Flipping the Bird: Elon vs Twitter | I Am Supposed to Believe This Man is a Genius? | 2

Summary

Business Wars: Flipping the Bird – Elon vs. Twitter | Episode 2 Summary

Introduction

In the second episode of "Business Wars: Flipping the Bird," host David Brown delves deep into the tumultuous battle between Elon Musk and Twitter’s board. Titled "I Am Supposed to Believe This Man is a Genius?," the episode explores the high-stakes negotiations, strategic maneuvers, and the personal dynamics that culminated in Musk’s acquisition of Twitter for nearly $44 billion. This summary captures the key events, discussions, and emotional narratives that unfolded during this corporate showdown.

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Elon Musk's Bold Offer to Acquire Twitter

The episode opens with the revelation of Elon Musk's sudden and aggressive move to buy Twitter. Initially, Musk had been in discussions to join Twitter's board, presenting himself as a cooperative investor. However, within a span of two weeks, the situation escalated dramatically.

• Unexpected Shift: On [00:00], Brett Taylor, chair of Twitter’s board, recounts receiving urgent texts from Elon Musk rejecting a board seat and instead proposing to buy the company outright. This abrupt change signaled Musk’s intent to take Twitter private, bypassing traditional corporate negotiations.

• Final Offer: Musk formally submitted his offer to the SEC, proposing to purchase all outstanding shares at $54.20 each, valuing Twitter at over $43 billion—significantly higher than its stock price in January. Musk’s offer included a veiled threat: if the board did not accept, he would sell his substantial 9.2% stake, potentially crashing Twitter’s stock and putting immense pressure on the board and shareholders.

  “Fixing Twitter by chatting with Parag won't work. Drastic action is needed.” ([00:02])

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Twitter Board's Strategic Response

Faced with Musk’s ultimatum, Twitter's board mobilized swiftly to counter the hostile takeover attempt.

• Legal and Financial Maneuvers: Brett Taylor convened with top legal advisors and financial experts from major law firms and Goldman Sachs to formulate a defense. The board considered deploying a "poison pill" strategy—a tactic designed to dilute Musk’s influence by creating more shares if his stake exceeded a certain threshold.

• Appeasement Attempts: Initial efforts to placate Musk by offering a board seat had failed, demonstrating that Musk was committed to his acquisition plan regardless of the board’s resistance.

  “The board is in receipt of your letter and is evaluating your proposal to determine the course of action that it believes is in the best interest of Twitter and all of its stockholders.” ([00:03])

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Media Frenzy and Public Perception

As news of Musk’s offer spread, media outlets scrambled to cover the unfolding drama, with journalists like Lauren Hirsch of The New York Times becoming deeply involved.

• Surprise and Skepticism: Lauren Hirsch expresses her initial disbelief and confusion over Musk’s sudden bid, highlighting the unprecedented nature of the offer.

  “Everything about the offer was surprising. The fact that it came from nowhere, the fact that it had zero financing and there was no plan.” ([07:19])

• Musk’s Public Persona: Musk appeared on the TED stage shortly after announcing his offer, emphasizing his belief in free speech and the importance of an inclusive public platform. His charismatic yet enigmatic presentation left audiences questioning his true motives.

  “Having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.” ([09:44])

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Internal Reactions and Employee Concerns

Twitter employees, like software engineer Nya from Portland, grappled with uncertainty and fear about the company's future under Musk’s ownership.

• Cultural Impact: Nya vividly describes the positive work culture at Twitter and her apprehensions about Musk’s leadership style potentially disrupting this environment.

  “As a woman of color, I didn't feel like I had to code switch. I didn't feel like I had to hide who I was or not show up as my full self.” ([29:45])

• Emergency Meetings: In response to the acquisition, Twitter organized emergency all-hands meetings to address employee concerns, though initial attempts to engage Musk were met with his evasive and unfocused communication style.

  “What the point of this? You could feel the morale just drop.” ([33:03])

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Challenges in Financing the Acquisition

Despite being one of the world’s richest individuals, Musk faced significant challenges in securing the $44 billion needed to finalize the purchase.

• Financial Strategies: Musk reached out to billionaire Larry Ellison for financial support, securing a $2 billion commitment, while also seeking strategic advisors and potential partners to bolster his bid.

