Elon Musk’s Twitter texts. Shattering the myth of Silicon Valley tech “genius”. It’s all “vibe” investing.

3 October 2022 (San Francisco, California) – Last week the world got a look inside Elon Musk’s phone. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO is currently in litigation with Twitter and trying to back out of his deal to buy the platform and take it private. As part of the discovery process related to this lawsuit, Delaware’s Court of Chancery released hundreds of text messages and emails sent to and from Musk. The 151-page redacted document is a remarkable, voyeuristic record of a few months in the life of the world’s richest (and most overexposed) man and a rare unvarnished glimpse into the overlapping worlds of Silicon Valley, media, and politics.

The texts are juicy, but not because they are lurid, particularly offensive, or offer up some scandalous Muskian master plan – quite the opposite. What is so illuminating about the Musk messages is just how unimpressive, unimaginative, and sycophantic the powerful men in Musk’s contacts appear to be. Whoever said there are no bad ideas in brainstorming never had access to Elon Musk’s phone.

In no time, the texts were the central subject of discussion among tech workers and watchers. The dominant reaction from all the threads I’m in is “Everyone looks goddamn dumb”. My conversation with folks runs along the lines of “Is this really how business is done? There’s no real strategic thought or analysis. It’s just emotional and done without any real care for consequence”.

Side thought: but appearing in the document is, I suppose, a perverse kind of status symbol (some people I spoke with in tech and media circles admitted to to searching through the 151 pages for their own names). 

The texts also cast a harsh light on the investment tactics of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest. There are the overeager angel-investing pitches, and then you have the more chill tactics of people like Marc Andreessen, who in a tossed-off Twitter DM offered Musk “$250M with no additional work required.” “Thanks!” Musk responded. In a separate exchange, Musk asks Ellison if he’d like to invest in taking Twitter private. “Yes, of course,” Ellison replies. “A billion … or whatever you recommend.” Sure. Easy enough.

Jessica Lessin, the founder of the tech publication The Information, whose publication has become a bit of a “go to” source for what is happening in Silicon Valley, said of the Marc Andreessen exchange:

“This is one of the most telling things I’ve ever seen about how investing works in Silicon Valley. Read the whole 151 pages and the document offers an inside look at the boys’ club and power networks of the tech world in action. Is it surprising that rich people (including one of the world’s 10 richest men) are throwing money at their friends the way you might on a low-stakes poker night? Though maybe, not really – and especially not when that man is the richest man in the world. But the eagerness to pony up for Musk and the lazy quality of this dealmaking reveal something deeper about the brokenness of this investment ecosystem and the ways that it is driven more by vibes and grievances than due diligence. Looking at these texts, it seems much easier to understand Andreessen Horowitz’s recent $350 million investment in WeWork founder Adam Neumann’s new real-estate start-up, or Bankman-Fried’s admission that most venture-capitalist investments are not ‘the paragon of efficient markets’ and driven primarily by FOMO and hype. ‘Like, all the business models are made up, right? Nobody really believes them. You need to get a vibe to invest’ he infamously told Bloomberg last April”.

Over a decade ago, Mark Zuckerberg described Twitter as “a clown car that drove to a goldmine and fell in”, and that’s been a part of the Twitter story ever since. It’s always been known in Silicon Valley as a place where good people were unable to get anything done. The recent whistleblower report from “Mudge” was about security – but really just encapsulated issues from across the company. It was about culture, some about resource (it has far less money to throw at problems than Facebook or Google) and about management – but it’s never been fixed. The product could be a lot better, and it could make a lot more money – it might also (and this is a much bigger stretch) have a lot more users.

You can see a lot of this sentiment if you weave your way through those Elon Musk’s texts – pent-up frustration from everyone he knows. Silicon Valley has a pretty strong cultural taboo against public criticism of engineers or founders, and that has perhaps held people back from attacking Twitter – plus, after a decade with nothing changing, complaining got boring. Now Elon says he’s there to fix it – so a lot of people want to pile in behind him (oh, and get richer on the way, if you weren’t paying attention).

Of course, a lot of the ideas for how to fix Twitter, both that were public at the time and that we can now read in these texts, are, well, debatable. Elon has lots of bots in his mentions and has made that an issue, but it’s not clear how much that degrades the typical Twitter experience. And a lot of the discussion of content moderation has been painfully naive and parochial, as though the only problematic “speech” on Twitter might be American culture warriors shouting at each other, and something called “the first amendment” which answers all possible questions for how to run a community. In truth, a tiny proportion of content moderation has to do with politics and even less is a “free speech” problem.

Frankly, though, it’s not clear to me that such debates ever really captured how Elon thought he’d run the business, and of course one can discount entirely the more hysterical reactions (“far-right MAGA tech bros want to run Twitter!!!”), as indeed he made clear repeatedly. Much more central, I think, is one exchange between Elon and the current CEO, Parag Agrawal. Elon has tweeted “Is Twitter dying?” and the CEO wants to explain that it is bad for morale and distracts the team for a board member to ask this. Elon’s reply: “So what did you get done this week?”

Larry Ellison offering “a billion … or whatever you recommend” is entertaining (it’s on page 23), but “what did you get done this week?” is the technical founder who thinks above all about building and shipping product, talking to a CEO (who is also in fact technical) of a company notorious for getting nothing done.

I have never run my own company but I did run advertising and social media divisions at two different media companies. I know that part of a CEO’s job is indeed to think about morale and distractions. But the reason for the raw enthusiasm and energy that comes across through all of these Elon Musk texts is the sense that Twitter really, really, really needs someone in charge with the drive and authority (and percentage ownership) to get stuff done and hold people to consequences. Elon has never run a social media company and has said some dumb things about that. Indeed, he has a polarising record in general – but as one media wag noted “he’s a bullshitter who delivers”. But Twitter certainly looks like a company that needs to be shaken by the scruff of the neck.

And what’s immediately clear from many of the men in Musk’s phone are they’re having fun with his Twitter escapade. It is an opportunity to blithely throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. They toss out phrases like “hard reboot” and “Day Zero. Sharpen your blades boys” – to cleave through what they see as an unnecessary and ineffective workforce, perhaps. They imagine massive revenue opportunities and sweeping changes that only they can usher in. For this crew, the early success of their past companies or careers is usually prologue, and their skills will, of course, transfer to any area they choose to conquer (including magically solving free speech!). But read through and you’ll see what they are actually doing is winging it. Despite all the self-mythologizing and talk of building, the men in these text messages appear mercurial, disorganized, and incapable of solving the kind of societal problems they think they can.

And many of us are just … well, idiots. We have a tendency, especially when it comes to the über-rich and powerful, to assume and to fantasize about what we can’t see – but they can! We ascribe shadowy brilliance or malevolence, which may very well be unearned or misguided. What’s striking about the Musk messages, then, is the similarity between these men’s behavior behind closed doors and in public on Twitter. Perhaps the real revelation here is that the shallowness you see is the shallowness you get.