Elon Musk

Musk wanted to create a blockchain-based social media system that handled payments and was similar to Twitter. He mused that he could simply buy the company, take it private, and shape it to his whims. He sent Twitter an offer letter, offering to buy it for $54.20 per share in cash. Then, he tweeted out a message saying, “I made an offer” (445). Isaacson posits that Musk wanted to buy Twitter because it was the ultimate playground for him—a place where he could feel in charge, unlike in his childhood when he was bullied and beaten up on the playground.

Musk met with the Twitter executives in a diligence meeting. He began grilling the execs, pressing them on their costs and the productivity of their employees. Musk was shocked and angry at how little they knew and suggested that their lack of diligence amounted to fraud. Both in public and in private, he wavered back and forth on whether he wanted to go through with the deal.

Around Father’s Day 2022, Grimes discovered that Zilis had given birth to twins with Musk and she was outraged. At the same time, Grimes had a third child with Musk, named Techno Mechanicus Musk, nicknamed Tau. Meanwhile, Errol sent Elon a racist, conspiracy-laden email ranting about Joe Biden, Anthony Fauci, and Black leaders in South Africa.

In early 2022, Musk initiated another surge at Boca Chica, pushing for a public presentation of the Starship rocket which would show off the chopstick arms of the Mechazilla device. He also lambasted the employees for their planned timelines, declaring that all work should be speedier. He ordered another surge to outfit the Booster 7 with Raptor engines, forcing the team to complete this in one day rather than the expected 10 days.

Musk announced his plans to build Optimus, a humanoid, artificially intelligent robot, in August 2021. He exhorted his team to work faster and cut as many costs as possible on the robot. He announced that September 30, 2022, would be “AI Day,” a day that would feature a public demonstration of Optimus, Full Self-Driving, and Dojo, a supercomputer.

In the summer of 2022, Musk was unsure of how to proceed with Twitter. He could either go through with the deal or try to reprice it or somehow get out of it. Musk vacillated rapidly between different options. Twitter’s board insisted that any renegotiated deal needed to protect them from future lawsuits from Musk, but Musk refused, saying, “[w]e will hunt every single one of them till the day they die” (493). Musk considered suing to get out of the deal, but finally, his lawyers convinced him to close on it at the original price.

The Optimus team successfully executed a demonstration of the robot on AI Day. Musk was relieved and made a speech about how AI robots would usher in a “future of abundance,” one in which “there is no poverty” (500).

In 2022, Musk shifted Tesla’s focus to developing a driverless taxi, the Robotaxi. He kept insisting to his team that they should eliminate the steering wheel, side mirrors, and pedals, but his engineers pushed back. Finally, the team was able to convince him to let them include these things in the design because it would be years before full self-driving could be approved internationally.

For years, Tesla had planned to make a small, mass-market car that would sell for around $250,000. Musk put a hold on the plans in 2020, but van Holzhausen was able to convince him by 2022 that they should continue with these plans to keep growing Tesla’s profits.

Musk decided to rebrand Twitter to X.com. When he went to visit Twitter headquarters, he was cynically dismissive of Twitter’s caring culture, one that valued “psychological safety”; Musk preferred to be “hardcore” (508). He viewed Twitter as complacent, and instead valued a company culture of extreme work and urgency.

An orderly transition of Twitter to Musk’s control was planned for October 28, 2022. As part of this transition, the top Twitter leaders would resign, which would allow them to collect severance and vest their stock options. Instead, Musk devised a secret plan to avert these events. He arranged for the Twitter leaders to be fired right before they were able to resign.

Three of the Musk loyalists who helped Musk in the Twitter transition were the software engineers James Musk and Andrew Musk (Elon’s younger cousins), as well as Ross Nordeen, James’s friend. They became “the three musketeers of Musk’s takeover” (517). Musk tasked them with grading the code of all the Twitter engineers and compiling a list of who should stay. On October 28, 2022, Musk declared that he wanted to bring the number of Twitter engineers down from 2,500 to 150. He wanted to proceed with firings immediately without letting the employees receive their bonuses and option grants. However, the human resources department warned him that that would trigger fines for breach of contract and violation of California’s laws, so Musk agreed to delay the firings for a few days.