  “Elon also started reaching out to people he might want to run Twitter with him, including venture capitalist Jason Calacanis.” ([16:18])

• Market Volatility: Geopolitical tensions, specifically the escalating conflict in Ukraine, adversely affected global markets and Musk’s net worth, complicating his ability to finance the deal. A significant drop in Tesla’s stock further strained his financial position.

  “The war in Ukraine had blown up, contributing to a tumbling stock market.” ([22:21])

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Breakdown of the Deal and Potential Fallout

As the deadline approached, Musk attempted to back out of the deal by citing concerns over Twitter’s spam accounts and bots. However, his earlier waiver of due diligence—standard for such a large acquisition—left him with limited options to retract without legal repercussions.

• Hostile Tactics: Musk’s tweets attacking Twitter’s spam detection and hinting at potential untrustworthiness aimed to undermine the company’s value and justify his attempt to withdraw.

  “Twitter’s stock plunged 25% in pre-market trading.” ([27:03])

• Board's Dilemma: With the deal already signed, the board found itself in a precarious position, unable to easily reverse the acquisition despite the shifting financial landscape and external uncertainties.

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Conclusion: Musk's Victory and Future Implications

Ultimately, Musk prevailed, and the Twitter board reached an agreement to sell the company for nearly $44 billion. The episode concludes with reflections on the personal and professional upheavals this acquisition caused within Twitter’s workforce and the broader implications for corporate takeovers.

• Employee Betrayal: Employees like Nya felt a deep sense of betrayal, questioning the board's decision to prioritize shareholder profits over the company's established culture and employee well-being.

  “I am supposed to believe this man is a genius.” ([34:26])

• Market Reaction: The acquisition sent shockwaves through financial markets, with significant drops in stock indices and Musk’s personal wealth, highlighting the volatile nature of such high-stakes business conflicts.

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Notable Quotes

• Elon Musk:

  “Having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.” ([09:44])

• Lauren Hirsch:

  “I am supposed to believe this man is a genius.” ([34:26])

• Nya (Twitter Employee):

  “As a woman of color, I didn't feel like I had to code switch. I didn't feel like I had to hide who I was or not show up as my full self.” ([29:45])

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Final Thoughts

Episode 2 of "Business Wars: Flipping the Bird" masterfully captures the intense drama and strategic complexity of Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter. Through detailed narration and firsthand accounts, listeners gain an in-depth understanding of the motivations, challenges, and repercussions that defined this monumental business war. Whether you're a business enthusiast or simply intrigued by corporate power plays, this episode offers a compelling glimpse into how one of today’s most influential figures reshaped a major social media platform.

Transcript

[David Brown]

This is Business War's Flipping the Bird Episodes will drop Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. For the next two weeks, Wondery subscribers can binge the entire season of Business Wars Flipping the Bird right now. Start your free trial in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Brett Taylor's day was already going sideways. The chair of the Twitter board had just gotten off the phone with Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. Just minutes earlier, Elon Musk had sent Parag a series of panic inducing texts. Elon was rejecting a seat on the board. Instead, he was going to make an offer to buy the company outright and take it private. Not even two weeks earlier, Brett and Parag had sat down with Elon for dinner and it seemed like everything was going smoothly. Now Brett needed to talk to Elon. He sent off a text. Parag just called me and mentioned your text conversation. Can you talk? Elon's reply did not leave much room for discussion. Please expect a take private offer. I saw the text thread. Do you have five minutes so I can understand the context? Fixing Twitter by chatting with Parag won't work. Drastic action is needed. This is Jack opinion too. Can you take 10 minutes to talk this through with me? But Elon blew him off. I'm about to take off, but can talk tomorrow. The next time Brett heard from Elon was four days later. And it wasn't a text or a phone call. It was a filing with the sec doing exactly what he'd promised to I am offering to buy 100% of Twitter for $54.20 per share in cash. My offer is my best and final offer. He was offering to buy Twitter for more than $43 billion. That was considerably more than it had been worth when he started buying up shares in January. At that time, it had only been trading at around $40 a share. If this offer was real, shareholders stood to make out far better than they could have hoped for. But this sweet offer came with a threat. If it is not accepted, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder. In other words, if the board didn't say yes, he could sell off his shares, all 9.2% of his stock, flooding the market and sending Twitter stock into free fall. Shareholders would be enraged at the board, and the board members themselves would see millions of dollars in wealth disappear overnight. Brett Taylor knew that Elon was backing the board into a corner with this offer. The board is in receipt of your letter and is evaluating your proposal to determine the course of action that it believes is in the best interest of Twitter. And all of its stockholders. We will be back in touch with you when we have completed that work. Brad he gathered his forces to respond. He arranged for the Twitter board to meet and brought in high powered lawyers from two major law firms as well as Goldman Sachs Advisors. An appeasement strategy of giving Elon a board seat hadn't worked to slow him down. Now both sides had to prepare for war.

