11 WTF Moments From ‘Character Limit,’ the Book About How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter
Elon Musk‘s tumultuous takeover and rebranding of Twitter — now X — played out in very public fashion: the $44 billion offer, an attempt to walk it back, and a lawsuit that forced Musk to complete the deal were followed by massive layoffs, a spike in misinformation and extremism on the platform, botched updates, and the return of notorious bad actors whose accounts had been permanently suspended — as well as an exodus of the advertisers that account for the site’s revenue.
Through it all, Musk himself kept up the commentary on his profile, promising a new and improved app, posting cringeworthy memes, sniping at his critics, and mixing it up with his new MAGA-world friends while amplifying their false claims and conspiracy theories. But this ugly spectacle doesn’t tell the whole story. Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, a new book out today from New York Times tech reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, takes readers behind the scenes of the unusual acquisition and its messy consequences.
More from Rolling Stone
Here we list some of the most baffling, disturbing, laughable and just plain ridiculous moments in Conger and Mac’s chronicle of Musk’s Twitter mess.
Blowing a Fortune on a Fake Private Eye
When Musk got in trouble for smearing a British diver involved in the 2018 rescue of a Thai youth soccer team in a flooded cave as a “pedo,” he made efforts to prove the unfounded accusation true. To that end, his wealth manager and CEO of his brain implant company Neuralink, Jared Birchall, paid $52,000 to someone he thought was a private investigator to dig up dirt on the man. In fact, their sleuth was a former convict without credentials who “fed Birchall and Musk false information” about the diver. Musk managed to beat a defamation suit anyway.
Musk’s Drug Habits Almost Led to an Intervention
Musk has been open about his use of drugs like ketamine, to the alarm of leadership at Tesla and SpaceX. As Conger and Mac report, he has also been known to take LSD or ecstasy at parties, and to stay up late tweeting on Ambien, a drug that is meant to be a sleep aid. This chemical cocktail led to such erratic behavior that in early 2022, shortly before Musk would launch his bid for Twitter, close family “began discussing a possible intervention that could make him aware of his issues.” Musk was “unreceptive” to their concerns.
Potential Partnership With an Infamous Fraudster
Musk had harsh remarks for crypto kingpin Sam Bankman-Fried once his exchange, FTX, collapsed in November 2022, with $8 billion in customer funds left missing. But in March of that year, as Musk acquired a significant stake in Twitter and mulled buying it outright, Bankman-Fried was among those acquaintances encouraging the takeover so he could come on as an investor. After the merger deal was signed, Musk’s finance team pushed him to accept funding from SBF, claiming he could invest as much as $3 billion. Musk didn’t go for it and apparently pretended not to know who SBF was when he continued to text. “Sorry, who is sending this message?” he wrote to the supposed wunderkind, “despite having been connected to the FTX leader twice via message.”
Grimes Finds Out Her Next Baby’s Name Is Already Taken
We learned last year from Walter Isaacson’s biography Elon Musk about a curious familial coincidence. The billionaire’s on-and-off-again girlfriend, the musician Grimes, stayed in an Austin hospital in 2021 when a surrogate was preparing to give birth to their second child together. Unbeknownst to Grimes, Shivon Zilis, a Neuralink employee, was in the same maternity ward, pregnant with twins by in vitro fertilization — with Musk as the father. Grimes was “furious,” Character Limit notes, not just to learn that he was having children with another woman at the same time, but because Zilis named her daughter Valkyrie, a name “that she had been saving” for her own daughter, born months later. Musk and Grimes would go on to welcome a third child the following year but have since waged a custody battle over all three.
Demanding That Twitter Help Pay for Musk’s Acquisition
Twitter executives were dumbfounded at how quickly Musk wanted to complete his purchase of the company, without any of the usual due diligence. The speed at which the deal went through caused lots of mistakes — for instance, Musk’s lawyers accidentally emailed Twitter’s finance team a spreadsheet of everyone they’d solicited for investment in the deal, then threatened them if they didn’t delete it. Later, at the eleventh hour, Antonio Gracias, a private equity investor and close Musk associate leading the deal, told Twitter they were $400 million short of the agreed price. “You need to wire us the money,” he told executives in a phone call, an extraordinary demand that they could not approve. “You’re not going to wire me the fucking money?” Gracias replied. “Are you saying no to Elon Musk?” In the end, Musk’s team found another source for the missing millions, and the deal went through.
