If you think you’ve heard it all about Elon Musk’s chaotic purchase of Twitter — and his sometimes chaotic personal life — a new book will likely dispel those misconceptions.
Kate Conger and Ryan Mac are the authors of “Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter.” The New York Times’ technology writers have unearthed new details about the chaotic period in 2022 when Musk decided to buy Twitter and its subsequent fall to ~what it is now~.
Conger and Mac spoke with Business Insider about their book, which comes out Tuesday.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Katie Notopoulos: You’ve both been working on Elon Musk and his companies for a long time. Was there anything that really surprised you about the way he worked in your reporting for this book?
Kate Conger: I think what surprised me about Elon was how isolated he became. And especially by the time the Twitter acquisition began, he was working with a very small, very close group of advisors who he trusted a lot, but who didn’t necessarily have a lot of experience in M&A or running social media companies. So he was being advised by a very small circle of people who didn’t have a lot of depth in the topics that he was talking about. And he’s always moved in small circles, but I was surprised by how small that world had become by the time he tried to take over Twitter.
Notopoulos: Everyone is talking about “founder modethe idea of running a company as if it were still in its infancy instead of going into “manager mode.” Elon Musk took Twitter back from its founder Jack Dorsey, who had arguably mismanaged it in manager mode. Musk comes in and wants to go “extremely hardcore,” his version of founder mode, but it didn’t quite work. What do you think happened?
Ryan Mac: I think it’s a little absurd, this current debate – and there are many examples of where the founder mode doesn’t work, but if we believe that there’s some truth to the founder mode, Elon’s takeover of Twitter proves, in a way, that he’s not the founder. He failed Twitter in part because he didn’t have those early experiences of what it was like to build this company from the ground up.
I think about what he did with advertising: he came in and failed to recognize the company’s addiction to advertising. He thought he could sell subscriptions right away, which was his main goal. Call it ignorance or not, I don’t know. But he just didn’t have the experience to run a social network. I think he relied on his self-confidence to build rockets or to start an electric car company. But he certainly wasn’t a founder or CEO of social media.
Notopoulos: That’s part of the interesting paradox: he has two very successful companies, SpaceX and Tesla, which he founded (or almost with Tesla). But then he’s really failed with twitter.
Conger: I think what’s interesting about Elon is that he has a lot of experience in hardware and engineering, but with X and Twitter, it’s a fundamentally social problem. It’s a problem of how people interact and relate to each other. I don’t think Elon has a lot of experience in that space and he doesn’t have a very good track record of resolving conflicts between people.
Kate Conger and Ryan Mac have written a new book about Musk’s takeover of Twitter. “Character Limit” contains more revelations, including the name of one of Elon Musk’s children. JJ Geiger / Penguin Press
Notopoulos: The Wall Street Journal recently published an article about how Musk’s Twitter buyout is now the worst buyout for banks Since the financial crisis of 2008. What I found really shocking in your book was the details of the projections he made for selling the banks involved. These outrageous numbers like, “We’re going to increase revenues fivefold in three years,” which are impossible.
Mac: I don’t know exactly what was going through their minds at the time. I think the actual numbers, which I don’t have in front of me, but we’re talking, again, doubling, tripling revenue, or more. It shows how much confidence he had in himself, how much he believed that Twitter was just a horribly run business by idiots who didn’t know how to make money. And he would be the champion who came in and righted the ship so that he could make it a business, because who knows better than him? This is the guy who’s one of the top 10 most followed accounts and spends so much time on it. Of course, he has all the ideas!
I find it interesting how the banks have enabled him to succeed. These are seemingly intelligent people who have agreed to do this simply to get debt financing or to attract investors. I think there is still a lot to be said about how he is helped by these institutions that simply want to be close to him because he is the richest man in the world.
Notopoulos: So how long is this going to last? This is a business that costs him money. How long is he going to keep burning money and hoping things will get better?
Conger: I think that’s a great question. I mean, the end of X is something we’ve thought about a lot. If it were a regular company, I think it would be done more quickly. But it’s something that Elon can continue to support with his own financial resources for a while. The question of how much money this company can lose is also an open question.
The first year after the buyout, the company lost a very significant amount of revenue. The projections for 2024 were that the losses would slow down. We’ve seen in our reporting that the losses have not slowed down as much as expected. So it’s still losing even more money than analysts thought it would this year. So we’re still on our way to the bottom, and I don’t know exactly when that’s going to happen.
Notopoulos: A lot of this book is about how Elon Musk runs his business, but people are also really interested in Elon Musk as a person. I was really shocked by his choice of baby name when he was expecting his second child with Grimes.
Conger: Elon and Grimes had chosen a name for their daughter that they wanted to use. That name ended up being used for one of Shivon Zilis’s twin daughters with Elon. When Grimes found out, she was obviously very upset. She posted lyrics to songs that she had written about the name that had been stolen from her. And then Shivon ended up changing that child’s name, which is actually how the existence of Shivon’s children became public knowledge, actually, because the name change documents became public knowledge. [Editor’s note: Business Insider first reported the news that Musk had twins with Zilis, an executive at Neuralink.]
Mac: The story is that Grimes didn’t know Shivon was going to have children with Elon. Grimes was going to have her second child via surrogate while Shivon was pregnant with these twins. The twins were born first. There was a boy and a girl, and the girl was named Valkyrie Alice Zilis, and Valkyrie was the name that Grimes and Elon had discussed for their daughter.
The song she posted the lyrics to never got made, but we were able to connect the dots and realize that this was a really messy naming incident. Shivon’s daughter ends up being named Azure, and Grimes’ daughter is Exa. So the name Valkyrie is effectively erased from Elon Musk’s entire family for all intents and purposes.
[Editor’s note: Musk, Zilis, and Grimes, whose real name is Claire Boucher, did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider. The authors of the book also contacted all three for comment.]
Notopoulos: I have one last question for you guys: did you find the character limit?
Conger: We really tested the limits of the character limit. I think we submitted a manuscript that was 40,000 words too long.
Mac: Jesus, my computer is crashing again.