Elon Musk’s Twitter Is a Shakespearean Drama in Silicon Valley

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 ...