Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - The Billionaire Brain: Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey & the Battle for Twitter with Kurt Wagner

Episode Date: March 20, 2024

In this episode, Anthony talks with award-winning Bloomberg journalist, Kurt Wagner about his new book Battle for the Bird. Kurt tells the gripping tale of the high stakes battle to control Twitter. From the rise of @RealDonaldTrump that showcased Twitter’s power, to the true characteristics of the story’s two main characters: Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey. So, who was the real villain? Should we still bet on Elon Musk and his plan to restore free speech? And what about all of Jack Dorsey’s so-called promises… Kurt has the answers for us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open book where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word from authors and historians to figures and entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe, wherever you get your podcast, and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can

roll with the punches, so let me know. Anyways, let's get to it. Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, two names we all know that make us think of one thing, Twitter, or should I say X? The completion of Musk's $44 billion acquisition of Twitter was one of the pinnical business moments of 2022. From the rise and fall of at real Donald Trump to the messy Takeover, Kurt Wagner gets into all of it with us on today's show. And joining us now on Open Book is Kurt Wagner, award-winning business and technology journalists for Bloomberg. But what a book.

Okay, this book is called Battle for the Bird, great title, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and the $44 billion fight for Twitter Soul. Well, I don't really know where to start with this, actually, because I read the book. I felt like it was a little bit of a thriller and a page turner. you're probably too young, Kurt, to remember barbarians at the gate. Do you remember barbarians at the gate? Fun story. I'm reading it as we speak. All right. Okay. So there you go. Okay. So for viewers and listeners that are younger than me demographically, that's a story from 1988, 88, 89 about the takeover of RJR Reynolds, which was an old school tobacco and Nabisco, Biscuit Company. And what a battle of egos.

and here we are 35 years later and we're reading about what I would call a web sort of Barbarians in the Gate. Do I have that right? I mean, that's how I felt. That's how I felt about your book. That's part of why I'm reading it, actually. Someone else made a similar comparison and I had read bits and pieces of Barbarians at the Gate, but it's a long book. It's like 500 pages and I never made it through, I have to admit. But I was like, well, if someone's going to be kind enough to sort of liken my book to that one, I really need to give this another chance. And so I picked it back up. I'm a little more than halfway through it right now. But I think you're right. Like there's a lot of similarities in the sense that it's, it's, you know, it's a leveraged buyout. This ultimately is what Elon did, a leveraged buyout of Twitter. And, you know, a ton of personalities involved, competing, you know, opinions about where this could or should go. And so I do see, like, you know, why the comparison gets tossed out, which is, which is flattering. I will say it's a great book. Well, I'm glad someone else felt the same way. I love the book. That book went on to become an HBO series. I predict you're going to get picked up. I know you did this in the middle. of the writer's strike, but my guess is the story is just too good, Kurt. And I also often tell my authors,

I don't like giving away too much of these books because I want people to go out and buy your book. The purpose of my podcast is to introduce an author, get people excited about reading. And I feel you did so much homework and research on this book, we owe it to you to read it. But let's start with you for a second. What made you pick this? It's a crazy struggle when you get down to it. You had to put it all together. What made you decide to write the book first and then we'll get into a little bit of it? Well, I wanted to write a book about Twitter before Elon came into the picture, to be honest with you. I'd been covering Twitter for almost a decade at this point and always sort of thought, well, if I was going to go the book route, Twitter would be a logical subject for me. I've just

covered the company. And the story is actually quite interesting and captivating even before Elon showed up. And so I had set my sights on writing this sort of Jack Dorsey Twitter book. And as I was out pitching it to publishers, like literally the same week I was out pitching this book idea to publishers, Elon showed up as the largest shareholder of Twitter. And I continually kept sort of telling myself, well, I'll just like add a chapter to the end or, you know, okay, now I'll add two chapters to the end. And eventually I got around to the idea that it was like, okay, this is a totally different story than I had originally set out to sell.

