Don’t Look Back in Anger
In the midst of his chaotic purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk’s attorneys accidentally sent a bunch of people the wrong email about his financial backing — and then aggressively demanded the recipients delete it.
As New York Times reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac note in a Vanity Fair-published excerpt from their new book about the Twitter buyout, the billionaire’s team made the massive gaffe while it was still unclear whether Musk was actually going to pull off the sale.
“At one point, Musk’s lawyers… accidentally sent Twitter’s finance team a full spreadsheet of all the people and investment firms from which they solicited money,” Conger and Mac wrote in “Character Limit,” their forthcoming book about the deal. “That screwup was immediately followed by a legal threat to the Twitter recipients to delete the email and its contents.”
Around the same time as the deal was in limbo in mid-2022, Twitter’s financial officers had, as the book notes, developed a dark way to handle the uncertainty of Musk’s closing.
“Members of Twitter’s finance teams had adopted a gallows humor approach to the deal,” the reporters described, “and made a joke of trying to track Musk’s money.”
Money Troubles
Though the sale obviously went through in the end, Mac and Conger’s portrait of the anxiety on the Twitter side of the deal shows that there was perhaps even less confidence behind the scenes of the deal than there was in skeptical media coverage.
While buyers in a normal takeover are generally transparent about where their money is coming from, Musk was no such beast. Instead, he “dumped all the funds into a single account so that Twitter couldn’t trace their origin.” There was even a possibility that the world’s richest man might defy courts by simply saying he couldn’t foot the bill — remember, Musk got cold feet and fought not to go through with the disastrous acquisition.
During a call discussing the deal, Musk’s consigliere Antonio Gracias, a private equity investor, told Twitter executives that Musk was missing $400 million and needed the company to front him the money so he could close the deal, essentially relying on them to trust that he was good for it.
When the executives were reportedly “dumbfounded” by the ask and denied it, Gracias then decided to “pull a mafioso move.”
“‘You’re not going to wire me the fucking money?'” the private equity buff said. “‘Are you saying no to Elon Musk?'”
More on the Twitter buyout: One of Elon Musk’s Major Twitter Investors Has Been Accused of Sex Trafficking and Domestic Abuse