Elon Musk told a Delaware court on Wednesday that his reorganization Twitter nearing completion and he will spend less time with the company next weekend. The team of lieutenants he had assembled to help with the transition was inching toward the door.
The group of trusted advisors that have been by Musk’s side as he ran his first few weeks as Twitter chief — including venture capitalists David Sacks, Jason Calacanis and Sriram Krishnan — has been less active. at the company for about a week, according to people familiar with the matter. None of the men spoke at a hands-on meeting at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters last week, and they reverted to their own tweets after initially enthusiastically using the platform to cheer on the young. change musk did.
In the early days of the transition, Musk’s right-hand man was everywhere: Sacks, who worked with Musk at PayPal Holdings Inc., discussed the idea with Twitter’s product team, while Calacanis, a former scout for venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, meets with advertisers and marketers. Krishnan, who previously worked at Twitter, helped Musk identify engineering and product leaders – Behnam Rezaei, who is running engineering under Musk, has worked closely with Krishnan. All three were seen in the office in the days immediately after the deal closed.
At first, they were eager to discuss their involvement, including tweeting about it and, in the case of Calacanis and Sacks, discussing it on the podcast they hosted with investors Chamath Palihapitiya and David Friedberg. Calacanis, Krishnan and Sacks have been added to Twitter’s internal Slack messaging account, according to a person familiar with the situation, along with two other VCs with a lower public role: SpaceX board member, Antonio Gracias, founder of Valor Equity Partners; and Sam Teller, a former Musk executive and now a venture partner at Valor Equity.
In doing so, they have stepped outside the traditional sphere of VCs, who often avoid prominent roles unrelated to their own startups and whose expertise lies in helping Helping early-stage, high-growth businesses. Twitter was founded 16 years ago and went public in 2013. Now it’s privately owned again due to Musk’s reluctant $44 billion acquisition.
“It is quite special for seasoned venture capitalists to spend their time with such a long-established company,” said Ayako Yasuda, a professor of finance at the University of California at Davis.
But in the weeks since the deal ended, the already messy situation has become more complicated. The launch of a new verification tool in early November was quickly reversed after it allowed the creation of countless fake accounts. Thousands of people were laid off, some asked to return to work a few days later. Musk has tried to reassure frightened advertisers and even talked about the possibility of bankruptcy.
Three men have earned the billionaire’s trust after years of spending time together and investing in each other’s efforts. Musk helped fund Mahalo, a now-defunct search engine that Calacanis launched in 2007. Sacks’s Craft Ventures has backed several of Musk’s companies, including Boring Co., Neuralink Corp. and Tesla Inc. LinkedIn; His employer, Andreessen Horowitz, provided Musk with financing to help make Twitter private.
They also hold tightly one of Musk’s personal bugs in their hearts. In the past, Twitter accounts have pretended to be both Calacanis and Sacks in an attempt to win cash and Bitcoin. And not long after Krishnan joined Twitter as product manager in 2017, he received a plea from Musk, who wants to stop people impersonating him on the site, according to an acquaintance. related to this issue. Musk has said that the bot problem on the platform is what made him want to buy back and reform Twitter. That’s also what led him to try to back out of the deal.
“People will immediately say, I’ll pay $5 or $10 a month for this to get verified,” Calacanis said late last month on his All-in podcast, referring to the possibility of engraving. bot troubleshooting. Since the implementation Blue Twitter seemingly adding to the uncertainty surrounding the user’s identity, the podcast did not return to this topic. As of Friday, the $7.99 per month service remains suspended.
Calacanis, with over 600,000 followers and 42,000 tweets, is the most Twitter user of the trio. The 51-year-old New York native is a former technology journalist who later founded Launch, an investment and startup support company.
As the Twitter takeover story unfolded, he told Musk he was ready to run the company. “Put me into the game coach!” Calacanis wrote in a message to Musk, which came to light during litigation over the deal. “Twitter CEO is my dream job.” On October 31, he met with advertisers and marketers on Twitter in New York. “Get to work,” he tweeted that morning with a picture of a coffee mug and a napkin with Twitter’s blue bird logo. The New York Times reported on November 11 that Musk sent a lieutenant to ask Calacanis to refrain from tweeting too much, after he appeared too involved in product or policy development.
Since then, his tweets about the service have become less and less frequent. On Friday, as questions swirled about Twitter’s future after several employees resigned, Calacanis added his own witty commentary: “Is this tweet going to work? Has anyone seen this?” Sacks quickly replied: “How do you make Twitter work? I don’t understand.”
