A recap of messages from the Twitter lawsuit that shows Parag Agrawal preventing Elon Musk from talking to the engineers
There were a lot of nuggets in these messages, including attempts to hide platform data and financials. Twitter is in a pickle.
This is a rundown of the 40 page dump of text messages (PDF) from the Twitter v Musk lawsuit, where Twitter is trying to cover their asses over their bots, fake accounts, and fraudulent financials. These messages reveal how they were busted, forcing the deal to go sideways.
Side note: as I read through it, I was hit with a dose of nostalgia because it reminded me of when I purchased my first company as a ute in my 20s, which was an exhilarating and stressful life-changing experience, as I tried to close the deal and integrate it into my then-current company.
It’s no biggie for Musk, obviously, but the chatter took me back to the due diligence process and figuring out who’s critical to operations, and who's the dead weight as you search for landmines, and where the bodies are buried, along with the excitement you’re feeling from others in your orbit.
Musk is doing it at a much bigger scale, but the types of players involved are the same. I’m amazed at how many of these VC clowns have been involved in billion-dollar deals, yet are non-tech absolute morons. That town is just swimming in money, thanks to government, with intelligence agencies making the decisions and running the show while doing the real tech as they suck data from the platforms like vampires.
95% of Silicon Valley bigwigs couldn’t start as much as a lemonade stand; I’m actually being serious when I say that. I'm also amazed at how many grown men tweet messages like 15 year old girls, e.g. “I’m excited to meet!”, or “I’m super excited!”
Unlike most of Silicon Valley, Musk wants developers and tech people. You need chefs for a fancy restaurant. You need rocket engineers for space rockets. You need tech people for a tech product. Managers and diversity hires are as useless as nuts on Bruce Jenner, and that understanding by Musk resonates in the messages.
Why is Musk even interested in Twitter? A social media platform from a development standpoint is boring, and there’s no real tech involved. There’s nothing innovative, especially to someone building AI self-driving cars while building and launching satellites into orbit, ultimately diverging from earthbound internet, meanwhile, moving forward with colonizing Mars.
That’s REAL tech. That’s REAL innovation. This social media crap is beyond a joke. If a client approached me and dumped a bunch of money in my lap to build a social media platform, I’d start stabbing my eyes out.
However, Musk has ideas on how to decentralize Twitter and make it spit out cash. There’s no decentralized social media platform, at least not at Twitter’s scale. I think that challenge is what’s holding Musk’s interest, to save a dying company and migrate to a secure, decentralized architecture that makes money.
I think Musk wants a true software development company, which is where his roots are, and Twitter should be that. Twitter should be a software company that innovates not only for the social media product, but for his other ventures; not a social user-data cow for intelligence agencies to milk.
This brings us to Parag Agrawal, the commie wokester who, like the turtle on the fence post, unnaturally ended up in that position.
What can I say about this loser? It’s obvious Musk has no respect for this clown. Agrawal’s experience is limited to academia and intern gigs, then a short stint as a programmer for Twitter before miraculously becoming CEO. It seems 90% of his workload is scheduling calls and meetings, and calls and meetings about calls and meetings. It’s no wonder why there’s been no innovation at Twitter in years.
Agrawal isn’t qualified to fetch coffee in Musk’s world. From what I garner, after their calls and meetings, Musk thinks this guy brings nothing of any value, technical or otherwise, to the table.
It seems to me that Musk was using Dorsey as his seeing-eye dog. I’ve done the same, where you have someone established in the company who benefits if the deal goes through and wants to be in good graces, so they’re motivated to get you what you need, covertly if need be, and fast. I think Dorsey circumvented Agrawal and fed a lot of information to Musk.
There’s a desperation in Dorsey’s messages, and I can’t quite put my finger on it. He really wanted Musk and Agrawal to get along, but Musk is allergic to stupid people. How does Dorsey not understand how stupid Agrawal is, and how Musk could possibly think otherwise?
I think it’s because whoever really controls Twitter wants Agrawal to stay, and they tasked Dorsey with making that happen.
I’ll skip ahead to where it starts to heat up, with these items that seem to be from Dorsey, Musk, or both.
I like the point about shortening the TOS, and the open APIs is a big one. That’s critical. In the past few years I’ve applied for a Twitter API key multiple times and was always rejected. I love the idea about choosing your own algorithm as well; that’s smart.
Here’s where I notice everyone (that I’ve read) misses what’s going on here.
Musk’s frustration with Agrawal grows on the last message on page 15 (April 7). Musk wants feedback on his bullet points and wants to dig into the platform, but engineering has ignored him. Agrawal is a horrible manager and doesn’t know how to walk into engineering and tell them to get Musk what he needs yesterday.
Agrawal keeps wanting to set up meetings and AMAs and chats and talks instead of getting engineering together with Musk. Musk must have been losing his mind at this point, and begins to probe Agrawal by asking if he’s being too aggressive, but Agrawal says he wants to hear “all of Musk’s ideas” to keep pacifying him.
It quickly becomes quite obvious that Agrawal is hiding the engineering team from Musk. Musk wants to talk with them and dig into the codebase, but Agrawal says “you can go through me.” Musk says he’d rather talk with the guys in the middle of the codebase, but Agrawal says “I used to be CTO and have been in the codebase for years.” Musk then says he’d rather interface with the engineers doing the hardcore programming than the managers, and Agrawal replies with “in our next convo, treat me like an engineer.”
