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. Trending