How Much of a Courtier Is Walter Isaacson Þese Days?

I find myself annoyed as I try to peel back possible potential layers of meaning in excerpts from Isaacson's Musk biography...

One of these very strange journamalistic pieces in the Wall Street Journal this morning—one of those where:

• If you come to the piece raw and take it at face value, you read the story of a heroic industrial statesman, Elon Musk, outmaneuvering naysayers and parasites in the interest of growth the American economy.

• If you come to the piece with even semi-deep knowledge, you think you can see winky-winky: Musk’s “conviction” that Twitter was trying to defraud him vs. “his lawyers finally convinced him that he would lose the case’; “justified in Musk’s mind because of his conviction that Twitter's management had misled him”; and “audacious, even ruthless”—and you conclude that Musk is delusional and out-of-control.

Is this winky-winky really there?

Or am I reading into Isaacson something that he did not intend?

Does Isaacson really want to be known as as much of a Musk fanboy as he comes off to the casual reader?

And should I read “in Musk’s mind” as a breadcrumb trail that Isaacson really thinks and wants to convey the esoteric meaning that Musk is highly delusional?

Or does “in Musk’s mind” simply signal that Isaacson wants to say: “Look at me! Look at how much access I have!! I’m taking you inside Musk’s innermost thoughts!!!”?

Reading things written by a courtier is annoying:

Walter Isaacson: The Real Story of Musk’s Twitter Takeover: ‘[Musk] became amused and then repulsed by how Twitter's iconic blue bird logo was plastered everywhere. He is not a chirpy person; he relishes dark and stormy drama rather than chipper and light chattiness. “All these damn birds have to go,” he told a lieutenant. The closing of the Twitter deal had been scheduled for that Friday… morning. The money would transfer, the stock would be delisted, and Musk would be in control. That would permit Agrawal and his top Twitter deputies to collect severance and have their stock options vest. But Musk decided that he did not want that. On the afternoon before the scheduled close he methodically planned a jiu-jitsu maneuver: He would force a fast close that night. If his lawyers and bankers timed everything right, he could fire Agrawal and other top Twitter executives “for cause” before their stock options could vest. It was audacious, even ruthless. But it was justified in Musk's mind because of his conviction that Twitter's management had misled him. “There's a 200-million differential in the cookie jar between closing tonight and doing it tomorrow morning,” he told me late Thursday afternoon in the war room as the plan unfolded.

At 4:12 p.m. Pacific time, once they had confirmation that the money had transferred, Musk pulled the trigger to close the deal. At precisely that moment, his assistant delivered letters of dismissal to Agrawal and his top three officers. Six minutes later, Musk's top security officer came down to the second-floor conference room to say that all had been “exited” from the building and their access to email cut off. The instant email cutoff was part of the plan. Agrawal had his letter of resignation, citing the change of control, ready to send. But when his Twitter email was cut off, it took him a few minutes to get the document into a Gmail message. By that point, he had already been fired by Musk. “He tried to resign”, Musk said. “But we beat him,” his gunslinging lawyer Alex Spiro replied…

Is Walter Isaacson correct in his belief that Elon Musk and Alex Spiro are telling the truth when they claim that Delaware Chancery Court will agree that they fired former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal before his options vested? In my view, the Delaware Chancery Court takes very seriously its charge as a court of equity: If you come to Delaware Chancery it will enforce what it takes to be the meeting-of-the-minds underlying the documents that memorialize the contract. That means that the party that undertakes unexpected actions has a very heavy boulder to roll up a very high hill.

You would think that Isaacson would be wary of passing along Musk’s and Spiro’s claims so stenographically. I mean, in the excerpt he has just taken Musk’s reasons for wanting to get out of the Twitter deal at face value:

Revelations from a whistle-blower and others had inflamed [Musk’s] conviction that Twitter had been lying about the number of actual users and that his original offer of $44 billion was too much. He wanted a better deal. Throughout September, he was on the phone with his lawyers three or four times a day. Sometimes he was in an aggressive mood and insisted that they could beat the lawsuit that Twitter had filed in Delaware seeking to force him to go through with his first offer. “They are shitting bricks about the dumpster fire they’re in,” he said of the Twitter board. “I cannot believe that the judge will railroad the deal through. It would not pass muster with the public”…

Sounds like Twitter had made relevant and material misrepresentations about the status of the company, no? That would have been sufficient cause to get out of the deal, or at least get a better deal, no? But then Isaacson writes:

His lawyers finally convinced him that he would lose the case if they took it to trial. It was best just to close the deal on the original terms…

“They would lose the case” = “The judge would find that the claims of relevant and material misrepresentations were false”, no? Shouldn’t that broadcast back to the early paragraph and change Musk’s “conviction” to “false conviction” or “claimed belief”?

As I say, this kind of journamalistic beat-sweetening makes it very hard to get a handle on what Walter Isaacson is doing here.

What I get is this: That SpaceX probably still needs the fanboy demand for stock coming from Elon Musk’s celebrity, as to the other “speculative” ventures. But does Tesla really need him looking forward into the future? Is Tesla going to raise any more equity over the next decade? (I think it very much should: simply buying things with more solid stable earnings would be a good move at current valuations, much as original AOL shareholders made out like bandits.) At least here in northern California, more people apologize for buying/owning a Tesla now than boast. And certainly every other business or individual dealing with any Musk-influenced entity is adding a Musk Chaos Monkey Tax on top of its normal charges, for this is not someone you want to have as a partner or a counterparty.

But you have to already know much more than Isaacson presents to you to get that vibe out. And when you do know more, you are always tempted to read more into a piece than is really in there…