This book is based on conversations and interviews totaling more than 150 hours with nearly 100 people. Those people included current and former employees for Twitter, X, Tesla, and SpaceX; lawyers, bankers, and other associates who worked for both sides during Elon Musk’s negotiations to buy Twitter; as well as friends and acquaintances of Musk, Jack Dorsey, and other Twitter executives. Some of those interviews were conducted during the course of our years of reporting for The New York Times on Twitter, Musk, and his 2022 acquisition of the company. We also relied on court filings, videos, audio recordings, internal company messages, and direct messages between key figures. Of course, we also referenced countless tweets.
Quotes from those internal messages and documents appear verbatim, as do quotes from company-wide meetings at Twitter. In dialogue, quotes that are attributed to specific people are reconstructed from the memories of participants, from contemporaneous notes they made about their conversations, and sometimes from recordings of those interactions.
For the early history of Twitter, we relied in part on Nick Bilton’s 2013 Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal, which offers a dramatic retelling of the company’s beginnings. To better understand Musk, we referred to two works: Ashlee Vance’s 2015 book, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, and Walter Isaacson’s 2023 authorized biography, Elon Musk. Isaacson shadowed Musk for two years, and his reporting helped us understand the entrepreneur’s whereabouts during the deal. We also depended on clues provided by @ElonJet, the since-suspended Twitter account that diligently tracked the movements of Musk’s private plane.
All of the people who appear in this book are identified by their real names. Many people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution from Musk or one of his companies in the form of either litigation or online harassment. In the process of reporting, we attempted to contact the main figures identified in the book and offered them the opportunity to tell their stories. Musk did not answer our requests for interviews.