Musk’s private plane landed at 2:00 a.m. at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport on Halloween, the first Monday following his takeover. He had already been planning to visit the company’s main East Coast office, but advertisers’ concerns, exacerbated by his Pelosi tweet, made the trip all the more urgent.
At the Chelsea office, building staff and assistants had been told to prepare for their new leader’s arrival, and they wanted to impress. But they had little to accommodate, much less entertain, Musk’s toddler son, who had traveled with his father. There was no play area or place for him to nap, so they improvised, clearing out a storage closet that usually held chairs and tables and laying down blankets. The workers gathered various Twitter-branded throw pillows from around the office to build a makeshift bed, while someone went out and purchased a set of building blocks. The staffers watched as the child and his nanny settled into the small space, which remained guarded by two bulky security guards who followed Musk’s progeny at all times.
Across from the storage closet, Musk began a series of meetings with the leaders from some of the world’s top advertising agencies. With Personette’s resignation confirmed, Musk was joined by Maheu. Berland had vouched for Maheu personally and told Musk about his connections with the largest advertising companies in the world.
Maheu immediately brokered meetings for Musk with WPP, Publicis Groupe, and Horizon Media. The goal was to reassure the ad agencies that Musk’s Twitter wouldn’t descend into a cesspool of misinformation and hate speech. The previous Friday, General Motors announced that it would pause advertising on Twitter, and other brands were rumored to be heading down the same path. The chaos was less than ideal for the multibillion-dollar corporations trying to sell people cars or convince them to watch a new movie. (General Motors, a competitor with Tesla, sought assurances that its advertising data wouldn’t be shared between Musk’s companies before it resumed spending.)
Maheu, a shrewd Frenchman who had developed deep connections to the ad industry over a decade at Twitter, knew he had to act fast to prevent the contagion from spreading. It would take only a matter of days before others would follow General Motors like lemmings, leading to steep reductions in revenue. He tried to make the gatherings orderly, but it was impossible.
In the meetings with advertisers, Musk surrounded himself with his motley entourage. There was X and Musk’s mother, Maye, who was in New York for an event that evening. Calacanis joined, as did Michael Tucker, a music producer better known as BloodPop, who had written songs for Justin Bieber, Britney Spears, and Lady Gaga. Tucker’s presence went unexplained and he sat in silence through some of the meetings. Advertisers were equally puzzled by their spontaneous introduction to the Musk circle.
Musk said the right things to advertisers and committed to a vision of continued content moderation. But Maheu also noticed a strange dynamic developing. Even though they were skittish, the ad agency leaders didn’t challenge Musk but rather wanted to charm him. They asked him softball questions and cozied up to him. After all, this was the leader not only of Twitter but also Tesla and SpaceX, two multibillion-dollar companies that did little to no advertising. What if those companies decided they wanted to start running ads one day?
The flattery was on full display that afternoon when Bill Koenigsberg, the chief executive of Horizon Media—an ad firm that represented Hershey’s and Burger King—parroted a question that had been asked repeatedly since Musk announced his takeover.
“My clients asked, ‘Is he going to get Donald Trump back on the platform?’ ” he said.
Musk had grown tired of the question. So instead of giving his typical staid answer, he took out his iPhone, opened up the Twitter app, and drafted a tweet: “If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me if Trump is coming back on this platform, Twitter would be minting money!” He looked around the room.
“You’re my content counsel,” Musk said with a wide grin. “Should I tweet that or not?”
To Maheu, the billionaire was like a fifth grader asking his parents if he could light an M80 in the house. Calacanis, giggling, said yes. So did his mother. Koenigsberg, who clearly had no intention of rocking the boat, gave his approval. The music producer gave his thumbs-up.
“No,” said Maheu, the lone voice of dissent, knowing that any mention of Trump would generate an unneeded press cycle. Musk eyed him briefly, then shrugged. He hit the tweet button.
>>> That night, Kaiden was still scrambling to confirm that all of Twitter’s employees were real people before his Tuesday morning deadline. He worked late into the evening, pestering managers to reach out to each of their employees and confirm their existence and reiterating impatiently that no, he wasn’t joking.
On Monday evening, the accountant blasted out an email to several managers about his ongoing “payroll audit.”
“We need to know by 8 AM PT if you know the following employees and that they are really humans,” Kaiden wrote. “If you don’t know please dive a level deeper and ask your directs if they know.” Attached to the message was a list of unaccounted-for Twitter workers. Kaiden knew he had to fulfill Musk’s insane demand.
>>> In New York, the sales team prepared to argue for their jobs. Tesla and SpaceX relied on word of mouth and consumer evangelism through Musk’s rabid fanbase. With such strong support, Musk came to see advertising as a waste. “I hate advertising,” he tweeted on a whim in October 2019.
But Twitter’s lifeblood was advertising. Ad revenue made up 90 percent of the company’s revenue, or some $5 billion annually.
After his meetings with Maheu, Musk was set to be briefed on the status of the company’s ad business. He finally arrived at the meeting three hours after its scheduled start at 6:00 p.m., hurrying into a conference room with Twitter’s top sales leaders—sans Maheu—and apologizing for his tardiness. The ad sales experts held their breath for a hostile Musk, but they found the billionaire to be far from it, perhaps humbled by the advertising backlash. They would have as long as they needed to explain the ads business to him.
“I have a party tonight, but it doesn’t matter,” Musk said, referencing a Halloween party he was expected to attend. “This is much more important.
“I’m really new to this,” he continued. “Educate me.”
What was supposed to be a thirty-minute gathering stretched beyond two hours as the sales leaders walked him through the basics of advertising. They broke down Twitter’s biggest customers, its advantages, and its technical disadvantages when competing against Facebook and Google, the dominant players in the digital ad space. Musk was soft-spoken but asked probing questions. More important, he listened as the ads professionals presented. It was a side of Musk that many in the room, most who were meeting him for the first time, were unprepared for.
Still there were worries. Some of the Twitter execs wondered why he hadn’t taken the time to do this type of diligence before buying the company. And they recalled that when Musk and his bankers went and pitched potential investors on backing his acquisition of Twitter, leaked presentation decks reported by the media said that Musk’s company would bring in $12 billion in annual advertising revenue, more than double its current clip, by 2028. If he was just learning how Twitter kept the lights on, what were his figures based on?
When the meeting ended, Musk was whisked out of the room and into a car where his mother, Maye, was waiting. The next day, tabloids would circulate photos of Musk, dressed in a $7,500 leather armor suit stamped with a devil’s insignia, and his mother, styled as Disney’s Cruella de Vil, on the red carpet of a Halloween gala hosted by former supermodel Heidi Klum.
In group chats, some employees joked that the costumes seemed a little too on the nose. Others asked how many fifty-year-old men dress up for parties with their mother?