cash, a 54% premium over the day before I began investing in Twitter and a 38% premium over the day before my investment was publicly announced. My offer is my best and final offer and if it is not accepted, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder. Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it.

Moments after he finished, he sent out a tweet: “I made an offer.” Not since he crashed his McLaren by flooring it at Peter Thiel’s behest had there been such an expensive display of his impulsiveness.

“Why are you doing this?” Musk had moved beyond thinking just about free speech issues. He answered Farooq by describing how he hoped to make Twitter a great platform for user-generated content, including music and videos and stories. Celebrities, professional journalists, and ordinary people could post their creations, like they did on Substack or WeChat, and get paid if they chose.

“What about your time and sanity?” he asked. “Tesla and SpaceX still need your help. How long would it take to turn Twitter around?” “At least five years,” Musk answered. “I would have to get rid of much of the staff. They don’t work hard or even show up.”

He believed that he could quintuple Twitter’s revenue to $26 billion by 2028, even as he reduced its reliance on advertising from 90 percent of the revenue to 45 percent. The new revenue would come from user subscriptions and data licensing. He also projected revenue from enabling users to make payments, including small ones for newspaper articles and other content through Twitter,

why he wanted to “open the aperture” of what speech was permissible on Twitter and avoid permanent bans of people, even those with fringe ideas.

On talk radio and cable TV, there were separate information sources for progressives and conservatives. By pushing away right-wingers, the content moderators at Twitter, more than 90 percent of whom, he believed, were progressive Democrats, might be creating a similar Balkanization of social media.

Wouldn’t all this be extremely difficult, time-consuming, and controversial, thus harming his missions at Tesla and SpaceX? “I don’t think from a cognitive standpoint it’s nearly as hard as SpaceX or Tesla,” he said. “It’s not like getting to Mars. It’s not as hard as changing the entire industrial base of Earth to sustainable energy.”

there were two other reasons, I think, that Musk wanted to own Twitter. The first was a simple one. It was fun, like an amusement park. It offered political smackdowns, intellectual gladiator matches, dopey memes, important public announcements, valuable marketing, bad puns, and unfiltered opinions. Are you not entertained?

And second, I believe there was a psychological, personal yearning. Twitter was the ultimate playground. As a kid, he was beaten and bullied on the playground, never having been endowed with the emotional dexterity needed to thrive on that rugged terrain. It instilled a deep pain

But now he could own the playground.

Ellison had not tweeted in a decade. In fact, he could not remember his Twitter password, so Musk had to personally get it reset for him. But he believed that Twitter was important. “It’s a real-time news service, and there’s nothing really like it,” he told me. “If you agree it’s important for a democracy, then I thought it was worth making an investment in it.”

When Michael Grimes persisted by texting that Bankman-Fried “could do $5bn if everything vision lock,” Musk responded with a “dislike” button.

On the Friday after the Twitter board accepted his offer, Musk flew to Los Angeles to have dinner with his four older boys at the rooftop restaurant of the Soho Club in West Hollywood. They did not use Twitter very much and were puzzled. Why was he buying it? Just from their questioning, it was clear that they didn’t think it was a great idea.

“I think it’s important to have a digital public square that’s inclusive and trusted,” he replied. Then, after a pause, he asked, “How else are we going to get Trump elected in 2024?” It was a joke. But with Musk, it was sometimes hard to tell,

By the end of the dinner, they accepted most of his reasons for buying Twitter but were still uncomfortable. “They thought that I was asking for trouble,” he says. They were, of course, right. They also knew that their father actually liked asking for trouble.

Some troll farms burned through hundreds of identities. Not only did these fake accounts pollute the service; they were not monetizable.

His Autopilot team at Tesla had two hundred software engineers, so why did Twitter have twenty-five hundred?

He felt strongly that he had overpaid, which was true.

what he really thought: that they were wrong to kick off Trump, that their content moderation policies crossed the line into unjustifiable censorship, that the staff had been infected by the woke-mind virus, that people should show up to work in person, and that the company was way overstaffed.

he was rather conciliatory on these hot-button issues. Leslie Berland, the chief marketing officer of Twitter, began with the issue of content moderation. Instead of simply invoking his mantra about the goodness of free speech, Musk went deeper and made a distinction between what people should be allowed to post and what Twitter should cause to be amplified and spread. “I think there’s a distinction between freedom of speech and freedom of reach,” he said. “Anyone can just go into the middle of Times Square and say anything, even deny the Holocaust. But that doesn’t mean that needs to be promoted to millions of people.”

