(Credit: Pool/Pool/Getty Images News via Getty Images) It's been almost two years since Elon Musk completed his takeover of Twitter, and while much of the drama played out in full view of his almost 198 million followers, a new book out today offers a behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of the $44 billion deal. For Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, New York Times technology reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac sifted through lengthy court documents, obtained internal memos, and interviewed over 100 people who were close to Elon Musk as the pieces fell into place—lawyers, advisers, employees, and friends. (Credit: Penguin Press) Is the book title hyperbolic? It depends on who you ask, but Twitter has undergone a radical shift under Musk, starting with the name change to X. Blue checkmarks are no longer a symbol of legitimacy and free speech trumps content moderation. It's made Musk popular with a certain crowd, but that doesn't include the companies whose ad dollars keep the lights on. "The advertising business has collapsed under this leadership," says Mac. "So has the valuation of the company. He bought it for $44 billion. It’s now, by his own valuation, under $20 billion. On those metrics alone, we thought the subtitle was defensible and explainable." In an interview with PCMag, Conger and Mac disclose their wildest findings and give some predictions about what’s next for the social media platform as we head into the election. Looking back to when Musk first began to show interest in Twitter—during the pandemic, the 2020 election, January 6, and beyond—what do you think was the single biggest motivator for him to buy it? Mac: That's one of the biggest questions for the book. I think what people have to realize with him is sometimes he shoots from the hip. I think of something like The Boring Company. The genesis of that was he is sitting in traffic, he hates it, and he's like, "Why can't I build tunnels into the ground so that cars can move faster?" He tweets it out, and then he literally starts a company. There are a lot of parallels between that and this Twitter deal. He'd become the richest man in the world, sitting on a huge amount of net worth. Tesla's stock was higher than ever. Tesla and SpaceX were doing pretty well, they run themselves largely. And he looks at Twitter and is like, “I love this platform. I spend hours a day on it, and there are a lot of things that I don't like about it and I think I can improve.” First, there was talk about him joining the board. He didn't like that. And then he's just like, “You know, fuck it. I'm just gonna run it myself.” The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel in 2022 (Credit: Rob Pegoraro/PCMag) You write about how Musk’s family tried to stage an intervention when he was buying Twitter. How did you find that out Conger: In speaking with sources. I don’t know if anyone agreed to be on the record. Mac: It’s not a rumor. It’s our reporting. We talked to more than 100 people on both sides of the deal and all facets of Elon’s life. The family talked about staging an intervention. We don’t know if an intervention happened, but there was a discussion about some of his instabilities. It’s telling that his family noticed a radical change in his personality, like they knew something was up. Conger: So many people who are close to Elon have seen the Twitter acquisition challenge him. He already works incredibly hard running many different companies, he doesn’t sleep, and this has added to that. A lot of people also wondered about the spending of the money. We talk about people having a midlife crisis and buying a sports car, but it’s another thing to buy a social media company. A lot of people were concerned about the expense. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. Take me inside the first few days of the acquisition, when the existing Twitter staff are faced with Musk and the new employees he brought with him. What was that integration like? Mac: I don’t think there was much integration. Conger: So, the Twitter building in San Francisco is actually two buildings. There's one really big building, and then there's a smaller building behind it. They're connected by a little bridge. When Musk came in, he came into that smaller building and stayed there for the first few weeks. So the groups are not just separated by a sort of mutual suspicion and distrust, but also physically separated in these two different buildings. Elon and his team were pretty much always in that smaller building, and they would summon the Twitter employees down from the big building to come across the bridge and speak with them and then send them back. There's a scene in the book where we describe one of the Twitter employees who's sitting with Musk in the smaller building as he's signing the documents to close the deal, with all the bankers celebrating and toasting each other. Then he leaves and goes back across the bridge [to the other building] and sees all these Twitter employees crying. It’s really these two separate worlds playing out on either side of the bridge. Twitter Skybridge (Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images) How many people did Musk bring in with him? Mac: A couple dozen, anywhere from advisors and close friends to engineers that came from Tesla and SpaceX. Eventually there was intermixing. You know, some people would walk over to the big building, and eventually Elon did move over to the main building. There was a lot of reporting about the acquisition as it was happening. What’s one thing you learned during the writing process that really sticks out in your mind, that you told your friends about, for example? Mac: There are things like he ended the janitorial service, and people had to provide their own toilet paper. Another one was a stunning internal meeting with Elon’s head lawyer, Alex Spiro, where he essentially tells people, “We don’t care about the law. We’re going to break it and pay fines.” There’s some gossipy stuff. Everyone knows Musk fathered a child with an executive at Neurolink, Shivon Zilis, and he was also fathering one with Grimes at the time. But we found out he took one of the names that Grimes and him had thought of for their coming daughter and used it on Shivon Zillis’s kid. That’s an insane move. Conger: There were also lot of surprising similarities between how [Twitter co-founder and former CEO] Jack Dorsey and [former Twitter CEO] Parag Agrawal viewed content moderation and where Elon wanted to go with content moderation. All the last three CEOs of this company agreed that the way Twitter was handling speech on the platform wasn’t sustainable and wanted to do something different with it. They deviated broadly in the directions they wanted to go. But it was surprising and interesting to me that they all agreed the current system was not working as it should. Did Musk basically carry out what the former CEOs wanted to be done, or did he do it in his own way? Conger: He still did it in his own way. There's this section in the middle of the book that talks about what Parag Agarwal planned to do with Project Saturn, to revamp Twitter's content moderation to allow much more content to remain on the platform, but deprive it of the algorithmic boost that Twitter granted to whitelisted or “safe” content. So Twitter was [already] moving in that direction and trying to do it in a principled and structured way, and after the takeover you see Elon sweep in and reinstate accounts willy-nilly and take a more chaotic approach. Is there any evidence that Musk is now promoting accounts he likes in a systematic way? Conger: Well there’s that one incident in the summer of 2023 where they open sourced the algorithm there was tag in the code that said, “Author is Elon.” He was promoting himself. There's also a lot that he does organically on the platform by replying to accounts that he likes, or tweeting and retweeting accounts, and that brings them into the feeds of the 198 million people who follow him. Recommended by Our Editors