Elon Musk ruthlessly fired Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. He's the latest in a long line of Silicon Valley giants to face Musk's wrath, from Jeff Bezos to Mark Zuckerberg.
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- Elon Musk fired Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal on his first day of owning the company.
- Musk is known for his fiery temper and cutthroat tweets and has clashed with many of tech's biggest players.
- He's targeted people including Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates.
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Musk and Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal met for a meal in March.
"Great dinner :)," Musk said in a text message after.
"Memorable for multiple reasons," Agrawal texted back. "Really enjoyed it."
But eight months later, Musk took ownership of Twitter and one of his first moves was firing Agrawal and a number of other top execs.
Their relationship hadn't taken long to sour.
Musk had been set to join Twitter's board in the spring after becoming the company's biggest shareholder.
But he tweeted on April 9 that some of Twitter's most-followed accounts "tweet rarely and post very little content," asking: "Is Twitter dying?"
Agrawal understandably didn't like the tweet and told Musk that "it's not helping me make Twitter better in the current context."
"What did you get done this week?" Musk shortly after. "I'm not joining the board. This is a waste of time. Will make an offer to take Twitter private."
Musk then made an offer to buy Twitter for $54.20 a share, and said that if the deal didn't go through, "given that I don't have confidence in management nor do I believe I can drive the necessary change in the public market, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder." Without the changes Musk sought, Twitter was "simply not a good investment," he wrote.
Twitter agreed to the deal on April 25.
But just weeks later, Musk appeared to be hesitant about the deal, tweeting that he'd put it "on hold" until Twitter gave him more data related to the number of bots on the platform.
When Agrawal posted a thread on Twitter explaining why Musk's plan to survey the number of bots on the platform was flawed, Musk responded with a poop emoji.
In July, Musk sent a letter to Twitter terminating the deal, claiming that the social-media giant had withheld or distorted data on the number of bot accounts on the platform.
Within days of Musk terminating the deal, Twitter sued him to force him to complete the deal, accusing him of "refusing to honor his obligations."
Musk countersued later in July, alleging that the company intentionally miscounted the number of spam accounts as part of what he called "its scheme to mislead investors about the company's prospects."
After months of Musk trying to abandon the deal, his lawyers sent Twitter a letter renewing the original offer on October 4.
Musk and Twitter came close to agreeing a deal at a roughly 8% discount for the tech mogul, but the talks fell through after the two sides clashed, with Musk's attorney saying that Twitter's executives and board wanted "all kinds of things" in the renegotiated deal that the billionaire refused to accept.
The deal final went through on the evening of October 27, just hours before the deadline given to Musk by a judge.
One of the tech mogul's first moves was to fire Agrawal. The same evening, Musk also ousted CFO Ned Segal, chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde, and general counsel Sean Edgett, sources told Insider.
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Musk has bashed Facebook for years, telling his followers to delete Mark Zuckerberg's social media site and even suggesting it was partly to blame for the US Capitol insurrection.
One of Musk and Zuckerberg's first known clashes was in September 2016, when a SpaceX rocket that was meant to take a Facebook satellite into space exploded during testing at a launch site in Florida. This destroyed the satellite, set to be Facebook's first to go into orbit.
Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook at the time that he was "deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX's launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else" across Africa.
"The problem isn't the money; it's that now it may take longer to connect people," he added.
Two years later, Musk said it was "my fault for being an idiot" and said SpaceX gave Facebook a free launch to make up for it.
In 2017, Zuckerberg, a huge proponent of AI said that he had "pretty strong opinions" on Musk's anxieties around the topic. He said that "people who are naysayers and try to drum up these doomsday scenarios" were "really negative, and in some ways, I actually think it's pretty irresponsible."
Musk responded on Twitter, calling Zuckerberg's knowledge of AI "limited."
Following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Musk deleted the Facebook pages of Tesla and SpaceX in 2018.
"It's not a political statement and I didn't do this because someone dared me to do it," Musk tweeted. "Just don't like Facebook. Gives me the willies."
Musk has also urged his own followers to delete their Facebook accounts, calling the platform "lame" and saying that "Facebook sucks."