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[David Brown]

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[Lauren Hirsch]

And then all of a sudden, he kind of crashed into my life. To be honest, you know, I wasn't even following him on Twitter before this all happened.

[David Brown]

Four days earlier, news broke that Elon Musk was no longer joining the Twitter board and everyone in the media was waiting to see what happened next.

[Lauren Hirsch]

So we were all kind of going down this rabbit hole, like, did they find something? Was there some kind of big surprise lurking now?

[David Brown]

The other shoe dropped in the form of a tweet from Elon Musk. I made an offer. He included a link to the SEC filing. Lauren clicked on it right away and couldn't believe what she was reading. Elon Musk was going to buy Twitt.

[Lauren Hirsch]

Everything about the offer was surprising. The fact that it came from nowhere, the fact that it had zero financing and there was no plan. We didn't know why he wanted to buy Twitter. We didn't know what he wanted to do with it, how he was going to do it.

[David Brown]

Lauren texted three letters to her editor. Omg. At first, Lauren wondered if Musk's offer was even serious.

[Lauren Hirsch]

You know, Elon Musk has founded a lot of companies. He has never bought a public company.

[David Brown]

It left her and a lot of other business reporters dumbfounded. Soon Elon would provide some answers. Sort of hours after news of his offer went public, the head of ted, Chris Anderson, welcomed Elon to the TED Theater stage in Vancouver, British Columbia.

[Chris Anderson]

And now, arguably the biggest visionary of them all, Elon Musk.

[David Brown]

Elon strode onto the stage dressed in dark pants, a white button down shirt and a mid length black jacket that was giving off both tech entrepreneur chic and mad scientist vibes.

[Chris Anderson]

Elon, welcome.

[David Brown]

He shook hands with Chris and took a seat in one of the armchairs at the front of the stage.

[Chris Anderson]

So Elon, a few hours ago you made an offer to buy Twitter.

[David Brown]

Why? Elon grinned like the Cheshire cat.

[Chris Anderson]

How'd you know? Little bird tweeted in my ear or something. I don't know. Why make that offer? Well, I think it's very important for there to be an inclusive arena for free speech.

[David Brown]

So yeah, this coming from a guy who announced he was joining Twitter's board with a meme. Twitter's next board meeting is going to be lit, featuring Elon as Joe Rogan sitting behind a microphone, exhaling a whole lot of smoke. A tweet he sent out at 4:22 in the morning from a guy who just days earlier had tweeted 69.420% of statistics are false, which is, of course, a 420 joke and a 69 joke rolled into one. But now Elon was getting existentially serious.

[Chris Anderson]

But it's just that my strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.

[David Brown]

So there it was. Nothing more nor less than the future of civilization was on the line, and all it cost was $44 billion.

[Chris Anderson]

Last week, when we spoke, Elon, you said, no way. I do not want to own Twitter. It is a recipe for misery. Everyone will blame me for everything. What on earth changed? I think everyone will still blame me for everything. Yeah.

[David Brown]

But Elon goes on to explain why he is willing to take that blame and that risk.

[Chris Anderson]

You know, I love humanity, and I think that we should fight for a good future for humanity. And I think we should be optimistic about the future and fight to make that optimistic future happen.

[Lauren Hirsch]

It might be Elon Musk. It might be kooky, but it's real.

[David Brown]

Lauren Hirsch was following every twist and turn of the deal. And for the Twitter board, they couldn't say what was driving Elon Musk, whether he was making this offer to save humanity or boost his own ego. But they knew they had a fiduciary responsibility to take the offer seriously.

[Lauren Hirsch]

So what the board did was they hired bankers, and they asked those bankers, what are we worth? Elon Musk wants to buy us for 44 billion. Can we truly say no, no to that offer and tell our shareholders we will be worth more than 44 billion in the future, and therefore it's okay if we say no.

