Perspective by Monica Hesse
Sunday October 2, 2022
Elon Musk arrives for the 2022 Met Gala in May. (Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images)
On Thursday, a giant cache of Elon Musk’s text messages
became public via court documents filed in an ongoing legal dispute over
whether the Tesla CEO must make good on his offer to buy Twitter. The texts,
which include correspondence with such people as former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey
to Joe Rogan, outline Musk’s shifting thinking on the deal — what he believed
the company was worth, and what he would try to do with it.
In one text thread with Musk, Oracle founder Larry Ellison
expressed interest in being part of a Twitter take-private deal.
“Roughly what dollar size?” Musk asked him.
Ellison texted back: “A billion...or whatever you
recommend.”
I would like to talk about Larry Ellison’s ellipses.
This ellipsis is a casual piece of grammar. It is used as
you might use an ellipsis when haggling with a dude on Craisglist about the
price of his used NordicTrack and you’re still fifteen bucks apart.
“Whatever works for you,” Musk responded. “I’d recommend
maybe $2b or more.”
To which Ellison replied a few days later, “Since you think
I should come in for at least $2b...I’m in for $2b.”
Another ellipsis. Three dots that stand in for the amount of
time and thought that went into Ellison concluding that, based on Musk’s
recommendation, he should offer not $1 billion (the price of a Boeing jet), but
$2 billion (the gross national income of Somalia).
The text chains of Elon Musk are a rare view into how the
world’s wealthiest communicate among themselves. How they think about money and
power — which is definitely different from how you and I might think about
money and power.
At one point an acquaintance of Musk’s suggests that he
knows another guy who is interested in buying Twitter, Sam Bankman-Fried, the
CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
“Does he have huge amounts of money?” Musk asks.
“Depends on how you define ‘huge’!” the acquaintance
replies. “he’s worth $24B and his early employees (with shared values) bump
that to $30b. I asked about how much he could in principle contribute and he
said “∼1-3b would be easy ∼$3-8b I could do ∼$8-15b
is maybe possible but would require financing.”
Throughout the texts, you’ll find several mentions of words
like “fun,” as when Ellison responds to Musk’s initial invitation to part with,
at minimum, $1 billion: “It would be lots of fun.”
“Why don’t you buy Twitter,” German businessman Mathias
Döpfner had suggested to Musk back in March, in much the same way that a mother
might suggest her bored children go play outside. “Will be fun.”
“I really hope you get Twitter,” texted Joe Rogan, in much
the same way that a teenager might root for his best friend to acquire a game
console. “If you do, we should throw a hell of a party.”
The text chains of Elon Musk are flabbergasting,
emoji-ridden displays of carefree, casual wealth, which make you realize that
for as much as you hope that the billionaires of the world are thinking soberly
about how to spend their money for good, these gentlemen are as often as not
just spraying a Cash Cannon in the direction of the fellow billionaires who
happen to hit them up on their private cell number.
I said “gentlemen,” which is not entirely fair. A handful of
women show up in these texts: Larry Ellison’s assistant. A person named Martha,
whose last name is blacked out but who appears to work for Twitter. Gayle King
repeatedly pops in to ask Musk for a sit-down interview, a request that he
seems to mostly to ignore.
But for the most part these are the masters, not mistresses
of the universe, egging on Musk to buy Twitter because of the changes he could
make or the fun they could all have. “You have my sword,” promises entrepreneur
Jason Calicanas, as he attempts to position himself as a trusted adviser while
simultaneously (I think?) referencing “Lord of the Rings.”
“Please do something
to fight woke-ism,” implored an acquaintance named “TJ,” whose last name is
blacked out. “Are you going to liberate Twitter from the censorship happy mob?”
Rogan asked.
The gender imbalance might explain why so many of these text
chains revolve around the idea that what Twitter needs most is fewer guardrails
against toxicity on the platform. Free speech on a social media platform means
something different to rich and powerful men than it does to the average user —
or more specifically, the average female user. For example, I’m pretty sure the
rich/male experience of being criticized online includes a lot fewer messages
from strangers declaring, “I will rape you.”
It is not yet clear how these text chains will be used in a
court of law. But reading them, you realize that you have no idea which side to
root for: the massive tech company, or the small clutch of tech bros who may
take it over in increments of $1 billion, or perhaps $3 billion, but definitely
not more than $8 billion, emoji emoji, lol.