And you'll probably see in the book, there's really a two, it's two parts. Like the first half is really the pre-Elon years and a lot of things that happened that set up the opportunity for him to show up and buy this company. And then the second part of the book is really when Elon arrives on the scene. So, you know, I mean, I'm going to say something to you and I want you to react to it. Okay. So I was at Goldman Sachs for seven years. And, you know, I believed that I was going to start my own business. I remember telling my dad, it was a blue collar worker. I said, you know, dad, I'm going to start a business. It's going to be great. There's going to be no politics. There's too much politics at Goldman Sachs. And then Kurt, the minute I had like

six employees, I had politics. And then I said, oh, you know, and we're going to be doing things differently at our firm. And then the minute things got hectic, I went right to the Goldman Sachs playbook and compliance book and replicated it. And I find fascinating about your book is whatever you think of Dorsey and his team, they put in some protocols and they put in some ways of doing business and some guardrails. Elon is a genius. There's no question about that.

He thinks differently than all of us. He's arguably one of the richest people in the world. but do we sometimes get our ego in play to the extent where we think we know better than people who actually may be more experienced than we are in a field that we're looking at? Let's say you. I would agree. And I think in Elon's case, you know, the issue was actually that he tried to take a playbook that had worked for him at Tesla and SpaceX and sort of force it on Twitter,

even though the problems at Twitter are just so different. They require a totally different type of thinking and skill set, right? They're more of a like soft skill problems, communication, human interaction, speech, free speech, those kinds of things. And Elon approached it like an engineer. And he was like, you know, we're just asleep at the office and we're going to run as fast as humanly possible and get these things shipped as fast as possible. And I just don't think that, you know, the playbook that worked to get the Tesla Model 3 out

the door, for example, is the same playbook you can use at a company like Twitter. And, you know, we saw that, in my opinion, be a major. problem for him in those first couple months after the takeover. Okay. So we have an engineer in Elon Musk. We have this sort of maverick bick-pointer and Jack Dorsey. They seem similar to me. Is that a problem for them in terms of the way they clash with each other? Or what am I missing? What is different and similar about Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey and describe their relationship to our viewers and listeners? How's that? Sure. I'll start actually with the differences. because I think they're more stark, which is just the management style of these two guys, right?

So Jack Dorsey, as we learn in the book, he's introverted. He doesn't like making decisions. His management style is essentially to be hands off and let the people who work for him run the show while he sort of serves as this advisor, you know, at the top, more of like a big thinker type guy. And he never, I never got the sense that he really wanted to be the CEO of publicly traded companies. It's sort of like something he almost fell into, which is bizarre because he had two of those jobs. at the same time. And then you look at Elon, right? And he's someone who moves incredibly quickly. He's very decisive, you know, not always the right decision, but he makes a decision and he goes for it.

And, you know, he is the ultimate decision maker, like the people who work for him are implementing his vision and not the other way around. So in terms of differences, that's where I feel like management style is very different. Now, where they're similar, they're both founders, they're both technologists. They're both incredibly rich, right? So they have this freedom to think about things in a way, much longer term, much bigger picture than most of us do because we just don't have the financial freedom to sit around and pontificate, you know, where's Bitcoin going to be in 20 years because you're trying to pay rent or whatever it may be, right? So I think where they sort of aligned was that they had this big sort of grand idea of what Twitter could be. And I think there were some similarities

in their visions for Twitter, even if the way that they chose to execute it, you know, were very different. And so this was a relationship. I spent a lot of time in the book, as you know, like focused on this relationship because I feel like without Jack Dorsey sort of encouraging Elon to buy Twitter and sort of welcoming him to come in and buy Twitter, I don't know if a deal actually gets done. And so that's why I spent so much time talking about those two guys. Yeah. I mean, listen, there are two brilliant guys. My next follow-up question there, I'm going to go in another direction.

You know, I just turned 60 this year. Somebody asked me, what's my observation? I sort of feel like people that have earned this amount of money, something happens to their brain. It's almost like the old drug commercial. When I was a kid, they used to crack an egg and say, this is your brain. And then they would put the egg in a frying pan and say, this is your brain on drugs. I feel that. I feel that money does that to people.