On January 6, 2021, Musk issued perhaps his most damning criticism of Facebook yet.
After a mob of President Donald Trump's supporters stormed the US Capitol, Musk tweeted a meme linking the riots to Facebook.
—Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 7, 2021
While avoiding Facebook, Musk has instead flocked to rival social-media site Twitter, where he has more than 111 million followers, making him one of its most-followed users.
Now that he's bought the platform, he will finally be in direct competition with Zuckerberg.
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Musk and Jeff Bezos, who both run rocket companies, have been rivals for years – and more recently Musk has booted the Amazon founder off top spot as the world's richest person.
Five years after launching Amazon, Bezos created Blue Origin in 2000.
But Musk was hot on his heels, launching SpaceX in 2002.
Over the years, the two have clashed over lawsuits, patents, and rocket launches.
In 2013, Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance filed a formal protest after SpaceX tried to get exclusive use of a NASA launchpad.
Musk said the move was a "phony blocking tactic" and told Space News that Blue Origin had "not yet succeeded in creating a reliable suborbital spacecraft, despite spending over 10 years in development." NASA ultimately sided with SpaceX.
The next year, Blue Origin was granted a patent for drone ships, which are used to land rocket boosters. SpaceX petitioned to invalidate the patent, which would have meant that SpaceX would have to pay to use the technology. A judge sided with SpaceX and Blue Origin withdrew most of the patent's claims.
In 2015, Bezos uploaded a video to Twitter of a reusable rocket landing, calling it "the rarest of bears." In a scathing response, Musk said that a SpaceX rocket had done six suborbital flights three years prior and was "still around."
Musk had also trolled Bezos for allegedly copying some of his ideas, such as when Amazon announced plans to launch more than 3,000 internet satellites and when it acquired self-driving-car startup Zoox. Musk's electric car company, Tesla, is also working on self-driving technology, though its vehicles are not yet fully autonomous.
Bezos, for his part, has poked fun at Musk's ambitions of populating Mars. People who want to live on the red planet should "go live on the top of Mount Everest for a year first and see if you like it, because it's a garden paradise compared to Mars," he said at a lecture in early 2019.
In an interview with The New York Times in 2020, Musk complimented his rival but appeared to imply that Bezos was too old to make progress on space travel, even though there's only a seven-year age gap between the two tech moguls.
Speaking about Blue Origin, Musk said that "the rate of progress is too slow and the amount of years he has left is not enough, but I'm still glad he's doing what he's doing with Blue Origin."
In April 2021, NASA named SpaceX the sole recipient of a $2.9 billion contract to make lunar landers for humans to return to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. Blue Origin filed a 50-page protest, calling the decision "flawed," and later filed a lawsuit against NASA, but the court ultimately ruled against Blue Origin.
Musk later quipped on Twitter that Bezos had stepped down as Amazon CEO in July 2021 "to pursue a full-time job filing lawsuits against SpaceX."
Since the start of 2021, Bezos and Musk have been sparring to claim the top spot as the world's richest person. Bezos had held the title since late 2017, but Musk overtook him for the first time in January 2021. The two have swapped places a few times, but Musk is now firmly in the top spot, with a fortune of around $195 billion, per estimates by Bloomberg.
Bezos sits in fourth place with around $112 billion, behind LVMH's Bernard Arnault and the Adani Group's Gautam Adani.
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Bill Gates and Musk have argued over electric cars, the coronavirus, and climate change.
Musk was a vocal opponent of lockdown measures throughout the pandemic, even filing a lawsuit against Alameda County, California, for making Tesla temporarily stop manufacturing at its Fremont factory.
He also expressed his hesitancy to get vaccinated, promoted the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment, and suggested that data on coronavirus deaths was distorted.
Gates, in contrast, pivoted his focus during the pandemic to pump money into coronavirus research and try curb the spread of misinformation.
"Elon's positioning is to maintain a high level of outrageous comments," Gates told CNBC in July 2020. "He's not much involved in vaccines ... I hope that he doesn't confuse areas he's not involved in too much."
