Flipping the Bird: Elon vs Twitter | I Am Supposed to Believe This Man is a Genius? | 2

Business Wars

Wondery

History, Business, David Brown, Management

4.6 • 13.2K Ratings

🗓️ 10 July 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Elon Musk makes the Twitter board an offer they can’t refuse — a $44 billion offer, to be exact. But this won’t be an easy marriage. No sooner does Twitter accept than Elon starts raising doubts. Publicly, Elon can’t help taking shots at Twitter and its leaders, sending their stock into a spiral. And it’s the everyday employees of Twitter who are stuck in the blast radius.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Business Wars Flipping the Bird.
0:02.6	Episodes will drop Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday for the next two weeks.
0:06.7	Wondery Plus subscribers can binge the entire season of Business Wars Flipping the Bird right now.
0:12.3	Start your free trial in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
0:15.9	Wondry. Brett Taylor's Day was already going sideways.
0:31.3	The chair of the Twitter board had just gotten off the phone with Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal.
0:37.2	Just minutes earlier, Elon Musk had sent Parag a series of panic-inducing texts.
0:43.2	Elon was rejecting a seat on the board.
0:45.7	Instead, he was going to make an offer to buy the company outright and take it private.
0:52.0	Not even two weeks earlier, Brett and Parag had sat down with Elon for dinner,
0:56.9	and it seemed like everything was going smoothly.
0:59.8	Now, Brett needed to talk to Elon.
1:03.5	He sent off a text.
1:05.9	Parag just called me and mentioned your text conversation.
1:09.3	Can you talk?
1:11.0	Elon's reply did not leave much room for discussion.
1:15.6	Please expect to take private offer.
1:18.2	I saw the text thread. Do you have five minutes so I can understand the context?
1:23.9	Fixing Twitter by chatting with Parag won't work.
1:27.8	Drastic action is needed.
1:30.2	This is Jack's opinion, too.
1:33.1	Can you take ten minutes to talk this through with me?
	...

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