Will make an offer to take Twitter private.

  Elon might have closed his eyes, envisioning the plumes of flame bursting out of the sides of the Raptor 2 engine, as it had been pushed past its limit.

  “Can we talk?” Parag had immediately responded, realizing what had just happened—what he’d just done.

  Bret Taylor, the company’s chairman, had also suddenly chimed in: “Parag just called me and mentioned your text conversations. Can you talk?”

  But Elon had made up his mind.

  “Please expect a take private offer,” he’d texted Bret.

  “I saw the text thread,” Bret had tried again. “Do you have five minutes so I can understand the context?”

  Backpedaling. Whining. Weakness.

  “Fixing Twitter by chatting with Parag won’t work,” Elon had succinctly responded.

  You didn’t make a better Raptor engine by talking about it. You made a better one by, well, blowing the fucker up.

  Once again, he was firing off text after text, but this was no longer the dance of two potential romantic partners. This was the sharpened rapier thrusts of an impending and violent divorce.

  “Drastic action is needed.”

  “This is hard to do as a public company, as purging fake users will make the numbers look terrible, so restructuring should be done as a private company.”

  “This is Jack’s opinion too.”

  A twist of the knife. Parag and Bret and the board had thought they’d excised Jack, but Jack was back, in a much more potent form.

  Bret, panicked, had tried once more: “Can you take 10 minutes to talk this through with me? It has been about 24 hours since you joined the board. I get your point, but just want to understand about the sudden pivot and make sure I deeply understand your point of view and the path forward.”

  But Elon was finished playing games. He’d proceeded to ghost both Bret and Parag for the next ten hours. In the meantime, he did delete many of the tweets from the weekend, but he’d left the most vicious one, which had asked if Twitter was dying. On top of that, he’d taken the time to like a tweet from a user calling himself “Tank” that explained the now-missing tweets, which everyone had already seen:

  Let me break this down for you: Elon became the largest shareholder for Free Speech. Elon was told to play nice and not speak freely.

  But Elon had never been great at playing nice.

  Then, two days after his weekend tweetstorm, three days after joining the company’s board, Elon had fired off an official letter to Bret, which he’d then added to the required filing he would simultaneously submit to his favorite government organization, the SEC:

  I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy.

  However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.

  As a result, I am offering to buy 100% of Twitter for $54.20 per share in cash, a 54% premium over the day before I began investing in Twitter and a 38% premium over the day before my investment was publicly announced. My offer is my best and final offer and if it is not accepted, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder.

  Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it.

  Elon’s offer represented a more than forty-three-billion-dollar investment.

  Elon took a deep breath and stopped scrolling through his texts. It was ancient history, because whatever had led him to this point—and the offer to take Twitter private—he now strongly believed it was the correct, and only, course of action. He also had no doubt that Twitter would eventually have no choice but to accept. He’d even added, to his filing, a series of lettered postscripts:

  a. I am not playing the back-and-forth game.

  b. I have moved straight to the end.

  c. It’s a high price and your shareholders will love it.

  d. If the deal doesn’t work, given that I don’t have confidence in management nor do I believe I can drive the necessary change in the public market, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder.

  i. This is not a threat, it’s simply not a good investment without the changes that need to be made.

  ii. And those changes won’t happen without taking the company private.

  Twitter was broken.

  And Elon was determined to fix it. By taking it over.

  In a TED interview on April 14, he had put it succinctly: “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.”

  This subtly referenced what he’d come to believe: that taking Twitter private was now an integral part of his existential mission. It would become part of what he was building, here at Starbase and to a lesser extent at Tesla—to save humanity by making it interplanetary. Tesla and Twitter were two sides to a coin; both were necessary to extend the time that civilization’s window of opportunity remained open. Tesla, by weaning the world from fossil fuels, and offering sustainable energy. Twitter, by enabling the free and unfettered exchange of ideas.

  That morning, at 7:23 a.m., he’d told his eighty million followers, even more succinctly, “I made an offer.”

  Looking past Stargate, out across the compound toward the trio of silvery, towerlike structures, his own personal, triune Babel, he might have almost heard the countdown, deep beneath the bone.

  Three.

  Two.

  One.

  Liftoff.

  CHAPTER SIX

  June 16, 2022

  Squares, all the way down.

  Mark Ramsey perched on the edge of his chair, staring at the floating window in the center of his laptop computer screen. Still dark and pensive, a square within the square of the virtual conferencing app, within the square that was the laptop itself, resting on the square surface of his desk, in the back corner of his square office, bathed in the light flowing through the square windowpane behind him. The view, if he’d turned to see it: a parking lot baking in the morning heat, more squares of blacktop, almost all of them empty. Mark could have chosen an office on the other side of the seven-story building, something with a view of the financial district, and nobody would have cared. Hell, nobody would have noticed, because he was mostly alone at the Charlotte headquarters. More than 80 percent of the Tweeps who would be watching the videoconference along with him were in their homes, or in their cars, or maybe even at the beach.