Sacks and Musk go the furthest. They met at PayPal, the company Musk co-founded in 1999 and where Sacks is chief executive officer. Sacks started Craft Ventures in 2017, which, in addition to Musk’s companies, has backed a buy-now, pay-as-you-go loan, Affirm Holdings Inc. and enterprise analytics Addepar.
On November 7, he tweeted that he had “no official role” and was just trying to “be useful to those on the sidelines”.
Robert Bartlett, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said that being directly involved in the company’s reorganization “would entail some pretty obvious risks of attribution if Twitter continues to follow you.” its current path”. Of course, if Twitter regains momentum, it will become “an opportunity to get some notable bragging rights,” Bartlett said.
Krishnan, a 39-year-old immigrant to the United States born in Chennai, India, seems to have the most experience directly related to helping. He holds product roles at Microsoft Corp.’s Facebook, Meta Platform Inc. and Snapchat’s parent company Snap Inc., according to his LinkedIn profile. Colleagues from his time at Twitter say he’s a co-worker but slow to make decisions. Krishnan did not respond to a request for comment.
As for Musk’s impersonation issues in 2017, Krishnan tried to help, according to a person familiar with the matter. For a while, things get better, but scammers keep coming up with new ways to interfere.
Krishnan joins Andreessen Horowitz as a general partner in early 2021, focusing on crypto technology. He tweeted in defense of the Twitter Blue service a few days before it first launched, but since then he’s kept quiet on the subject. He recently posted from Chennai, where he and his wife Aarthi Ramamurthy hosted an episode of their live podcast.
A spokesman for Sacks declined to comment. Calacanis did not respond to an email seeking comment. A Twitter representative did not respond to a request for comment.
It remains to be seen whether Musk can stick to his plan to spend less time on Twitter, as he told the judge. He announced the relaunch of Twitter Blue Verified, scheduled for November 29, and told the rest of the employees they needed to accept “intensity” long hours or acquisitions. As for his team of advisors, all of whom say they are continuing their day-to-day business, such a decision would not be necessary.
“Elon is the CEO, he runs it, he makes the decisions, he makes the decisions,” Sacks said on his Nov. 4 podcast. “We were just helping a friend.”
The group of trusted advisors that have been by Musk’s side as he ran his first few weeks as Twitter chief — including venture capitalists David Sacks, Jason Calacanis and Sriram Krishnan — has been less active. at the company for about a week, according to people familiar with the matter. None of the men spoke at a hands-on meeting at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters last week, and they reverted to their own tweets after initially enthusiastically using the platform to cheer on the young. change musk did.
In the early days of the transition, Musk’s right-hand man was everywhere: Sacks, who worked with Musk at PayPal Holdings Inc., discussed the idea with Twitter’s product team, while Calacanis, a former scout for venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, meets with advertisers and marketers. Krishnan, who previously worked at Twitter, helped Musk identify engineering and product leaders – Behnam Rezaei, who is running engineering under Musk, has worked closely with Krishnan. All three were seen in the office in the days immediately after the deal closed.
At first, they were eager to discuss their involvement, including tweeting about it and, in the case of Calacanis and Sacks, discussing it on the podcast they hosted with investors Chamath Palihapitiya and David Friedberg. Calacanis, Krishnan and Sacks have been added to Twitter’s internal Slack messaging account, according to a person familiar with the situation, along with two other VCs with a lower public role: SpaceX board member, Antonio Gracias, founder of Valor Equity Partners; and Sam Teller, a former Musk executive and now a venture partner at Valor Equity.
In doing so, they have stepped outside the traditional sphere of VCs, who often avoid prominent roles unrelated to their own startups and whose expertise lies in helping Helping early-stage, high-growth businesses. Twitter was founded 16 years ago and went public in 2013. Now it’s privately owned again due to Musk’s reluctant $44 billion acquisition.
“It is quite special for seasoned venture capitalists to spend their time with such a long-established company,” said Ayako Yasuda, a professor of finance at the University of California at Davis.
But in the weeks since the deal ended, the already messy situation has become more complicated. The launch of a new verification tool in early November was quickly reversed after it allowed the creation of countless fake accounts. Thousands of people were laid off, some asked to return to work a few days later. Musk has tried to reassure frightened advertisers and even talked about the possibility of bankruptcy.