[David Brown]

But the board also had every reason to be wary of Elon, and this too good to be true offer. The man had amassed almost 10% of their stock. In secret, he then accepted and promptly rejected a seat on their board. Elon had clearly proven that he could and would do wild, unexpected things. The board needed to slow him down to try and take back control of the process. So they adopted what they formerly called a shareholder rights plan, more commonly known as a poison pill.

[Lauren Hirsch]

A poison pill is kind of a tried and true tactic in corporate America. The way it works, you put something in place whereby after a certain number of shares are bought, all of a sudden tons more shares are created, and basically that dilutes the person that just bought those shares.

[David Brown]

The poison pill could Buy the board a little time to weigh their options. But their impulsive prospective buyer wasn't about to sit around and twiddle his thumbs up. Back home in Texas, Elon decided to rattle the cages of the Twitter leadership. Where else but on Twitter? When a Silicon Valley personality tweeted the ownership percentage of each board member, Elon responded with a cutting observation. Wow. With Jack departing, the Twitter board collectively owns almost no shares. Objectively, their economic interests are simply not aligned with shareholders. By tweeting this out about the board, El was basically trying to get the average Twitter shareholder on his site. He followed that up with another subversive tweet, love Me Tender. The words were surrounded by musical note emojis.

[Lauren Hirsch]

Love Me Tender is, of course, a famous Elvis Presley song. But it's also what is very likely a reference to a tender offer, which is effectively a hostile deal. And it means going to shareholders with your offer. So instead of trying to get the board to agree with you, you go to shareholders at the company and say, hey, I'm offering you 5420. Don't you think this is a good deal? And you try to get enough shareholders on board to effectively overrule whatever decision the board might say.

[David Brown]

A tender offer wouldn't solve all of Elon's problems because of the poison pill the board had enacted, but he could still use the threat of it to apply pressure to the board.

[Lauren Hirsch]

If he's getting support from other shareholders who were all saying to him, I'm voting in favor of this deal. It's hard for a board to justify keeping that poison pill in place.

[David Brown]

The next day, on April 17, board chair Brett Taylor sent Elon a text. I'm just checking in to reiterate that the board is seriously reviewing the proposal in your letter. We're working on a formal response as quickly as we can, consistent with our fiduciary duties. Feel free to reach out anytime. Elon acknowledged Bret's text by liking it, but he didn't slow down. He knew he had the upper hand, that the high value he had offered for the company effectively forced the board to sell to him. He knew the bankers Twitter was talking to would eventually come back and tell them just that. And so he kept moving ahead as though he was going to get his way, which led to the next challenge for Elon. Where was he going to get $44 billion? Yes, he was the world's richest man, worth about 200 billion, but most of that was tied up in Tesla stock and other assets he didn't have. 44 billion on hand. And he had made his offer so quickly that he hadn't gotten banks or any other investors lined up yet to finance his offer either. He needed to pull 44 billion together fast.

[Lauren Hirsch]

So there were a couple of things that were going on all at the same time. So one, there was Elon Musk trying to cobble together the cash. And if you look at a lot of the texts that came out in discovery, they're pretty hilarious.

[David Brown]

He reached out to Larry Ellison, the founder of the software company Oracle and the fourth wealthiest man in the world. Any interest in participating in the Twitter deal? Yes, of course. He added a thumbs up emoji at the end. Cool. Roughly what, dollar size a billion, or.

[Lauren Hirsch]

Whatever you recommend you have Larry Ellison just kind of casually agreeing to put in 2 billion.

[David Brown]

Elon also started reaching out to people he might want to run Twitter with him, including venture capitalist Jason Calacanis. Want to be a strategic advisor to Twitter if this works out, board member, advisor, whatever you have. My sword. Friends started suggesting new CEOs. People already seemed certain that Parag was not going to be the CEO of an Elon owned Twitter. Elon was growing impatient. He wanted this deal done. So as good as his offer already was, he now offered them something the board truly could not refuse.

[Lauren Hirsch]

Elon Musk said, I want this deal by tomorrow. And in order to make that happen, I won't do any due diligence.

[David Brown]

Due diligence, the business equivalent of doing a home inspection before you buy a house, a $44 billion house, you look.

[Lauren Hirsch]

Into the company, you look kind of, you know, underneath the carpet, in the cracks to find out, how does this does business really work?