Shortly after, Musk jokingly tweeted: "The rumor that Bill Gates & I are lovers is completely untrue." In an interview with The New York Times, he called Gates a "knucklehead."
Gates told a YouTuber in February 2020 that he had recently bought his first electric car, a Porsche Taycan. Musk responded to a tweet about the interview, saying his conversations with Gates had been "underwhelming." In another tweet later that year, Musk tweeted that Gates had "no clue" about electric trucks after the Microsoft cofounder questioned whether it was practical to turn them fully electric.
Gates also doesn't appear fully supportive of the space missions that tech moguls including Musk and Bezos are pumping billions into.
"I'm not a Mars person ... I don't think rockets are the solution. But maybe I'm missing something there," he said. He added that he wasn't going to fork out for a ticket on a space flight "because my foundation can buy measles vaccines and save a life for $1,000."
Gates also warned people not to be sucked in by Musk's promotion of Bitcoin, advising people who "have less money than Elon" to be careful when investing in the cryptocurrency.
Musk also posted a tweet – which he has since deleted – appearing to mock Gates' weight in a argument over Gates allegedly shorting Tesla stock.
"There's no need for him to be nice to me," Gates told The BBC in May.
But Gates has also praised Musk.
In a podcast interview with The New York Times' Kara Swisher in 2021, Gates said that what Musk has accomplished with Tesla is "one of the greatest contributions to climate change anyone's ever made."
"Underestimating Elon is not a good idea," he said.
He also told YouTuber Hugo Décrypte: "I like him. I think he does great work. I don't know him very well."
"Bill is an opinionated guy and so is Elon," Merlin Eller, a former Microsoft employee and coauthor of "Barbarians Led By Bill Gates," told The New York Post, adding that their argument "doesn't surprise me."
"But I don't think Bill particularly likes it," Eller added.
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Tim Cook swore at Musk after he asked to be the CEO of Apple, according to a book.
In roughly 2016, Musk and Apple CEO Tim Cook had a phone call about Apple potentially acquiring Tesla, according to Tim Higgins' 2021 book "Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century."
Higgins wrote that Musk would only agree to the deal if Cook let him become CEO of Apple, citing people familiar with Musk's version of events.
"Fuck you," Cook replied and hung up, per the book.
"It's hard to imagine Musk was serious about wanting to be CEO of Apple," Higgins added, noting that it was hard to tell whether Musk's remarks about the phone call were accurate.
Musk has denied the book's claims.
"Cook & I have never spoken or written to each other ever. There was a point where I requested to meet with Cook to talk about Apple buying Tesla," Musk tweeted in response to the report.
"There were no conditions of acquisition proposed whatsoever. He refused to meet."
Mary Altaffer/AP
Musk isn't afraid to argue with anyone.
In 2018, Musk called a British diver who participated in the rescue of 13 people from a flooded cave system in Thailand a "pedo" and a "child rapist," leading to a defamation lawsuit.
He has also clashed with short-seller David Einhorn, the president of Greenlight Capital, who is usually scathing in his notes about Tesla. Musk sent Einhorn a box of "short shorts" in the post.
Musk has often sparred with politicians and lawmakers, including with Senator Elizabeth Warren over taxes and with officials from Alameda County over lockdown measures.
Musk has had a rocky relationship with former president Donald Trump, too.
Trump said Musk had told him that he'd voted for him, but Musk went on to say at a tech conference in May that he had never voted Republican. Trump called the tech mogul a "bullshit artist."
Though Musk has hinted that Trump could return to Twitter, including saying that his ban from the platform following the January 6 Capitol siege was "foolish to the extreme," Musk wants Trump to exit politics.
"I don't hate the man, but it's time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset," he said in July.
Virgin
Some tech giants appear to have never clashed with Musk, and are even seemingly friends with the mogul.
Shortly after Musk announced he planned to buy Twitter, he had a phone call with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, though it's not clear what they discussed. Musk spoke to former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, and billionaire Larry Ellison about his Twitter plans.
Musk also appears to have a close relationship with Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, whom he visited at his home ahead of Virgin Galactic's first flight with a full crew, which Branson was on board, in July 2021.
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