What are tech billionaires’ text messages like? Just as petty as ours, it turns out
How do tech billionaires talk when they think nobody’s listening? Usually, the only people who know are the National Security Agency and waiters at Manresa, Silicon Valley’s sole three-star Michelin restaurant. But now, courtesy of the court of chancery in the state of Delaware, we lesser mortals have had an opportunity to tune in to recent conversations between Elon Musk (of Tesla, SpaceX and PayPal fame) and some of his buddies.
How come? Well, the court is the arena in which a legal battle is currently being fought between Twitter and Musk. You will recall that in April the Tesla boss offered to buy Twitter outright for $54.20 a share, valuing the company at $43.4bn, which seemed, er, generous at the time. Shortly afterwards, shares in both Twitter and Tesla (the main source of Musk’s fortune) tanked, leading to a bad attack of buyer’s remorse and a search for a way of backing out of the deal. Twitter was not amused by this and sued in the Delaware court, which is the prime boxing ring for these contests because more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies are registered there. The two sides then assembled small armies of high-priced lawyers (I see that Musk’s regiment, Messrs Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, has nearly 300 lawyers, none of whom comes cheap) and battle commenced.
Most of the documents relevant to the case come varnished with three coats of prime legal verbiage, but one set turned out to be delightfully clear: the text messages exchanged between Musk and his buddies that had to be disclosed during the “discovery” process of the hearing. They come in exhibits H and J of his lawyers’ 151-page submission as 35 pages of messages, averaging 21 texts per page. That’s roughly 735 instances of pure,
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