“Would You Say No to Elon Musk?”: Scenes from the Arson-Style Twitter Takeover

At approximately 9:00 a.m. on October 27, 2022, Mr. Agrawal, Twitter’s CEO convened his executive team in one of the large glass-fronted conference rooms that lined the seventh-floor office block of Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters. After months of tension and anxiety, the mood became grimly clear—Musk was finally closing the deal.

Twitter’s top brass were packed into the room. Agrawal’s deputies were there, as were the vice presidents of finance, product, people, and sales. Even more executives were videoconferenced in from New York and around the world, their faces filling the screen at the back of the room.

It was clear to everyone there that it was Agrawal’s last meeting. He sat at the conference room table, the CFO Ned Segal beside him. The mood was gloomy—everyone in the room understood that many of them might soon be swept away by Elon MuskTsunami

No one is more likely to be fired than Agrawal. For months, Musk has made his contempt for Twitter’s CEO clear in scathing tweets, terse text messages, and explosive video calls. Agrawal has taken most of Musk’s outbursts in silence, advised by Twitter’s legal team not to argue with the billionaire or discuss the deal with employees—or even executives—because anything he says could leak to the media.

After months of near silence in front of the larger group, Agrawal spoke up, still calm and analytical. “We can close today,” he announced. Musk’s court-imposed deadline for completing the transaction was the following day, Friday, but it appeared he could get it done a day earlier. Agrawal told the executives he was proud of what they had accomplished.

He told everyone there was no agenda and opened the discussion. “What happens now?” one executive asked. Segal tried to explain how the closing would work but said frankly that no one could be sure. After all, the man on the other side of the transaction was unpredictable.

There was still a lot of work to do to finalize the deal, but Agrawal allowed Twitter’s leaders to discuss, share, and ask whatever they wanted. They had never had a meeting like this before. Sales executives wanted to know what they should tell advertisers. HR leaders wanted to know what they could tell employees and when they were allowed to share any information.

Then one of the staff members in the room asked the question that everyone was thinking but no one dared to say: “What will happen to you?”

Segal repeated what he had said to the employee earlier. “I haven’t talked to him yet,” he said. “I’m not going to open the door until I do.” Agrawal nodded.

“Each person needs to make their own decision,” Agrawal said.

CEOs have countless questions, but their leaders have few answers.

Segal could sense their frustration and, after months of facing unanswerable questions, he broke down. Trying to stay calm, he told them he didn’t know what would happen next. “People remember how you handle yourself when things are tough, not when they’re easy,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion. He tried to convey the weight of responsibility they all bore—to the company and to each other—to close the sale.

Several executives in the room were startled to see Segal, usually polite, cheerful and on-message, become emotional. When the meeting ended, some hugged each other, while others stayed behind to say goodbye to their boss.

Antonio Gracias, A private equity investor who is a close friend of Musk’s and the de facto financial manager on the deal, told Twitter’s team on Wednesday that he had enough money to close the deal. It was a pleasant surprise to Segal, who, upon learning that Gracias had the money, pushed the board. They should have closed the deal sooner, the CFO suggested. Closing the deal early would have given Musk one less day to back out. While Twitter’s board didn’t know where some of Musk’s money was coming from—new, undisclosed investors had joined Musk’s take-private effort—they were more than willing to take his $44 billion.

Members of Twitter’s finance team took a darkly humorous approach to the deal, joking that they were trying to track Musk’s money. As he sold new tranches of Tesla stock and filed mandatory disclosures about the transactions, they calculated his money, trying to figure out whether Musk had enough cash to buy their company. At one point, Musk’s lawyer also accidentally sent Twitter’s finance team a complete spreadsheet of all the people and investment firms they had asked for money from. That incident was immediately followed by a legal threat to Twitter recipients to delete the email and its contents.

Of course, there’s no way to know where the billionaire keeps all his money or how he plans to use it. Twitter employees have debated whether Musk is holding a secret stash of cryptocurrency or has taken out a new margin loan using his private SpaceX shares as collateral. The Wall Street Journal It was later reported that Musk borrowed $1 billion from SpaceX in October of that year and paid it back with interest the following month.

For Twitter, it doesn’t really matter where Musk’s money comes from—as long as he pays. But given the number of deals Musk has tried to renegotiate, nothing is certain. There is a world in which the world’s richest man, they believe, could test the court-imposed deadline by saying he simply doesn’t have enough money to make the deal.

In a normal transaction, the buyer would be transparent with the seller about the source of his money. But Musk, in what Twitter executives believe was an effort to shield his investors from scrutiny, poured all the money into a single account so Twitter couldn’t trace its origins.

On a call with Segal and Twitter’s chief financial officers and lawyers on Thursday, Gracias changed his tune. His boss was really short, Gracias explained. Musk had lost more than $400 million, and Gracias was asking Twitter to transfer money from its treasury to Musk so the deal could go through. Segal was dumbfounded. Robert Kaiden, Twitter’s stern chief accounting officer and a half-dozen others listening in on the conversation couldn’t believe what they were hearing.