[David Brown]

And Elon was just going to go without that.

[Lauren Hirsch]

That's effectively never done, certainly not for a $44 billion deal.

[David Brown]

The board had already come to the conclusion that Elon was overvaluing the company and they were unlikely to get a better offer. And now there would be no due diligence.

[Lauren Hirsch]

The board, which was already kind of planning to hand it over to Elon for 44 billion, said, Sure, I guess we could do that if you really want.

[David Brown]

Four days later, the deal was done. Elon Musk would buy Twitter for nearly $44 billion. Twitter would officially change hands in six months. At the end of October, Brett tweeted out the news. The Twitter board has reached an agreement with Elon Musk. Elon had won. Twitter was his. There was one Twitter user in particular who weighed in to applaud the deal. The man who sent the first Tweet ever. The man who founded the company and not long ago was its CEO starting a thread with a link to Radiohead's song Everything in Its right Place, Jack Dorsey wrote, elon is the singular solution. I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness. But Jack's former employees weren't so sure. Twitter's internal chat lit up with the news that Elon would soon be the new owner of Twitter. Sasha Solomon, a software engineer for Twitter, was working from home in Portland, Oregon, when the news came through. Her stomach sank. Sasha loved her job in no small part because she loved Twitter's culture.

[Lauren Hirsch]

There were very few assholes. It was like we had an asshole filter at Twitter, so there weren't any. And that was, like, pretty special compared to, like, other companies I'd worked at.

[David Brown]

Based on how Elon Musk tweeted, at least he didn't seem like someone who would fit in with a company culture.

[Lauren Hirsch]

It just seems like he really wants to be liked by people, and so he'll kind of tweet anything.

[David Brown]

And some of that anything. The derogatory transphobic using his platform to punch down. Well, it made Sasha worry. Was Twitter about to be run by an asshole? Sasha and other Twitter employees had been in the dark the whole time, getting details about the sale the same way as everyone else from the news. They wanted answers. Twitter scheduled an emergency all hands meeting for the same day that the deal was announced. A meeting where Twitter employees would get to ask CEO Parag Agrawal and board chair Brett Taylor questions. And the Twitter employees? They had questions.

[Lauren Hirsch]

All right, Parag, can you clarify if there will be layoffs? Were not.

[Parag Agrawal]

There are no plans for any layoffs at this time.

[Lauren Hirsch]

Right. Another question for you. Are any projections for a possible merger with Elon's other companies? Starlink and Tesla Phone, PI and Twitter apps?

[Chris Anderson]

Not sure I can speak on Elon's behalf on that front.

[Lauren Hirsch]

There is general sentiment just looking at the slack questions around uncertainty about what happens after the deal closes.

[Parag Agrawal]

Yeah, I think that is a fair question. And there is indeed uncertainty about what happens after the deal closes. But there are ways where we will learn more as time goes on. We will directly hear from Elon. I and the management team and the board members of the board will continue to spend time with Elon to learn more. And as we learn more, we'll share with you. So while there is a lot of uncertainty about what happens after the deal closes today, over time that will decrease.

[David Brown]

But Brett and Parag were pretty short on answers. Turns out they didn't know a whole lot more about Musk's plans than anyone else. Parag promised that employees would get the chance to ask Elon their questions. He was arranging for Elon to come and speak to them soon, but not yet.

[Lauren Hirsch]

The Dow has tumbled over 1000 points. The S and P and the Nasdaq are off about 4% or more. It seems the markets are still looking for the bottom. Tesla down 12% during Tuesday's session. That's the biggest drop since September 2020. You can't even imagine. It's horrific. This witness says. Russia intensifying its assaults on eastern Ukraine.

[David Brown]