Musk’s Bizarre Victory Cheer
Character Limit traces Musk’s years-long grudge against another Silicon Valley billionaire, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, which dates at least as far back as a statement he made in 2016 about a SpaceX rocket that exploded on the launch pad with one of Facebook’s satellites aboard. (More recently, Meta unveiled the Twitter competitor Threads, and Musk has made empty boasts about his willingness to fight Zuckerberg in a “cage match.”) The vendetta partially explains Musk’s first comment upon hearing his costly Twitter deal had officially closed: “[H]e slammed his fist on the table and let out what could only be described as a battle cry. ‘Fuck Zuck!’ Musk shouted.” Jon Chen, the Twitter VP on hand to witness this outburst, “couldn’t fathom” what the moment had to do with Musk’s enemy. At any rate, the response sharply contrasted with what Musk had said when Twitter initially accepted his offer: “I’m going to regret this for the rest of my life.”
Paranoia About Employees That Didn’t Exist
Organizationally, Musk’s Twitter was chaotic from day one. He had demanded the firing of a certain executive before he was even CEO; then the company laid off thousands of employees almost at random, had to hire some back, and in one case couldn’t even explain why an essential worker had been terminated. It also fired a lead engineer on bereavement leave for supposedly approving the budget for a party that had taken place six months before he was hired. Musk was paranoid about the employees who stayed, fearing they would sabotage the site, but strangest of all, Conger and Mac report, he “had convinced himself that not all of Twitter’s employees were real.” He wanted an audit of the staff to identify what he called “ghost employees” who might be collecting paychecks without doing work. When the request came up in a meeting, “several executives burst out laughing at the absurdity of the idea.” Ultimately, Twitter’s accounting chief and his team had two days to confirm the identities of 7,000 remaining employees — no “ghosts” were found.
Concept for What Would Have Been a Disastrous New Feature
Musk had basically one idea for how to increase Twitter’s revenue while making it less dependent on the advertisers that were already leaving the site: get rid of the old verification system that assigned blue checkmarks to notable figures, institutions, and media, and make people pay $8 a month for the badge as well as premium features. (He based the price on his estimate of how much an order costs at Starbucks.) Product teams, meanwhile, were scrambling to put together more features that could potentially shore up the company’s finances. One poorly conceived proposal was for “paid direct messaging,” which would allow users to DM celebrities for a fee: “Mock-ups presented to Musk’s entourage showed a user paying a few dollars to message the musician Post Malone, with Twitter taking a cut of the proceeds.” Perhaps someone pointed out that this was a good way to drive celebrities off the site, because the project didn’t move forward from there.
Jack Dorsey’s Dabbling in Conspiracist Culture
Much has been made of the misinformation Musk disseminates on social media, but Character Limit also touches upon some curious content excused or amplified by Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey, who encouraged Musk to acquire the platform. In late 2020, he often objected to the labeling or removal of vaccine misinformation by anti-vaxxers on the site, arguing that they didn’t actually violate community guidelines. (Last year, he endorsed anti-vax third-party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for president.) Following Musk’s takeover, Dorsey’s public communications most often came via the decentralized social media protocol Nostr, where he shared content from a dietician known to use a slogan associated with the far-right conspiracist movement QAnon, as well as “conspiratorial videos that referred to victims of the September 11 terrorist attack as ‘crisis actors.'” Obviously, Musk isn’t the only tech mogul susceptible to outlandish claims.
An Outgoing Employee Gives Musk His Honest Opinion
Musk isn’t too forgiving of employees who criticize him — or give him answers he doesn’t like — as many episodes in the book illustrate. In one case, he was enraged about a decline in engagement on his tweets, and abruptly fired an engineer who suggested that the public’s interest in him had fallen off since the Twitter acquisition closed several months prior. But another employee, a data scientist who had already made up his mind to resign after turning over memos on how to run Twitter more effectively, was even more blunt with Musk. He explained that he had been excited about the takeover but was disheartened when, just weeks later, Musk shared blatant partisan misinformation about an assault by a home intruder on then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul Pelosi. “It’s only really like the tenth percentile of the adult population who’d be gullible enough to fall for this,” the employee told Musk, who shot back, “Fuck you!” The departing data scientist left him with a piece of advice: “I hope you’ll declare bankruptcy and let someone else run the company.”
When Musk Learned What Twitter Users Thought of Him
Following a series of disastrous policy changes, Musk decided to hold an informal performance review for himself using one of his favorite Twitter tools: the polling feature. “Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll,” he tweeted in December 2022 before embarking on a flight from Qatar to London. When he landed, he found that “57.5 percent of the more than 17.5 million accounts that had voted were calling for him to resign.” Between this rejection and the plummeting value of Tesla stock, Musk became withdrawn and unresponsive, with those who did manage to talk to him worrying that he was “in the throes of a manic event.” Speaking with on confidante, “Musk choked up and began to doubt his ability to run the company” in light of the poll results, saying, “I’m never going to recover from this.” He would, of course, go on to hire Linda Yaccarino as a replacement CEO in the new year — though as anyone still active on the site that soon became X will tell you, it continues to reflect his worst impulses and warped worldview.
Best of Rolling Stone
Sign up for RollingStone's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Solve the daily Crossword
