Musk Tweet on Pausing Twitter Deal Was Frustration, Adviser Says

Elon Musk was frustrated with Twitter Inc. when he tweeted in 2022 that his offer to buy the company was “temporarily on hold,” but his team continued to work behind the scenes to make it work, his main financial adviser testified.

Jared Birchall, who was hired by Musk a decade ago to run his family office, was called to the witness stand Tuesday in the second day of a trial over claims by a group of investors that the multibillionaire waffled on the Twitter purchase to get a better deal for himself.

A central allegation in the lawsuit is that the tweet on May 13, 2022, wasn’t true and was intended to drive down the company’s stock price.

“Work never stopped on the deal,” Birchall told jurors in San Francisco federal court. He noted that the Musk team held Twitter due-diligence meetings the same day as the serial entrepreneur fired off the controversial social media post.

“We continued full steam ahead,” Birchall said. “Nothing changed with our approach to accumulating investors, speaking with banks.”

The longtime lieutenant to the world’s richest person also said Musk never said or hinted that he wanted to drive down the Twitter deal price.

The trial is focused over the chaotic six-month period in 2022 during which Musk oscillated between a hostile takeover of Twitter, an attempted withdrawal of his offer, and ultimately, consummation of the deal after the company sued him to follow through. He ended up paying $44 billion at the $54.20 share price he had agreed to six months earlier. He later renamed the platform X.

Read More: Musk Is on Trial Over His Tweets Ahead of Twitter Purchase

Musk’s lawyers contend that his early-morning tweet was not part of a scheme to defraud stockholders, but was instead his way of venting frustration. He also tweeted the same morning that he was committed to the deal.

But he was irritated that despite asking Twitter to differentiate how much of its user traffic was real — and how much was spam, driven by bots — company executives were not giving him the information he sought, said Birchall.

“I understood his thinking behind” the tweet, Birchall testified. “He’d made several requests for data about the bots and he hadn’t gotten it” from Twitter’s top managers, he said.

Besides running Musk’s family office, Excession LLC, Birchall also serves as chief executive officer of Musk’s Neuralink Corp. focused on human-brain implants.

Birchall said he was familiar with Musk’s approach on the tweets because he was deeply involved in lining up the deal’s financing. He said Musk sold more than $9 billion worth of stock in his electric-car company Tesla Inc. to help fund the Twitter buyout, which also included billions of dollars in loans.

During questioning by Musk’s lawyers, Birchall dryly recounted what it’s been like to work for the billionaire over the last decade.

“Elon has high expectations for the people who work for him,” the adviser said. He recalled that Musk fired another adviser, Robert Swan, after the former Intel Corp. CEO presented an unfavorable analysis of the Twitter deal. Swan is now a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, the storied venture-capital firm.

The jury also heard from Twitter’s former top in-house lawyer, Vijaya Gadde, about her firing. Gadde testified that as the deal’s closing date approached, Musk told then-CEO Parag Agrawal to get rid of her. After he acquired the company, Musk also laid off thousands of Twitter employees.

“My CEO told me that Mr. Musk told him to terminate me immediately,” Gadde told jurors. “He didn’t give a reason.”

Agrawal is slated to testify later in the trial about the tumultuous deal negotiations.

The case is Pampena v. Musk, 3:22-cv-05937, US District Court for the Northern District of California (San Francisco).

To contact the reporters on this story:
Jef Feeley in Wilmington, Delaware at jfeeley@bloomberg.net;
Isaiah Poritz in San Francisco at iporitz@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Sara Forden at sforden@bloomberg.net;
Stephanie Gleason at saerts1@bloomberg.net

Peter Blumberg

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