During Musk’s April media frenzy, the billionaire frequently demonstrated a shallow understanding of Twitter, suggesting contradictory policies such as banning spam and bot armies but also leaving up all content that is “legal.” (Spam, bot armies, and crypto scam hawkers are all technically legal.) Many of the ideas coming from his peanut gallery were equally poor. Döpfner, who is in charge of numerous media companies, including Insider and Politico, offered to run Twitter for Musk but seemed woefully unprepared for the task. In a novel-length text, Döpfner laid out his “#Gameplan” for the company, which started with the line item: “1.),, Solve Free Speech.” He alluded to vague ideas such as making Twitter censorship resistant via a “decentralized infrastructure” and “open APIs.” He’s similarly nonspecific with his suggestion that Twitter have a “marketplace” of algorithms. “If you’re a snowflake and don’t want content that offends you pick another algorithm,” he wrote Musk.
At one point in early April, Musk appears infatuated with his own idea to replace Twitter with a blockchain-based payment-and-message system. In a string of texts to his brother, the entrepreneur Kimbal Musk, he manages to convince himself that the idea could be huge and a way to crush spam while preserving free speech. In this preposterous scenario, users would have to pay a fractional amount of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin to post or retweet. Roughly 10 days later, Musk sends a different text noting that “blockchain Twitter isn’t possible.”
Read: Elon Musk already showed us how he’ll run Twitter
The texts also cast a harsh light on the investment tactics of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest. There’s Calacanis’s overeager angel-investing pitches, and then you have the more chill tactics of people like Andreessen, who in a tossed-off Twitter DM offered Musk “$250M with no additional work required.” “Thanks!” Musk responded. In a separate exchange, Musk asks Ellison if he’d like to invest in taking Twitter private. “Yes, of course,” Ellison replies. “A billion … or whatever you recommend.” Easy enough.
“This is one of the most telling things I’ve ever seen about how investing works in Silicon Valley,” Jessica Lessin, the founder of the tech publication The Information, tweeted of the Andreessen exchange. Indeed, both examples from the document offer a look at the boys’ club and power networks of the tech world in action. Is it surprising that rich people (including one of the world’s 10 richest men) are throwing money at their friends the way you might on a low-stakes poker night? Not really—and especially not when that man is the richest man in the world. But the eagerness to pony up for Musk and the lazy quality of this dealmaking reveal something deeper about the brokenness of this investment ecosystem and the ways that it is driven more by vibes and grievances than due diligence. Looking at these texts, it seems much easier to understand Andreessen Horowitz’s recent $350 million investment in WeWork founder Adam Neumann’s new real-estate start-up, or Bankman-Fried’s admission that most venture-capitalist investments are not “the paragon of efficient markets” and driven primarily by FOMO and hype. “Like, all the models are made up, right?” he infamously told Bloomberg last April.