How Elon Musk fumbled his purchase of Twitter — and apparently gave Grimes’s baby name to his other child

Notopoulos: The Wall Street Journal had a story recently about how Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover is now the worst buyout for banks since the 2008 financial crisis. What I found really shocking in your book were details on the projections he made to sell the banks on the deal. These outrageous, “We’re going to make five times the revenue in three years,” kind of impossible numbers.

Mac: I am not sure what was going through their heads at the time. I think the actual numbers themselves, which I don’t have in front of me, but we’re talking about, again, doubling, tripling the revenue — even more. So it just shows how confident he was in himself, how confident he was that Twitter was just this horribly run business run by idiots basically that didn’t know how to make money. And he would be the champion that came in and righted the ship that would be able to make this a business because … who would know better than him? He’s the guy who is a Top 10 followed account who spends so much time there. Of course, he has all the ideas!

I think it is interesting how the banks enabled him. These are ostensibly smart people as well, and they went along with it simply to get him his debt financing or get him his investors. I think there is more to be said about that in terms of how he is enabled by these institutions who simply want to be close to him because he’s the world’s richest person.

Notopoulos: So, how long does this go on? It’s a money-losing venture for him. How long does he just keep burning money hoping maybe things will turn around

Conger: I think that’s a great question. I mean, the end of X is something that we’ve thought about a lot. If this was an ordinary business, I think it would come to a conclusion more rapidly. But this is something that Elon can continue to prop up with his own financial resources for quite some time. It’s also an open question of: How much money can this business lose?

The first year after the takeover lost a really significant amount of revenue. Projections for 2024 were that the loss would slow down. We found in our reporting that it hasn’t quite slowed down as much as they had hoped. And so it’s continuing to lose even more money than what analysts thought would happen this year. And so we’re still on a journey to the bottom, and I don’t know when exactly will arrive.

So, a lot of this book is about his mercurial ways of handling his business, but obviously, people are also very interested in Elon Musk as a person. There was something really shocking to me about a baby name situation when he was having his second child with Grimes.

Conger: Elon and Grimes had picked out a name for their daughter that they wanted to use. That name ended up being used for one of Shivon Zilis’s twins with Elon. When Grimes found out about it, obviously, she was very upset. She posted some song lyrics that she had written about the name essentially being stolen from her. And then, Shivon ended up changing that child’s name, which is how the existence of Shivon’s children came to light to the public, actually, because the name change paperwork became public. [Business Insider first reported the news that Elon Musk had twins with Zilis, an executive at Neuralink.]

Mac: More of the backstory is that Grimes did not know that Shivon was having kids with Elon. Grimes was going to have her second child through a surrogate while Shivon was pregnant with these twins. The twins were born first. There was a boy and a girl, and the girl was given the name Valkyrie Alice Zilis, and Valkyrie was the name that Grimes and Elon had been discussing for their daughter.

The song that she posted the lyrics for was never made, but we were able to connect the dots and realize that it was about this really messy incident about the name. Shivon’s daughter ends up being called Azure, and Grimes’s daughter is Exa. So, the name Valkyrie is effectively erased from all of Musk’s family for all intents and purposes.

[Business Insider contacted Musk, Zilis, and Grimes, whose real name is Claire Boucher, for comment. They didn’t respond. The authors of the book also contacted all three for comment.]

Notopoulos: I have one final question for you guys. Did you find the character limit?

Conger: We really tested the boundaries of the character limit. I think we submitted a manuscript that was like 40,000 words too long.

Mac: Jesus, my computer is crashing again.