He also explained why some limits on hate speech were important. “You want as many people as possible on Twitter,” he said. “For that to happen, people must enjoy being on Twitter. If they’re being harassed or made uncomfortable, they’re not going to use Twitter. We have to strike this balance

When asked about diversity, equity, and inclusion, Musk pushed back a bit. “I believe in a strict meritocracy,”

he also insisted he had not become an ideological conservative. “My political views, I think, are moderate, close to the center.”

His trans daughter Jenna had just turned eighteen and gone to court in Los Angeles, where she lived with her mother, to change her name officially from Xavier Musk to Vivian Jenna Wilson.

She called herself “Jenna,” which was similar to the name that her mother Justine used, Jennifer Wilson, before she met and married Musk. “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form,” she declared to the court.

Musk had made peace with Jenna’s transitioning, even though he had not embraced the protocols about listing one’s pronouns. He believed that she was rejecting him because of her political ideology. “It’s full-on communism, and a ...

Musk. “We are simultaneously being told that gender differences do not exist and that genders are so profoundly different that irreversible surgery is the only option,” he tweeted that week. “Perhaps someone wiser than me can explain this dichotomy.” Then, almost as a memo to himself as well ...

Musk and Grimes had a third child that week, a son named Techno Mechanicus Musk. The boy, who was birthed by a surrogate mother, was nicknamed Tau, after the Greek letter representing the irrational number that is equal to two times pi. Its approximation, 6.28, reflected Musk’s own birthday, June 28. They kept the existence of this third child private.

When Errol had heart surgery in 2015, Elon’s support was temporarily increased to $5,000 a month. But he cut off the funds after learning that Errol had impregnated Jana, the stepdaughter he had raised from age four, whom Elon and Kimbal considered a half-sister.

At the end of March 2022, Errol wrote asking that his stipends be restored. “At 76, I cannot generate income easily,” he wrote. “The alternative for me is starvation and unbearable humiliation or death by suicide. Death by suicide does not worry me, but it should worry you. The truth is too well known. You will be ruined, make no mistake, and people will know who you really are, or have become.”

Around the time of Father’s Day, Elon resumed the $2,000 monthly payments. But his financial manager Jared Birchall asked Errol to stop making a series of YouTube videos, titled Dad of a Genius, that he had produced with a clinical psychologist.

As if following a perverse script, Father’s Day 2022 brought one more complication to this situation. Errol revealed that he had fathered a second child with Jana, a daughter. “The only thing we are on Earth for is to reproduce,” he said. “If I could have another child I would. I can’t see any reason not to.”

He took his four older boys along with Grimes and X to Spain to vacation with James and Elisabeth Murdoch and their children. James, a member of the Tesla board, is the liberal member of the Rupert Murdoch family, and Elisabeth is more so. They provided Musk with a calming personal influence and political counterbalance.

On a group chat they do with their father, even when traveling together, one asked him to not tweet out pictures of them without their permission. Musk got depressed, dropped off the group chat, and a few minutes later sent word that they were returning to the U.S.

Musk realized that it was difficult to have a stable family life if he didn’t have a family home. So amid the domestic drama in the summer of 2022, he started dreaming about a home of his own in Austin. He considered a few houses for sale, but deemed them too expensive. Instead, he decided to build one on a sprawling horse farm, with a tranquil lake, that he had bought right across the Colorado River from Giga Texas. He thought he might use other parts of the property for Neuralink and his other companies.

Birchall, who was with them, Googled images of futuristic buildings, while Foster made more sketches in his notebook. Maybe, Musk suggested, a shard of glass coming out of the lake? The bottom floor could be partly submerged in the water, accessible by a tunnel from another structure on the shore. I later commented that it did not actually seem like a family home. Musk agreed. “It’s more an art project than a house,” he explained. He put off building it.

somber. “I will need to live at Twitter HQ. This is a super tough situation. Really bumming me out :( Sleep is difficult.”