I’ve seen these exchanges interpreted as “Musk and Agrawal bonding as coders” by the non-tech tech journalists. As someone who’s been a software developer and business owner for 30 years, trust me, they weren’t bonding. Musk was furious with Agrawal and knew for certain Agrawal was trying to hide information.
Agrawal then replies with how Musk likes to receive his calendar invites. Good Lord this guy is clown shoes.
Musk tosses ideas at his brother about the architecture, like where someone pays to register their messages on the blockchain so it lives forever, and on top of that, the messages on the blockchain are read into a real-time DB (where data is kept in memory), and just general architecture stuff.
As he’s waiting for his brother’s reply, Musk tweets this:
At this point, he’s so done with Agrawal blocking him from getting information from the engineers, and the moron messages back with:
The reason Agrawal was hiding engineering from speaking with Musk directly is because someone would have spilled the beans on the bots and fake accounts, so Musk decided to toss a grenade to force the issue and get everyone’s attention.
If Twitter was the Titanic, that was the iceberg moment.
Musk asks Agrawal what he got done this week (spoiler alert: nothing) and then decides to not join the board. Instead, he’ll just take the company private, which undoubtedly sent Agrawal and the board into a panic.
As Musk’s brother replies with ideas on the new architecture, Agrawal asks if they can talk (again, in a panic). It looks like Musk ignores him, and that generates a message from Bret Taylor (board Chairman) to ask about the exchange with Agrawal, where Musk informs him to expect an offer to take the company private. Musk then unloads about Agrawal and how he must take it private:
Taylor tries to connect with Musk, but after a few days, Musk reaffirms he’s taking it private. Musk send the offer letter on 4/13.
We also learn what Musk’s “plan B” was; he lets Steve Davis (from Musk’s tunneling company Boring) know that his plan B is a new decentralized platform.
At this point it’s public he made the offer and the flurry of tweeps sending congratulations and support, along with those wanting a seat on the train. Musk’s friend Jason Calacanis starts hammering out numbers, and it’s sad how badly Agrawal and Dorsey before him ran that platform into the ground. Musk acknowledges “insane potential for improvement.”
Calacanis and Musk laugh at how crappy Twitter’s “Blue” service is, and laugh at how Agrawal is on day ten of his vacation in Hawaii instead of in the war room. Musk asks if doing Zoom calls while drinking fruity cocktails at the Four Seasons counts as work. Agrawal is a punchline of a joke.
Calacanis is aggressive (which I like) and seems to be assuming a seat on the train. Musk asks Gayle King if Oprah would be interested in joining the board. Pardon me while I puke. Elon, you need to move Twitter AWAY from child trafficking, not towards it.
Musk reaches back out to Larry Ellison, who’s the biggest player of Musk’s contacts, if he wants in, and replies “of course.” Calacanis continues with new ideas for revenue models and accepts Musk’s offer as a strategic advisor if the deal goes through. He hints for more, including CEO. I like Calacanis’ aggressiveness, but I’d tell him to slow his roll.
Musk asks his brother if he wants to take part in the Twitter transaction, who’s done business with him many times. Twitter is spazzing about the offer as Musk is hearing pitches from investors.
Dorsey somehow manages to pull Agrawal back into the loop and tries to get him on a call with Musk. Why is Dorsey so hard up over Agrawal?
Here’s the funniest, and saddest part of the entire message dump:
Poor CCP Justin Amash. I guess daddy’s tool business isn’t working out. No way Musk will hire that useless idiot.
Musk reaches out to Reid Hoffman, with whom he’s friends, and lines up $2B. Musk also ponders what to do with DMs, possibly integrate with Signal. That sounds like a smart idea. Meanwhile, his tweeps continue to pitch various tech ideas and candidates for executive roles. Sadly, none of them are tech people.
This was my favorite exchange:
This is music to my ears.
Into the first page of the second part of the exhibit containing another section of messages, Musk starts to bring up the severity of the bot problem.
His friend Jason Calacanis is back in the messages, looking to manage an SPV, and Musk gives him the OK to run with it. Calacanis seems to be more of a bull in a China shop. That’s a good thing, and those are good people to have in your corner because you can point at something and say “attack” and they’ll be all over it, but sometimes the bull will knock over some expensive China.
Musk is focused on how Twitter counts their DAU:
It blows my mind that Twitter pays 2,500 coders and has nothing to show for it except bots, fake users, and an API service for which I can’t get approved for a key. What in the hell do they do??
On May 10 it appears Musk gets user metrics from his due diligence guys (one of them named Peter — perhaps a Twitter engineer? Or Thiel?) they plan to use on a conference call with an unknown party, presumably his attorneys and/or money guys.
Remember when I said Calacanis is like a bull in a China shop? Musk gives him a light spanking:
This is embarrassing for Calacanis, but it’s not as bad as it looks. He was doing what he thought he needed to do, but was a little presumptuous of his role, but I like that.
To wrap up the messages, Musk and another guy talk about how way off Twitter’s projections sent to them are from Agrawal and Ned Segal (the CFO). Agrawal has to be in a perpetual panic right now. I can’t wait to see what happens when he’s on the stand under oath being asked about bots and fake users.
That’s the end. None of it is bad for Musk, despite the insane amount of fake news saying otherwise. These messages show Musk is serious about the purchase, and it went off the rails when Agrawal and Twitter refused to allow due diligence, which is beyond ridiculous. Musk has clean hands, and I can’t imagine how Twitter can win in court.