The billionaireâs text messages have been published, revealing the relationship breakdown between himself and Parag Agrawal
Text messages Elon Musk sent to the former Twitter CEO before taking over have revealed the moment their relationship broke down.
The texts have been published in a court filing and it details how in April 2022, the richest man on the planet was invited onto the board of Twitter by its former boss, Parag Agrawal. The Tesla owner subsequently began asking users what they thought of the social media platform by simply tweeting from his account.
This is how it all went down.
On March 27 of that year, Agrawal â who like Musk is also a billionaire â reaches out to the SpaceX founder, asking for a chat and they do so that night.
Four days later they meet alongside Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of the platform, and a few days later it is announced that Musk is on the board of execs at Twitter.
Joe Rogan then texts Musk: âAre you going to liberate Twitter from the censorship happy mob?â
He replies: âI will provide advice, which they may or may not choose to follow.â
On April 7, Musk textâs Parag: âI have a ton of ideas, but Imk if Iâm pushing too hard. I just want Twitter to be maximum amazing.â
âI want to hear all the ideas â and lâll tell you which ones iâll make progress on vs. not. And why,â the former CEO replies.

Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
âAnd in this phase â just good to spend as much time with you. + have my Product and Eng team talk to you to ingest information on both sides.â
The pair then begin to talk about their coding credentials before Musk texts Agrawal: âFrankly, I hate doing mgmt stuff. I kinda donât think anyone should be the boss of anyone. But I love helping solve technical/product design problems.â
âYou got it!â replies Agrawal, but I donât think he got the message.
Musk then proceeds to tweet a list of the top 10 most followed accounts, writing: âMost of these âtopâ accounts tweet rarely and post very little content.
âIs Twitter dying?â
Annoyed that one of the most powerful men in the world questions his platform, Agrawal texts him a stern message: âYou are free to tweet âis Twitter dying?â or anything else about Twitter â but itâs my responsibility to tell you that itâs not helping me make Twitter better in the current context.
âNext time we speak, lâd like to have you provide your perspective on the level of internal distraction right now and how it [is] hurting our ability to do work.

Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion back in October 2022 (Chesnot/Getty Images)
âI hope the AMA will help people get to know you, to understand why you believe in Twitter, and to trust you â and lâd like the company to get to a place where we are more resilient and donât get distracted, but we arenât there right now.â
This enraged Musk, who snapped back: âWhat did you get done this week?
âIâm not joining the board. This is a waste of time.
âWill make an offer to take Twitter private.â
He then proceeded to buy Twitter out for a staggering $44 billion and laid off Agrawal.
Taking to social media to react, one user wrote: âElon is savage.â
While another added: ââWhat did you get done this week?â is so hard.â
Yeah, apparently the richest man on the planet doesnât like being told what he can or canât say.