Three men have earned the billionaire’s trust after years of spending time together and investing in each other’s efforts. Musk helped fund Mahalo, a now-defunct search engine that Calacanis launched in 2007. Sacks’s Craft Ventures has backed several of Musk’s companies, including Boring Co., Neuralink Corp. and Tesla Inc. LinkedIn; His employer, Andreessen Horowitz, provided Musk with financing to help make Twitter private.
They also hold tightly one of Musk’s personal bugs in their hearts. In the past, Twitter accounts have pretended to be both Calacanis and Sacks in an attempt to win cash and Bitcoin. And not long after Krishnan joined Twitter as product manager in 2017, he received a plea from Musk, who wants to stop people impersonating him on the site, according to an acquaintance. related to this issue. Musk has said that the bot problem on the platform is what made him want to buy back and reform Twitter. That’s also what led him to try to back out of the deal.
“People will immediately say, I’ll pay $5 or $10 a month for this to get verified,” Calacanis said late last month on his All-in podcast, referring to the possibility of engraving. bot troubleshooting. Since the implementation Blue Twitter seemingly adding to the uncertainty surrounding the user’s identity, the podcast did not return to this topic. As of Friday, the $7.99 per month service remains suspended.
Calacanis, with over 600,000 followers and 42,000 tweets, is the most Twitter user of the trio. The 51-year-old New York native is a former technology journalist who later founded Launch, an investment and startup support company.
As the Twitter takeover story unfolded, he told Musk he was ready to run the company. “Put me into the game coach!” Calacanis wrote in a message to Musk, which came to light during litigation over the deal. “Twitter CEO is my dream job.” On October 31, he met with advertisers and marketers on Twitter in New York. “Get to work,” he tweeted that morning with a picture of a coffee mug and a napkin with Twitter’s blue bird logo. The New York Times reported on November 11 that Musk sent a lieutenant to ask Calacanis to refrain from tweeting too much, after he appeared too involved in product or policy development.
Since then, his tweets about the service have become less and less frequent. On Friday, as questions swirled about Twitter’s future after several employees resigned, Calacanis added his own witty commentary: “Is this tweet going to work? Has anyone seen this?” Sacks quickly replied: “How do you make Twitter work? I don’t understand.”
Sacks and Musk go the furthest. They met at PayPal, the company Musk co-founded in 1999 and where Sacks is chief executive officer. Sacks started Craft Ventures in 2017, which, in addition to Musk’s companies, has backed a buy-now, pay-as-you-go loan, Affirm Holdings Inc. and enterprise analytics Addepar.
On November 7, he tweeted that he had “no official role” and was just trying to “be useful to those on the sidelines”.
Robert Bartlett, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said that being directly involved in the company’s reorganization “would entail some pretty obvious risks of attribution if Twitter continues to follow you.” its current path”. Of course, if Twitter regains momentum, it will become “an opportunity to get some notable bragging rights,” Bartlett said.
Krishnan, a 39-year-old immigrant to the United States born in Chennai, India, seems to have the most experience directly related to helping. He holds product roles at Microsoft Corp.’s Facebook, Meta Platform Inc. and Snapchat’s parent company Snap Inc., according to his LinkedIn profile. Colleagues from his time at Twitter say he’s a co-worker but slow to make decisions. Krishnan did not respond to a request for comment.
As for Musk’s impersonation issues in 2017, Krishnan tried to help, according to a person familiar with the matter. For a while, things get better, but scammers keep coming up with new ways to interfere.
Krishnan joins Andreessen Horowitz as a general partner in early 2021, focusing on crypto technology. He tweeted in defense of the Twitter Blue service a few days before it first launched, but since then he’s kept quiet on the subject. He recently posted from Chennai, where he and his wife Aarthi Ramamurthy hosted an episode of their live podcast.
A spokesman for Sacks declined to comment. Calacanis did not respond to an email seeking comment. A Twitter representative did not respond to a request for comment.
It remains to be seen whether Musk can stick to his plan to spend less time on Twitter, as he told the judge. He announced the relaunch of Twitter Blue Verified, scheduled for November 29, and told the rest of the employees they needed to accept “intensity” long hours or acquisitions. As for his team of advisors, all of whom say they are continuing their day-to-day business, such a decision would not be necessary.
“Elon is the CEO, he runs it, he makes the decisions, he makes the decisions,” Sacks said on his Nov. 4 podcast. “We were just helping a friend.”
