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The world got a peek into Elon Musk’s phone yesterday. His CEO of Tesla and SpaceX is currently engaged in a legal spat with Twitter in an effort to back out of his agreement to purchase and take private the social media network. Hundreds of texts and emails addressed to and from Musk were made public by the Chancery Court of Delaware as part of the investigation process for this litigation. The 151-page redacted dossier, a unique voyeuristic portrayal of months in the life of the richest (and most exposed) man alive, brings Silicon Valley to his valley, the nexus of media and politics. It is a rare, unfiltered look into.
The lyrics are interesting, but not because they express his Muskian master plan in an outrageously scandalous or particularly provocative manner. How uninspired, unimaginative, and repulsive the prominent guys in Musk’s connections seem is what is so illuminating about his message. Anyone who asserted that brainstorming produces no terrible ideas has never had access to Elon Musk’s phone.
In a very short period of time, the lyrics have become a central topic of discussion among technicians and viewers alike. “The most important reaction of every thread I’m on is that everyone looks stupid as fuck,” said Musk, who anonymously allowed himself to be associated with many people in his writing. A former social media executive told me. “It was a common question. Is this really how trading is done? There`s no real strategic thought or analysis. It`s just emotional and done without any real care for consequence.”
I assume that being mentioned in the paper serves as a bizarre form of status symbol (some people I spoke with in tech and media circles copped to searching through it for their own names). And when reading the communications, it becomes clear that many of the same individuals who the media could not stop mentioning this year were also the ones injecting themselves into Musk’s texts.
Musk, who is likely the most well-known and exhausting of them all, has an inbox that also functions as a power ranking of the most divisive figures to have made headlines in the preceding 12 months.
There is Joe Rogan, the effective altruist William MacAskill, who is reaching out on behalf of cryptocurrency billionaire and Democratic donor Sam Bankman-Fried, Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer (and the subject of a recent, unflattering profile), Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist, NIMBY, and prolific Twitter blocker, Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, of course, Jack Dorsey, co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, who was just discovered to have participated in a November 2020 discussion about challenging Donald Trump’s election loss.