  His reflection bounced in the screen as he shifted in his chair; even his reflection seemed vaguely square to him. When he was ten years younger, back in his army days, he could have been described as chiseled. Now, in his thirties, he’d gone a little soft, less carved of stone and more blown of glass. But still primarily square, from his closely shorn hair to the boxiness of his shoulders.

  Squares, all the way down.

  He drummed his fingers against the desk, still waiting. The skin of his fingers looked strangely dark to him, which made him smile, reminding him that two days ago, he too was on a beach, with Gina, his wife. Wife—the word seemed so strange to him. Being from the South, waiting to get married until his early thirties was almost scandalous, but four years in camouflage between college and business school had delayed what had been inevitable since he’d met Gina in his freshman year of high school. Both had been new kids at a new school, and had gravitated to each other mostly because of proximity—same bus stop, same homeroom—but they’d soon found they had a lot more in common than a lack of driver’s licenses. They’d both grown up in small towns, both loved classic rock, and both wanted to travel the world. On top of paying for college and business school, the army had given Mark enough of a cushion to take her across Europe; he’d smuggled an engagement ring from London to Paris to Berlin before finally getting up the nerve to propose in Copenhagen, while wandering the Rosenborg Castle Gardens, after which they’d traded their brief but romantic vagabond lifestyle for the practical life back in Charlotte.

  Even the two-week honeymoon they’d just spent in Hawaii had been carefully planned and budgeted; Mark had never been the sort of person who could just relax, so they’d spent much of the first week hiking through lush rain forests, snorkeling in crystal-clear waters, and diving off perfectly good cliffs—before Gina had finally put her foot down, negotiating for a half dozen days of lying on the beach until sunset, by the end of which Mark had been jumping out of his skin to get back to Charlotte and his empty office building.

  Part of the reason he’d been unable to simply shut down and enjoy his first two weeks as a newlywed had to do with the moment, now almost two months before, when that lightning strike of news had first hit Twitter, almost simultaneously as it had hit most of the major media outlets.

  Mark had been sitting in this exact spot when his office had erupted in a cacophony of sound: his cell phone chirping as its vibrations threatened to send it clattering to the floor, his desk phone clanging, which had surprised him the most because who the hell still called him on his desk phone, and his computer signaling a flood of incoming messages, on the multiple email servers he used inside and outside of work. It had seemed like everyone had seen the news before he had; after opening Twitter, Slack, and his text app, he’d immediately understood the commotion.

  Elon Musk’s offer to take Twitter private had hit everyone by surprise. To Mark, the numbers had seemed insane—a 40 percent bump over the stock’s price, almost $44 billion—but he’d also realized it was a number that would be almost impossible for the Twitter board to turn down. Though they’d initially adopted a “poison pill” strategy—announcing that they would offer shares at a discount to other shareholders to try to dissuade Elon’s private offer—they’d very quickly flipped in the opposite direction, understanding that they served at the pleasure of the shareholders. It would be a dereliction of their duty to turn down such a premium, no matter how much they might have wanted to. In short order, Parag had informed the Tweeps that the board had voted to accept Elon’s offer.

  Mark’s colleagues inside Twitter had responded with a mix of fear and dismay; the riotous applause Elon had garnered as a virtual guest—and cheerleader—at the Houston conference almost three years earlier had morphed into a terrified circling of the wagons at the thought of the unpredictable billionaire taking the reins of the company. There was also an undercurrent of disbelief. Didn’t Elon have enough on his plate with Tesla and SpaceX? Did he really want to step into Twitter, a social media company that seemed to lurch from one controversy to the next?

  Meanwhile, Mark’s colleagues outside Twitter had barraged him with texts and emails of congratulations; for some reason, most of them had assumed that the richest man in the world taking over Twitter meant that Mark himself had somehow just hit the jackpot, and would soon be retiring to the sort of beach he’d just spent a month’s salary to visit on his honeymoon. Mark’s own mother had left two messages pointing him toward real estate listings in the greater Charlotte area, houses that would have been oversized for a family of five, let alone a newly married couple. He assumed that his mom pictured herself occupying one of the many bedrooms; Mark’s father had passed away when Mark was in his twenties, and since he was an only child, his mother had leaned on him pretty heavily for support during the traumatic decade that followed. But Mark knew that, in her own way, she only wanted the best for him—and she’d obviously assumed that Elon taking over Twitter would translate into a six-bedroom estate in Myers Park.

  The general public seemed to share Mark’s mother’s enthusiasm, as evidenced by Twitter’s stock price jumping as much as 28 percent in the day after Elon had announced the offer. But weeks later, by the time Mark had been trading vows with Gina at a church two blocks from the house where he’d grown up (his mother and two cousins he hadn’t seen since elementary school representing his family in a sea of Gina’s relatives), there had been signs that the road forward wasn’t going to be anywhere near as smooth as the optimistic public might have hoped.