I feel like it smokes their brain a little bit where they think that they're superior or they think that they're smart. I'm watching it with some billionaires in sports. They believe that they know more than the baseball or football or hockey operators. Am I missing something? or do sometimes rich people get in the way of themselves as a result of the ego of being rich? It's funny you say that because a colleague of mine just talked to me about the book last week in New York and literally she called a billionaire brain. She was like, what is this billionaire brain thing that happens to people?

And I think you're totally right. And I think it's two things. Well, it might be more than that, but I've identified, I think, like two main things. The first is you're reluctant to surround yourself with anybody because you kind of lose trust with most people, right? They're either trying to get something from you or they're trying to manipulate you or whatever. So I feel like people isolate themselves a little bit more when they get to that point because they just, they don't trust many people.

There's no question. You're fearful that people are cloning on to you for money or digging gold on you. Exactly. I totally. I understand that. So then you have a smaller circle and people want to be in that small circle. So then the other thing that happens is they don't actually give you any real feedback, right? They just agree with everything you say or if they do give you.

feedback. They do it in a very gentle way that might not even change your opinion, right? So we saw this with Elon in particular when he was taking over Twitter. He had this sort of small group of advisors he brought with him, personal friends, you know, relationships from other companies. And everything that I heard was essentially he'd sort of have a bad idea. And they'd be like, yes, that's the best idea ever. Go forward. Go do that. You should totally do it. Instead of someone being like, well, wait a minute, let's like think this thing through. Like this might not actually be a good idea. But when, you know, you have a small group of people and those people just can to encourage every idea that pops into your head, I think it's, you know, creates that billionaire

brain thing because you're no longer getting the feedback you probably need. I mean, it's just fascinating, right? Billionaire brain, you know, it's interesting because, and by the way, all of us, billionaires are not billionaires. We can get our egos into our decision making. I certainly did that when I joined the White House. I had this vision of me working for the president and blah, blah, and of course, it didn't work out for me.

But I do feel that I put too much of my ego into the decision making. and it was very costly to me. So that's a cautionary tale for people that I get out of your book. Let's go to the following equation. Jack Dorsey's indecisiveness plus Elon Musk's impulsiveness equals what.

Yeah. Well, the indecisiveness was a major problem for years because Twitter simply didn't innovate fast enough. As a result, it didn't grow fast enough and its business lagged behind. So this indecisiveness, Decisiveness is one of the key reasons that Twitter was in a position to be acquired, right? It had not achieved its potential because, in my opinion, Jack Dorsey as the leader, was not making these affirmative decisive decisions.

Flip that on its head with Elon and the impulsiveness. And you see the destruction of some of the stuff that was actually, in my opinion, working at Twitter. So even though Twitter was a small business, they had a pretty stable, solid brand advertising business, right? A lot of big brands wanted to be on Twitter because it's where people talked about the Super Bowl and the World Cup and the Oscars and all of these like things that are happening in real time. It was a great compliment to watching on television. But Elon Musk's, I guess, ability or inability to filter himself ultimately has scared off a lot of those advertisers because he goes on Twitter and just tweets whatever pops into his head. And there's a lot of people, marketers who don't want to be associated with that. Right.

So where Jack's slowness kind of set Twitter up, you know, struggled business-wise, I think Elon's sort of not reading the room and understanding that his own impulsive behavior has a negative effect on the company is destroying the business that they have right now. And so obviously two different approaches, but two very similar outcomes, which is Twitter is underachieving as a business in both cases. Okay. So this is essential thought of mine. Free speech, you're for free speech? I'm assuming you are you a journalist. Of course, yeah. I'm for free speech. But help me, okay, because I had to take con law in school and there's a lot of different types of speech. Some of it's protected. Some of it isn't. Obviously, hate speech wouldn't be. I can't put you in harm's way.

