Elon Musk timed his $44 billion takeover of Twitter early to stop CEO Parag Agrawal and other top executives of the social media platform from collecting $200 million in stock options, according to an excerpt of an upcoming biography on Musk published in The Wall Street Journal.

“There’s a 200 million [dollar] differential in the cookie jar between closing tonight and doing it tomorrow morning,” Musk explained to Walter Isaacson, author of the biography “Elon Musk” (Simon & Schuster, 2023) coming out on Sept. 12.

Musk wanted to impart retribution on Agrawal’s team because he believed they fraudulently inflated Twitter’s monetizable users, and technology valuations began to plummet in the months before he closed on the deal on Oct. 28, 222.

“It was audacious, even ruthless,” writes acclaimed author Isaacson, who also penned biographies on Steve Jobs and Henry Kissinger, and who Musk tapped to write his own life story. “But it was justified in Musk’s mind because of his conviction that Twitter’s management had misled him.”

To pull it off, at precisely 4:12 p.m. Pacific time, right when the deal closed, Musk’s assistant delivered letters of dismissal “for cause” to Agrawal and his top three lieutenants.

Within six minutes, the four were escorted from the building, their email accounts terminated.

M&A ‘Jujitsu’

“Agrawal had his letter of resignation, citing the change of control, ready to send,” Isaacson writes of the “jujitsu maneuver.”

“But when his Twitter email was cut off, it took him a few minutes to get the document into his Gmail message. By that point, he had already been fired by Musk.”

Musk told Isaacson: “He tried to resign.”

“But we beat him,” added Musk’s “gunslinging” lawyer Alex Spiro.

Once he wrested control of Twitter, now known as X, Musk quickly became disgusted with its flagrant woke policies.

Leslie Berland, former chief marketing and people officer at Twitter, until she was fired by Musk, tells Isaacson: “We were definitely very high-empathy, very caring about inclusion and diversity; everyone needs to feel care here.”

Monthly Mental ‘Day of Rest’

“Psychological safety” was a phrase commonly used at Twitter, which had instituted a permanent work-from-home policy and a monthly mental “day of rest.”

Musk recoiled bitterly from all of this, according to the biography:
“He considered it to be the enemy of urgency, progress, orbital velocity. His preferred buzzword was ‘hardcore.’ Discomfort, he believed, was a good thing. It was a weapon against the scourge of complacency. Vacations, work-life balance and days of ‘mental rest’ were not his thing.”

The sight of the iconic Twitter blue bird logo everywhere also repulsed him.

“He is not a chirpy person,” Isaacson writes. “He relishes dark and stormy drama rather than chipper and light chattiness.”

“‘All these damn birds have to go,’” Musk ordered.

Musk was also revolted by signs on the restrooms saying, “Gender diversity is welcome here,” and Twitter T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Stay woke.”

‘Bullshit Detector’

In another surprising plot twist to the Twitter takeover, accused FTX cryptocurrency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried initially wanted to invest $5 billion in the deal.

On a half-hour call Bankman-Fried made to Musk in May, the two took an instant dislike to one another.

“My bullshit detector went off like a red alert on a Geiger counter,” Musk says in the book.

Gushing on about himself, Musk recalls of Bankman-Fried, “He was talking like he was on speed or Adderall, a mile a minute. I thought he was supposed to be asking me about the deal, but he kept telling me the things he was doing. And I was thinking, ‘Dude, calm down.’”

For his part, Bankman-Fried thought Musk was nuts.

‘For Democracy’

Musk speaks at length about how he would like to turn X into “the everything app” and how former Oracle CEO Larry Ellison agreed with Musk on the social media platform’s potentially significant role in American democracy.

Musk recalls Ellison telling him: “It’s a real-time news service, and there’s nothing really like it. If you agree it’s important for a democracy, then I thought it was worth making an investment in it.”

As for what the volatile billionaire’s next surprising move could be, the 688-page book hints that even Musk cannot be sure.

Being in “war,” Musk said he told Shivon Zilis, mother of two of his children and manager of his Neuralink brain implant company, is “part of my default settings. I guess I’ve always wanted to push my chips back on the table or play the next level of the game.”