That's how billion-dollar ideas are arranged. Elon Musk's secret conversations with financial figures released
Ever wondered what conversations between the richest men on the planet might look like? Then you've come to the right place! Because let's take a look at Elon Musk's leaked messages in which he was negotiating huge potential deals.
A huge amount of texts were released last month in court documents to help shed light on Musk's purchase of Twitter, which has been one of the biggest topics for months. It has been addressed recently here, for example by @pavelbotek in his article, and possibly by me in my earlier posts.
When Musk announced his nine percent stake in Twitter on April 4, and the following day Twitter publicly appointed him to its board of directors, it caused both shock and jubilation in the tech world, as many speculated that Musk would revamp the platform into a fully free one. But Musk announced his surprise plan to take the company private a few weeks later. Then he tried to back out of the purchase, then the courts... you know the drill. The bottom line is that because of these tug-of-wars, his private conversations have been made public, and they hide a lot of interesting stuff!
According to the documents, Musk's phone has been flooded with messages this spring from well-known fellow entrepreneurs, investors, tech personalities and celebrities, and media personalities.
Let's take a look at some of them!
Jack Dorsey
The most interesting figure (both in terms of what's happening around Twitter and overall) is clearly Jack Dorsey. The former CEO of Twitter $TWTR and CEO of Block $SQ-2.3%.
The most important part of the conversation went like this:
Dorsey: "Yes, a new platform is needed. It can't be a company. That's why I left.
Musk: Okay, what should it look like?
Dorsey: I think it needs to be an open source protocol, funded by some kind of foundation that doesn't own the protocol, just develops it. Something like Signal did. It can't have an advertising model. Otherwise you have an area that governments and advertisers will try to influence and control. If there is a centralized entity behind it, it will be challenged. It's not a complicated job, it just has to be done right to be resistant to what happened to Twitter.
Musk: Super interesting idea
Dorsey: "This is a very important thing for me to say: I'm leaving Twitter's board of directors in mid-May and then the company altogether. I intend to do this work and fix our mistakes. Twitter started as a protocol. It was never meant to be a company. That was the original sin.
Musk: I'd like to help if I can.
Dorsey: I wanted to talk to you about it when I was clear because you care so much, you understand how important it is, and you could definitely help tremendously. At the time the activist came to us, I tried my best to get you to be on our board, and our board turned it down. That's when I decided I had to work to leave, even though it was hard for me.
Musk: Do you have a moment? We'd discuss it.
Dorsey: I'm going to go to dinner, but I can for a while.
This seems like an extremely important conversation between two extremely important and powerful men. Dorsey puts forward a really interesting idea that Musk thinks is absolutely groundbreaking. The conversation dates back to March 26 - could this have been one of the key moments that led Musk to his next steps regarding Twitter?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4qiRBSrhcs
But the conversations didn't just end with Dorsey. A number of other interesting names can be found here. And once again, it was connected to social networks and platforms!
Reid Hoffman
Reid Hoffman is the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn. On April 27, two days after Twitter accepted Musk's acquisition offer, Hoffman offered the billionaire to put him in touch with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
Hoffman : Great. I'll put you in touch withSatya Nadal.
Hoffman : I assume you're not interested in venture $. (Venture dollars - venture capital investments - venture investments in emerging businesses.)
Musk: There's plenty of financial backing, but you're a friend, so I'm just letting you know you'd be preferred. Venture capital money is not a problem if you want it.
Hoffman: Great! Okay - if I put together $, what amount could you make available?
Musk: Whatever you want. I'll just scratch the rest.
Musk: I'd need to know the approximate amount by next week.
Hoffman: What would be the largest amount of $ that would be okay? I have consulted with our LPs (Limited Partners) and have a strong demand. It would be fun!
Musk: $2 billion?
Hoffman: Great. Probably doable - I'll take a look.
Musk: Could be less if it's easier. I just need to tell the other investors what their allocation is, ideally by early next week.
Musk: Shall I put you in touch with the Morgan Stanley team?
Hoffman: Yes, please. Especially with terms and conditions, etc. I know Michael Grimes, btw.
Musk: Feel free to call him directly.
That's the way to do it, folks! Two billion dollars? no problem, just write a message 😇
Parag Agrawal
Once again we return to the Twitter case - this time with its current CEO - Parag Agrawal. He lashed out at Musk after his tweet on April 9, 2022.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1512785529712123906
To which Agrawal responded as follows:
Feel free to tweet "is Twitter dying?" or anything else about Twitter - but it's my duty to tell you that it won't help me improve Twitter in the current context. Next time we talk, I'd like to give you my perspective on the level of internal chaos right now and how it's hurting our ability to work. I hope the AMA helps people get to know you, understand why you trust Twitter, and trust you - and I'd love for the company to get to a state where we're more resilient and not distracted, but we're not there at the moment.
Musk responded less than a minute later.
"What have you done this week? I'm not joining the board. It's a waste of time. I'll make an offer to take Twitter private."
Twitter board chairman Bret Taylor reached out to Musk a few minutes later for an interview.
"Fixing Twitter by talking to Parag isn't going to work," "Drastic measures need to be taken. It's hard to do as a public company because cleaning out the bots will make the numbers look terrible, so restructuring should be done as a private company. That's Jack's view as well." Musk tells Taylor.
The documents can be found in the original here.
You'd expect news from the richest man on the planet to be a bit more... different than inviting a friend over for a beer. But Musk is human too and he just moves at higher levels of influence and operates with larger sums 😁You can see the rest of the conversations in the document I linked to above.
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Disclaimer: This is in no way an investment recommendation. This is purely my summary and analysis based on data from the internet and a few other analyses. Investing in the financial markets is risky and everyone should invest based on their own decisions. I am just an amateur sharing my opinions.
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