Less than two weeks after he'd victoriously signed the deal to buy Twitter, Elon discovered he might have a problem. The war in Ukraine had blown up, contributing to a tumbling stock market. Elon was worth over $200 billion on paper, but that was mostly from Tesla's stock. The more the stock value shrank, the less Elon would have in his war chest to buy Twitter. And now it looked like Russian President Vladimir Putin might send the whole world and its economy into further chaos. Putin was set to deliver a speech on May 9 that pundits everywhere said would indicate if he was ready to turn the invasion of Ukraine into the next world war. There was no clever tweet to get out of this one. Elon texted Morgan Stanley banker Michael Grimes with his concerns. Let's slow down just a few days. Putin's speech tomorrow is extremely important, and it won't make sense to buy Twitter if we're headed into World War Three. Just saying. Michael agreed. Understood. We'll pause for May 9, Vladimir, and hope for the best. There we can take stock of where things look. After that, Elon was trapped. He'd legally signed a contract to purchase Twitter. He couldn't just change his mind. He'd fought ruthlessly to buy Twitter, but he'd given himself no way to back out or find a loophole. Originally, it had been Twitter's board backed into a corner until they had to accept his deal. But now, with the stock market tumbling and war looming, the tables were turned. Elon was the one in the corner, looking for a way out. After telling hundreds of stories about business battles throughout history, I've learned one constant truth. Having the right support systems in place can make or break a new venture. Trust me, it was a battle even I faced on my business journey. That's why AT&T business makes so much sense for entrepreneurs today. When you're building something from scratch or even just at the point where you're ready to grow, you need a provider that makes things easy. With AT&T business, you can have reliable, protected Internet connection you can count on, so you do not miss a beat. Building your dream might take time and a lot of work, but that doesn't mean it can't be a little easier. Wake up to the power of ATT Business and turn your vision into reality. Business.att.com in the summer of 1925, a.

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[David Brown]

Elon was wrapped tightly in a spider's web. Only this was one that he had spun himself. He personally crafted a deal that waived due diligence, meaning that even if he found something objectionable with Twitter, he couldn't just walk away. Of course he knew this, but he probably figured with enough bluster and a credible complaint, he just might wiggle out of this trap. So he accused Twitter of harboring too many spam accounts and bots and then went public with this possible deal breaker. Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.

[Lauren Hirsch]

Like what does that mean? Can he legally do that? Where is this coming from?

[David Brown]

Lauren Hirsch had been covering the Elon Twitter deal for the New York Times in this tweet of his raised a lot of questions.

[Lauren Hirsch]

You can't break off a deal via tweet.

[David Brown]

This tweet landed like a bomb in the business world. Twitter's stock plunged 25% in pre market trading. Lauren and other reporters were pretty sure Elon was trying to plant the seeds.

[Lauren Hirsch]

To Renege he was kind of raising this question as to whether or not the existence of bots on Twitter made it less valuable. And so you could kind of see the pieces he was looking to put in play, which was build a case to see if he could walk away from the deal.

[David Brown]

No one could tell if Elon really just wanted out of the deal, or if he was using this as a way to reopen negotiations to lower the price, or if it was just a passing thought he'd shared while he was on the toilet, the place he'd once said he composed many of his tweets. To make things even more awkward. Elon had a pre planned meeting that morning with Twitter executives. He tweeted again, presumably to reassure the faltering market and his concerned lawyers to clarify that he was still committed to the deal. Twitter stock rebounded, but the roller coaster was just getting started. Elon kept needling Twitter. He accused Twitter of having lax spam detection and tried to goad the SEC into investigating Twitter's legal disclosures. He suggested he would unilaterally reverse the ban on former President Trump. He claimed, with no evidence, that up to 90% of Twitter users might be fake. It was like Elon couldn't stop slashing the tires of a car he was about to drive off the lot. Employees inside Twitter didn't know what to make of it all, and they had yet to hear a word directly from elon. Finally, on June 16, they thought they were going to get some answers. Elon was scheduled to hold an all hands meeting with Twitter's employees.

[Nya]

We were like, okay, it's finally happening.

[David Brown]

Naya, we're using only her first name to protect her identity. Had joined Twitter just a year and a half earlier. She worked remotely from South Carolina in ad sales, and even though she'd had reservations about getting a job in tech, she'd come to love Twitter.

[Nya]

I had never worked at a place where everyone genuinely liked each other. Working at Twitter, you see the way, like, some of your co workers tweet and you see how they show up online, offline, at work, and you're able to kind of unclench a little bit. You're able to just like, relax your shoulders. It felt like a culture where, for me, as a black woman, I didn't feel like I had to code switch. I didn't feel like I had to hide who I was or not show up as my full self.

[David Brown]

But the recent drama and lack of answers had been making her nervous. She wondered what exactly was going to happen to her company and her job. So she was excited to finally be having this meeting.

[Nya]

We were like, okay, it's finally happening. We'll get to hear from him, get to understand, you know, why this man wants to buy Twitter, what his plans are for Twitter, to make it better, to improve the app.

