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Elon Musk’s Text Messages Explain Everything

As the year comes to a close, I cannot stop thinking about … a court document. Plaintiffs in Twitter, Inc.
v. Elon R. Musk et al. filed Exhibit H just before sunrise on September 29 in Delaware’s Court of
Chancery. If you’ve seen excerpts, you probably know it by its street name: Elon Musk’s texts.

Exhibit H is remarkable insomuch as it is a spreadsheet containing the private messages between the
(then) richest man in the world and his friends, associates, and hangers-on while they discuss buying
one of the world’s most influential communications platforms—just for kicks. Leafing through Exhibit H,
you will feel like you should never have seen these communications, and yet there they are, on display
for the hordes of the internet, courtesy of the legal system.

I wrote about the texts back in September, arguing that they demonstrated “just how unimpressive,
unimaginative, and sycophantic the powerful men in Musk’s contacts appear to be.” I still believe that.
But now, armed with three months of hindsight, I’ve begun to think of Exhibit H as a skeleton key for the
final, halcyon days of the tech boom—unlocking an understanding of the cultural brain worms and low-
interest-rate hubris that defined the industry in 2022.

What we see in Exhibit H is only a tiny snapshot of a very important inbox, but it’s enough to make this
one of the most revealing documents in a year that’s been absolutely overflowing with tech disclosures
—from Peiter Zatko’s leaks, to FTX’s balance sheet, to the “Twitter Files” championed by Musk himself.

Beyond the obvious tabloid intrigue, what’s most striking is how Musk’s texts shed light on two of
2022’s biggest tech meltdowns. If you came out of a lengthy coma in mid-December, puzzled by
headlines about collapsing crypto exchanges and once-beloved entrepreneurs behaving like villains, you
could read a copy of Exhibit H and understand everything with surprising clarity.

The texts are, of course, a guide to the events that ultimately led Musk to purchase Twitter—a decision
that has tanked his net worth, saddled his new asset with debt, and led to the quick erosion of his
reputation as a savvy businessman. But also lurking in Musk’s inbox is Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder
of the now-collapsed crypto exchange FTX, who was arrested in the Bahamas when federal prosecutors
charged him with defrauding investors and customers.