Walter Isaacson: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, at the beginning of 2022, he was riding high, but as we say, he’s a drama addict, he doesn’t like to coast. And Tesla sold a million vehicles, I think 33 boosters, Falcon Nines have been shot up and landed safely in the past few months, and he was the richest person on earth and Times person of the year. And yet he’d said, I still want to put all my chips back on the table. I want to keep taking risks. I don’t want to savor things. He had sold all of his houses. So he starts secretly buying shares of Twitter. January, February, March. Becomes public at a certain point he has to declare it. And we were here in Austin at Gigafactory on the mezzanine and he was trying to figure out, well, where do I go from here? And at that time, this is early April, they were going to offer him a board seat and he was going to do a standstill agreement and stop at 10% or something. I remember we were standing around, it was Luke Nozik, whom you know well, Ken Howery, some of his friends on that mezzanine here. And all afternoon and then late into the evening at dinner is like, should we do this? And I didn’t say anything, I’m just the observer, but everybody else is saying, excuse me, why do you want to own Twitter? And Griffin, his son joined at dinner and May for some reason was in town. And everybody says, no, we don’t use Twitter. Why would you do that? And May said, well, I use Twitter. And it is almost like, okay, the demographics are people my age or May’s age. And so it looked like he wasn’t going to pursue it. They offered him a board seat and then he went off to Hawaii to Larry Ellison’s house, which he sometimes uses. He was meeting a friend, Angela Bassett, an actress, and instead of enjoying three days of vacation, he just became supercharged and started firing off text messages, including the fire breathing dragon one, I think he used that phrase a few times that Parag wasn’t the person who was going to take Twitter to a new level. And then by the time he gets to Vancouver where Grimes meets him, they stay up all night playing Elden Ring. He was doing a Ted Talk. And then at 5:30 he finishes playing the Elden Ring and sends out that I’ve made an offer. Even when he comes back, people are trying to intervene and say, excuse me, why are you doing it? And so it was a rocky period between late April and October when the deal closes. And people ask me all the time, well, did he want to get out of the deal? I said, which Elon are you talking about at what time of day? Because there’ll be times in the morning when he’d say, oh, the Delaware court’s going to force me to do it, it’s horrible. Talk to his lawyers. You can win this case. Get me out of it. t time of day? Because there’ll be times in the morning when he’d say, oh, the Delaware court’s going to force me to do it, it’s horrible. Talk to his lawyers. You can win this case. Get me out of it. He met here in Austin with three or four investment bankers, Blair Efron at Center View, Bob Steele at Perella Weinberg, and they offered him options, do you want to get out? Do you want to stay in? Do you want to reduce the price? And I think he was mercurial. There were times he would text me or say to me, this is going to be great. It’s going to be the accelerant to do x.com the way we thought about 20 years ago. And so it’s not until they finally tell them at the beginning of October, right when Optimus the robot is being unveiled in California actually, that the lawyer is saying, you’re not going to probably win this case, better go through with the deal. And by then he’s not only made his peace with it, he’s kind of happy with it at times. Eventually the deal is going to close on, I think a Friday morning, I have it in the book, and we’re there on Thursday and he’s wandering around looking at the Stay Woke t-shirts and psychological safety lingo they’re all using. And he and his lawyers and bankers hatched a plan to do a flash close. And the reason for that was if they closed the deal after the markets had closed for the day and he could send a letter to Parag and to others firing them, quote, for cause, and this’ll be something the courts will have to figure out, then he could save 200 million or so. And it was both the money, but for him, a matter, I won’t say of principle, but of, Hey, they misled me about the numbers. I got forced into doing it, so I’m going to try this jujitsu maneuver and be able to get some money out of them. Then when he takes over, it’s kind of a wild scene, him trying to decide in three different rounds how to get the staff down to 15% of what it was him deciding on Christmas Eve after he’d been at a meeting where they told him, we can’t get rid of that Sacramento server farm because it’s needed for redundancy. And he says, no, it’s not. And he’s flying here to Austin and young James says, why don’t we just do it ourselves? He turns the plane around, they land in Sacramento and he pulls them out himself. So it was a manic period. We should also say that underneath of that, there was a running desire to, or a consideration to perhaps start a new company to build a social media company from scratch.…

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