  Within a day of Twitter officially accepting Elon’s offer for the company, Tesla’s stock had cratered 12 percent—losing more than $100 billion in value in a single market day. That meant Elon’s car company had lost more than twice what Elon was going to pay for Twitter: a pretty unavoidable signal that Tesla shareholders had a very different view of Elon’s takeover of Twitter than Twitter’s own investors did. Three days later, when it became public that Elon had sold $8.5 billion worth of Tesla stock to boost his own cash position ahead of the deal, Tesla stock descended further, beginning a spiral that seemed to have no end in sight.

  Though Tesla’s plummeting stock price could also be blamed on the wider market pullback, it seemed obvious that Tesla investors feared Elon’s divided focus, and perhaps the sort of public attention that running Twitter would surely bring Elon’s way. Elon had caused enough problems with his tweets when he was just another registered user; what was it going to be like when he was tweeting as the platform’s CEO?

  Elon himself seemed to be taken aback by the sudden negative sentiment from the Tesla community; likely he was not accustomed to the Tesla faithful treating him as anything but a savior, considering that he’d carried the company on his shoulders through multiple potential disasters. Quite frankly, in anything Tesla related, there had been very few times Elon’s name had been mentioned in a paragraph that didn’t also include the word genius.

  Then Elon’s sudden announcement—two weeks later, on May 13—that he was putting his Twitter deal “on hold” seemed too much a coincidence with the plummeting of Tesla’s value (slicing away at Elon’s net worth along with it) to be anything but a reaction. Elon’s own explanation of the pause on his purchase had nothing to do with Tesla stock, of course: he had put the deal on hold, he’d announced, because he had reason to believe that Twitter had inflated its calculation of its user base by claiming that less than 5 percent of its users were fake or spam accounts. Elon believed that number was wildly underestimated, suggesting in a tweet on May 17 that even 20 percent of Twitter’s users being fake might have been an underestimate.

  Although in public, both Elon’s and Twitter management’s rhetoric had begun escalating toward outward animosity, within Twitter, Parag and his team were proceeding as if Elon’s purchase would be going forward, no matter what the billionaire was tweeting. Through internal channels, Mark had heard that a legal team was already being assembled on the chance that Elon’s “hold” on the deal turned into a true retreat.

  A month later, newly tanned and back at his desk, Mark had no reason to suspect it would ever come to a lawsuit; quite the opposite, as the floating square in the center of his laptop’s screen suddenly flickered to life, revealing a live image of Parag in a cramped office with walls that seemed to have been papered in fifteen different shades of beige. Mark felt like he had a front-row seat—alongside the nearly seventy-five hundred other Tweeps who were attending the all-hands call along with him—of what Twitter would soon look like.

  After a brief and overly obsequious introduction, Parag’s visage was replaced by Elon’s; the contrast between the two engineers, and the backgrounds they’d chosen to beam into the gathering, could not have been more stark. Parag’s black shirt, collarless and clingy, morphed into Elon’s crisp white dress shirt, open at the neck in a style that seemed both effortless and debonair. Parag’s tiny, cramped beige office was offset by the vast and airy setting Elon had chosen for the call: some sort of conference room or business cafeteria with ridiculously high ceilings, decorated in tones of gold and softly lit wood, with what appeared to be a galley kitchen behind him, complete with the shiny chrome of a large refrigerator.

  Parag couldn’t have slunk off the screen any faster, quickly passing the baton to Leslie Berland, Twitter’s chief marketing officer. Mark was pleased to see Leslie conducting the conversation; Mark had worked with her directly on numerous campaigns, and knew her to be extremely competent. He also felt it was telling that Parag had tapped his CMO to run the call, perhaps a sign that he understood that his background as an engineer, and his lack of experience in management, hadn’t prepared him for handling someone like Elon Musk. The way Mark saw it, Parag had already “managed” Elon into quitting the Twitter board, making an offer to take the company private, and then putting that offer on hold.

  Leslie started off the call with a softball, giving Elon a moment to tell the camera how much he loved Twitter: “I’ve literally tweeted—I love Twitter,” he answered. She followed up by asking why. Because, he explained, it allowed people to communicate with large numbers of other people without being filtered by the negative lens of mass media. He continued by clarifying comments he’d made about the importance of Twitter being “a digital town square.”

  “You can’t have millions of people in a town square,” Elon told Leslie. “You have millions of people on Twitter, which is incredibly important and essential for a functioning democracy. To function well, I think it’s essential to have free speech and communicate freely.”

  Then Elon dug deeper:

  I think there’s also freedom of speech and freedom of reach. Freedom of speech is one thing. Anyone can go to Times Square right now and say anything they want. They can deny the Holocaust, okay? That doesn’t mean that it needs to be promoted to millions of people. So I think people can say outrageous things within the bounds of the law, but it doesn’t have to get amplified. And I think an important goal for Twitter is to try and include as much of the country, as much of the world as possible.

  On the one hand, Elon seemed to be saying that he did agree that the sort of moderation that Twitter had been performing, often led by Yoel Roth’s team, was sometimes necessary, but that it could be applied without truly limiting “legal” free speech. But it was also clear that Elon wanted to expand Twitter’s user base—giving more people the opportunity to join in on the conversation.