Cracks in the Foundation

Musk’s play for Twitter has damaged an already shaky company, and there’s no easy path to recovery

- Joshua Brustein

When Twitter Inc. co-founder Jack Dorsey invited Elon Musk to speak at a companywide retreat in early 2020, he asked the Tesla Inc. chief executive officer a prescient hypothetical question. “If you were running Twitter—by the way, do you want to run Twitter?” Dorsey joked as employees laughed. “What would you do?”

Musk, who at the time was neither the world’s richest man nor Twitter’s biggest headache, took the question seriously. “I think it would be helpful to differentiate between real” and fake accounts, he replied, his face projected onto several giant video screens inside the Houston convention center as more than 4,000 Twitter employees sat listening. Musk specifically called out “botnets” and “troll armies” for trying to manipulate the social media network. “What’s real public opinion, and what’s not?” he asked.

Two and a half years later, Musk’s thoughts about what’s ailing Twitter are far more than a curiosity. His offer in April to purchase the company for $44 billion—and the ugly fight that ensued when he tried to pull out of the deal—has transfixed the business world for months. A court case to determine whether Twitter could force Musk to stick to the terms of the acquisition was scheduled to begin on Oct. 17. But Musk blinked at the last second, saying he’d buy the company for the original price after all, and the judge gave the two sides until Oct. 28 to sort out the details before proceeding with the trial.