It was Day 5 of Elon Musk’s riveting, rambunctious takeover of Twitter Inc. The owner and self-proclaimed Chief Twit had spent much of the last weekend in October at his new company’s San Francisco headquarters among people desperate to please him: employees angling to keep their jobs amid steep layoffs and personal advisers helping him with the turnaround. He arrived in New York at 2 a.m. that Monday with plans to visit Twitter’s offices in Chelsea and spend the day courting advertisers, the group most important to the company’s survival.
In the early afternoon, a team from Horizon Media Inc. stopped by. Horizon is one of the largest ad agencies in the world, chaperone to brands such as Capital One and Burger King. Also in attendance were two ad execs from Twitter, as well as two major fans of Musk’s: investor and podcaster Jason Calacanis and, inexplicably, his mother, Maye Musk. Horizon Chief Executive Officer Bill Koenigsberg sat at the head of the table with a colleague. “Some of my clients knew that I was going to meet you,” Koenigsberg said, “and they all asked, ‘Is he going to get Donald Trump back on the platform?’ ”
Musk had already proclaimed publicly that he didn’t believe in permanent Twitter bans. So here was a moment for a careful response—perhaps an explanation of how the company planned to guard against the former president’s predilection for misinformation and incitements of violence upon his return. Instead, Musk replied that it was the question he was getting from everyone, too, and, sitting there, composed a tweet on his iPhone: “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 paused, surveyed the room and asked everyone whether he should post it. One of the Twitter ad execs strenuously objected. Musk laughed and posted the tweet anyway—and fired the dissenter later that week.