[David Brown]

Nya sat in front of her computer. A livestream of the meeting had started, but Elon wasn't there. She and thousands of other employees just sat and waited and waited.

[Nya]

We had a 45 minute window, and I think we started 10 minutes late.

[David Brown]

Finally, Elon arrived. He was on his phone in what looked like a kitchen. Leslie Berlin moderated. She was Twitter's chief marketing officer.

[Chris Anderson]

I love Twitter. In fact, I literally have tweeted. I love Twitter.

[Lauren Hirsch]

You have. So say more. Why do you love Twitter? And also, why did you. And do you want to buy Twitter?

[Chris Anderson]

I learn a lot from what I read on Twitter and what I see on the pictures, videos, text, and memes that people create. I also find it's a great way.

[David Brown]

To.

[Chris Anderson]

Get a message out if I want to. If I want to say something or make an announcement. I think Twitter is the best way to do that.

[David Brown]

This was the most predictable question in the world. And Elon's answer was rambling and unfocused.

[Nya]

He just kind of keeps going on, on and on about how he utilizes Twitter and how he's seen others use it.

[Chris Anderson]

Some people use their hair to express themselves. I use Twitter.

[David Brown]

Nya had one eye on the internal Twitter Slack channel, where employees were not holding back.

[Nya]

Everyone in Slack in the all hands chat is saying, leslie, please tell him to move to the next question. Leslie, it's been 10 minutes. Leslie, do something. Someone jump in.

[David Brown]

But Elon made it hard for Leslie to get control of the conversation. He dodged direct questions on the topics employees really wanted answers on, like remote work and layoffs. Instead, he droned on about the nature of trust.

[Chris Anderson]

I don't trust is as trust does.

[David Brown]

A misguided purchase he made.

[Chris Anderson]

I bought this thing off of a YouTube ad, and it doesn't work.

[David Brown]

His dream number of Twitter users.

[Chris Anderson]

So I think we really want to have at least a billion people on Twitter, maybe more. As many people as we can possibly.

[David Brown]

At one point, he even brought up aliens.

[Chris Anderson]

The meaning of life. Where are things going? Where do we come from? Can we travel to other star systems and see if there are alien civilizations? There might be. There might be a whole bunch of long dead.

[Nya]

I do remember people just being like, what the. What is going on? What is the point of this? You could feel the morale just drop. You could feel it get lower and lower. And I just remember thinking, but why him? As a woman? And then like as a woman of color, you always question why you are in that room. And then you get in the room and you hear those people talk and you realize those people aren't that smart. They just had the advantage of having wealth and having people that could give them access and resources that you aren't able to get. That was the moment where I was just like, I am supposed to believe this man is a genius.

[David Brown]

She posted that exact question in the Slack channel. It was a sarcastic question, but the emotions behind it were deep. Nya loved working at Twitter, loved the culture of the place, but she felt betrayed by the top level executives and the board.

[Nya]

We would ask Parrot, why him? Why did you guys move along with this in a matter of weeks when we were told this could take up to months? Again, we are told a million times as fiduciary duty, we have a duty to our shareholders. And I just remember thinking, so this outweighs, you know, the humanity of it.

[David Brown]

Less than a month later, the Twitter board would possibly be asking themselves the same question.

[Lauren Hirsch]

We start getting phone calls and texts from sources being like, so Elon just.

[David Brown]

Walked into the building and he's carrying a sink. That's on the next episode of Flipping the Bird from Wondery. This is episode two of six, Flipping the Elon versus Twitter. I'm your host David Brown. Austin Rachlis wrote this story. Our producers are Nicka Singh and Dave Schilling. Julia Lowery Henderson and Karen Lowe are our senior producers, reporting by Emily Corwin. Production assistance by Emily Locke and Mariah Dennis. Fact checking by Nawal Anjani. Consultant is Kurt Wagner, Bloomberg journalist and author of an upcoming book about Twitter and Elon Musk. Sound design by Kyle Randall. Music supervisor is Scott Velasquez. For Frisson Sync. Senior managing producer is Latha Pantya. Managing producer is Olivia Weber. Coordinating producer is Heather Baloga. Executive producers are Jenny Lauer, Beckman, George Lavender, Marshall, Louie and Jen Sargent. For wondering.

[Unknown]

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