The billionaire’s takeover of the platform has been a very public disaster. The action behind the scenes was even crazier

Elon Musk‘s tumultuous takeover and rebranding of Twitter — now X — played out in very public fashion: the $44 billion offer, an attempt to walk it back, and a lawsuit that forced Musk to complete the deal were followed by massive layoffs, a spike in misinformation and extremism on the platform, botched updates, and the return of notorious bad actors whose accounts had been permanently suspended — as well as an exodus of the advertisers that account for the site’s revenue.

Through it all, Musk himself kept up the commentary on his profile, promising a new and improved app, posting cringeworthy memes, sniping at his critics, and mixing it up with his new MAGA-world friends while amplifying their false claims and conspiracy theories. But this ugly spectacle doesn’t tell the whole story. Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, a new book out today from New York Times tech reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, takes readers behind the scenes of the unusual acquisition and its messy consequences.

Here we list some of the most baffling, disturbing, laughable and just plain ridiculous moments in Conger and Mac’s chronicle of Musk’s Twitter mess.

Blowing a Fortune on a Fake Private Eye

When Musk got in trouble for smearing a British diver involved in the 2018 rescue of a Thai youth soccer team in a flooded cave as a “pedo,” he made efforts to prove the unfounded accusation true. To that end, his wealth manager and CEO of his brain implant company Neuralink, Jared Birchall, paid $52,000 to someone he thought was a private investigator to dig up dirt on the man. In fact, their sleuth was a former convict without credentials who “fed Birchall and Musk false information” about the diver. Musk managed to beat a defamation suit anyway.

Musk’s Drug Habits Almost Led to an Intervention

Musk has been open about his use of drugs like ketamine, to the alarm of leadership at Tesla and SpaceX. As Conger and Mac report, he has also been known to take LSD or ecstasy at parties, and to stay up late tweeting on Ambien, a drug that is meant to be a sleep aid. This chemical cocktail led to such erratic behavior that in early 2022, shortly before Musk would launch his bid for Twitter, close family “began discussing a possible intervention that could make him aware of his issues.” Musk was “unreceptive” to their concerns.

Potential Partnership With an Infamous Fraudster

Musk had harsh remarks for crypto kingpin Sam Bankman-Fried once his exchange, FTX, collapsed in November 2022, with $8 billion in customer funds left missing. But in March of that year, as Musk acquired a significant stake in Twitter and mulled buying it outright, Bankman-Fried was among those acquaintances encouraging the takeover so he could come on as an investor. After the merger deal was signed, Musk’s finance team pushed him to accept funding from SBF, claiming he could invest as much as $3 billion. Musk didn’t go for it and apparently pretended not to know who SBF was when he continued to text. “Sorry, who is sending this message?” he wrote to the supposed wunderkind, “despite having been connected to the FTX leader twice via message.”

Grimes Finds Out Her Next Baby’s Name Is Already Taken

We learned last year from Walter Isaacson’s biography Elon Musk about a curious familial coincidence. The billionaire’s on-and-off-again girlfriend, the musician Grimes, stayed in an Austin hospital in 2021 when a surrogate was preparing to give birth to their second child together. Unbeknownst to Grimes, Shivon Zilis, a Neuralink employee, was in the same maternity ward, pregnant with twins by in vitro fertilization — with Musk as the father. Grimes was “furious,” Character Limit notes, not just to learn that he was having children with another woman at the same time, but because Zilis named her daughter Valkyrie, a name “that she had been saving” for her own daughter, born months later. Musk and Grimes would go on to welcome a third child the following year but have since waged a custody battle over all three.

An Outgoing Employee Gives Musk His Honest Opinion

Musk isn’t too forgiving of employees who criticize him — or give him answers he doesn’t like — as many episodes in the book illustrate. In one case, he was enraged about a decline in engagement on his tweets, and abruptly fired an engineer who suggested that the public’s interest in him had fallen off since the Twitter acquisition closed several months prior. But another employee, a data scientist who had already made up his mind to resign after turning over memos on how to run Twitter more effectively, was even more blunt with Musk. He explained that he had been excited about the takeover but was disheartened when, just weeks later, Musk shared blatant partisan misinformation about an assault by a home intruder on then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul Pelosi. “It’s only really like the tenth percentile of the adult population who’d be gullible enough to fall for this,” the employee told Musk, who shot back, “Fuck you!” The departing data scientist left him with a piece of advice: “I hope you’ll declare bankruptcy and let someone else run the company.”

When Musk Learned What Twitter Users Thought of Him

Following a series of disastrous policy changes, Musk decided to hold an informal performance review for himself using one of his favorite Twitter tools: the polling feature. “Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll,” he tweeted in December 2022 before embarking on a flight from Qatar to London. When he landed, he found that “57.5 percent of the more than 17.5 million accounts that had voted were calling for him to resign.” Between this rejection and the plummeting value of Tesla stock, Musk became withdrawn and unresponsive, with those who did manage to talk to him worrying that he was “in the throes of a manic event.” Speaking with on confidante, “Musk choked up and began to doubt his ability to run the company” in light of the poll results, saying, “I’m never going to recover from this.” He would, of course, go on to hire Linda Yaccarino as a replacement CEO in the new year — though as anyone still active on the site that soon became X will tell you, it continues to reflect his worst impulses and warped worldview.

When Musk Learned What Twitter Users Thought of Him

Following a series of disastrous policy changes, Musk decided to hold an informal performance review for himself using one of his favorite Twitter tools: the polling feature. “Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll,” he tweeted in December 2022 before embarking on a flight from Qatar to London. When he landed, he found that “57.5 percent of the more than 17.5 million accounts that had voted were calling for him to resign.” Between this rejection and the plummeting value of Tesla stock, Musk became withdrawn and unresponsive, with those who did manage to talk to him worrying that he was “in the throes of a manic event.” Speaking with on confidante, “Musk choked up and began to doubt his ability to run the company” in light of the poll results, saying, “I’m never going to recover from this.” He would, of course, go on to hire Linda Yaccarino as a replacement CEO in the new year — though as anyone still active on the site that soon became X will tell you, it continues to reflect his worst impulses and warped worldview.