How Elon Musk fumbled his purchase of Twitter — and apparently gave Grimes’ baby name to his other child

Elon Musk and Grimes at the 2018 Met Gala. A new book called “Character Limit” describes their tumultuous relationship and details Musk’s chaotic purchase of Twitter.

If you think you’ve heard all there is to hear about Elon Musk’s chaotic purchase of Twitter — and his sometimes chaotic personal life — a new book will probably dispel those notions.

Kate Conger and Ryan Mac are the authors of “Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter.” The technology reporters at The New York Times unearthed new details about the chaotic period in 2022 when Musk decided to purchase Twitter and its subsequent descent into ~whatever it is now~.

Conger and Mac spoke with B-17 about their book, which comes out Tuesday.

The interview was edited for length and clarity.

Katie Notopoulos: You’ve both reported on Elon Musk and his companies for a long time. Was there anything during the course of reporting for this book that really surprised you about how he operates?

Kate Conger: I think something that surprised me about Elon in this process is just sort of how isolated he’s become. And especially by the time the Twitter takeover started, he was operating with a very limited and close set of advisors who he had a lot of faith and trust in but didn’t necessarily have a lot of experience in mergers and acquisitions or in running social-media companies. So he was being advised by a very limited circle of people who had not a lot of depth of knowledge about the things that he was taking on. And he’s always kind of operated in limited circles, but it surprised me just how tiny that world had become by the time he tried to take over Twitter.

Notopoulos: Everyone’s talking about “founder mode,” the idea of running a company like it’s still in its early days instead of scaling to “manager mode.” Musk took over Twitter from its founder Jack Dorsey, who had arguably been running it — badly — in manager mode. Musk comes in and wants to go “extremely hardcore,” his version of founder mode, but it hasn’t really worked out. What do you think happened?

Ryan Mac: I think it’s kind of absurd, this discussion now — and there are plenty of examples of founder mode not working, but if we believe there’s a kernel of truth in founder mode, Elon’s takeover of Twitter proves, in a way, he is not the founder. He has run Twitter into the ground in part because he didn’t have those early experiences of what it was like building that company from the bottom up.

I think of something like what he did with advertising — coming in and being ignorant toward the reliance of the company on advertising. He believed that he could just sell subscriptions immediately, which was his big focus. Call it ignorance or call it — 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 in rocketry or building an electric-car company. But he was definitely not a social-media founder or CEO.

Notopoulos: That’s part of the interesting paradox: He has these really successful two companies, SpaceX and Tesla, where he was the founder (or close to it with Tesla). But then he’s really failed with Twitter.

Conger: I think the thing with Elon that’s interesting is he has all this experience in hardware and engineering — but with X and Twitter, it is a fundamentally social problem. It’s a problem of how people interact and relate to each other. I don’t think that’s a problem that Elon has a lot of experience in dealing with and doesn’t have a very successful track record in figuring out how to navigate conflict among people.

Kate Conger and Ryan Mac wrote a new book on Musk’s takeover of Twitter. “Character Limit” has other revelations, including about one of Musk’s children’s names.

Notopoulos: The Wall Street Journal had a story recently about how Musk’s Twitter takeover is now the worst buyout for banks since the 2008 financial crisis. What I found really shocking in your book were details on the projections he made to sell the banks on the deal. These outrageous “we’re going to make five times the revenue in three years” kind of impossible numbers.

Mac: I am not sure what was going through their heads at the time. I think the actual numbers themselves, which I don’t have in front of me, but we’re talking about, again, doubling, tripling the revenue — even more. So it just shows how confident he was in himself, how confident he was that Twitter was just this horribly run business run by idiots basically that didn’t know how to make money. And he would be the champion that came in and righted the ship that would be able to make this a business, because who would know better than him? He’s the guy who is a top 10 followed account who spends so much time there. Of course he has all the ideas!

I think it is interesting how the banks enabled him. These are ostensibly smart people as well, and they went along with it simply to get him his debt financing or get him his investors. I think there is more to be said about that in terms of how he is enabled by these institutions who simply want to be close to him because he’s the world’s richest person.

Notopoulos: So how long does this go on? It’s a money-losing venture for him. How long does he just keep burning money hoping maybe things will turn around?

Conger: I think that’s a great question. I mean, the end of X is something that we’ve thought about a lot. If this was an ordinary business, I think it would come to a conclusion more rapidly. But this is something that Elon can continue to prop up with his own financial resources for quite some time. It’s also an open question of how much money can this business lose?

The first year after the takeover lost a really significant amount of revenue. Projections for 2024 were that the loss would slow down. We found in our reporting that it hasn’t quite slowed down as much as they had hoped. And so it’s continuing to lose even more money than what analysts thought would happen this year. And so we’re still on a journey to the bottom, and I don’t know when exactly will arrive.

Notopoulos: So a lot of this book is about his mercurial ways of handling his business, but obviously people are also very interested in Elon Musk as a person. There was something really shocking to me about a baby-name situation when he was having his second child with Grimes.

Conger: Elon and Grimes had picked out a name for their daughter that they wanted to use. That name ended up being used for one of Shivon Zilis’ twins with Elon. When Grimes found out about it, obviously she was very upset. She posted some song lyrics that she had written about the name essentially being stolen from her. And then Shivon ended up changing that child’s name, which is how the existence of Shivon’s children came to light to the public, actually, because the name-change paperwork became public. [Editor’s note: B-17 first reported the news that Musk had twins with Zilis, an executive at Neuralink.]

Mac: More of the backstory is that Grimes did not know that Shivon was having kids with Elon. Grimes was going to have her second child through a surrogate while Shivon was pregnant with these twins. The twins were born first. There was a boy and a girl, and the girl was given the name Valkyrie Alice Zilis, and Valkyrie was the name that Grimes and Elon had been discussing for their daughter.

The song that she posted the lyrics for was never made, but we were able to connect the dots and realize that it was about this really messy incident about the name. Shivon’s daughter ends up being called Azure, and Grimes’ daughter is Exa. So the name Valkyrie is effectively erased from all of Musk’s family for all intents and purposes.

Notopoulos: I have one final question for you guys: Did you find the character limit?

Conger: We really tested the boundaries of the character limit. I think we submitted a manuscript that was like 40,000 words too long.

Mac: Jesus, my computer is crashing again.