The proverbial young fire in the theater. What does Elon Musk get right? And what does he get wrong about free speech on his new business? Yeah. Formerly known as Twitter. I think what he gets right is probably that Twitter, old Twitter 1.0, had probably over indexed on its rules, right? Quite frankly, I think we have the benefit of hindsight now, but you look at what happened in 2020 with COVID and the election and the reaction to the election

from then President Trump. And we saw Twitter like really, really get a lot more strict on its rules. And I think like in the moment, given the severity and the extreme things that were happening, I think it's, you know, to some people, it was justified, right? And I think you could look back now and say, well, you know, maybe they were a little too far. forceful with some of that stuff. And I don't think it's crazy for Elon to come in and say, I feel like there are too many rules and I want to sort of, you know, rescind some of these. I don't have a problem with that. But what I do think he's missed is the fact that the rules exist not just, you know, for the company to feel good about itself. There's a business reason

to have these things, right? Like more users want to show up at a place where they feel safe, where they're not going to be attacked, where they are not going to be exposed to, you know, ridiculous conspiracy theories or whatever. And so there's a business reason to have some of these rules. I don't think, you know, he has really thought that through. Or if he has, he just says, well, we're just going to suffer the business consequences of, you know, letting people sort of say whatever they want. And, you know, people are free to leave, of course, if they don't feel that the place reflects their own values. And that's what some of them are doing. And so it's just incredibly, I think what I've learned from doing this book is how difficult the balancing act is,

right you know you want to uphold free speech you want to let people say what's on their mind but at the same time you got to build a business and a business requires some level of pruning right and and some level of kind of cleaning these things up and no one has really succeeded in and navigating that perfectly i don't think anyone would to be clear but it's just a really tough thing that i don't think outsiders fully appreciate they feel like the the service should reflect whatever they personally believe and anything else is wrong but those beliefs are a huge you know we're in that society now we're in that tribal society now we want to we want to play to the band or sing to the chorus, that sort of thing.

Yeah. I learned so many different things from your book. I'm going to start with a couple, and it's why you get your reaction. Sure. What did I learn from your book? I learned that these things are way more complicated, aren't they? Setting up free speech, you just set that as an example. I learned that this deal could have been very successful for Elon Musk because he is a great

innovator, but he went in the wrong direction as explained in your book. How did he go in the wrong direction if you believe that's the case? I do. I feel like what Twitter was best at and maybe this is unique to, you know, your, you know, one-time position in the White House, what I do for living. But like Twitter was great at news. Like if you cared about news, Twitter was the place you went. You had to be there. You had to have an account.

And I feel like Elon has sort of said, you know, he's got it. He's got beef, obviously, with the media right now, certainly like sort of the mainstream media. I kind of feel like he's saying, I want to make this less useful for news because I'm going to stick it to some of these journalists who have been either critical of me or who he disagrees with. But the problem is that was what made Twitter super sticky and unique to people. And so I get the sense he's sort of gone away from the thing that it was best at. And, you know, you add that on top of the business struggles we talked about with the advertising and sort of how Elon has run off some advertisers.

I think the idea of subscriptions actually isn't a bad idea. But I think the way he rolled them out as quickly as he did without thinking through the, the, you know, potential ramifications of taking away check marks, for example, or selling check marks without any kind of identity verification. Like, these are the kinds of things when I, when I said he moves fast, but almost in a reckless way. Like, these are ideas that could have worked, in my opinion, had they been handled very differently. I just feel like the execution was poor. Okay. Okay. Last thing on this topic of what I learned, um, you can really do.

damage a brand. And you could put a brand in a non-recoverable position. I'm not saying he's not going to be successful with X, but when I look at X today, it is very different than what Twitter once was. And so I want you for our viewers and listeners to describe, again, your opinion, what Twitter once was with Jack Dorsey and what X is today under Elon Musk. It feels like a totally different experience to me. And I've been on the platform for 15 years. So tell us what you think that differences are. Yeah, I think if you just look at the actual product, I don't think it looks that different. I don't think it, you know, the way you interact with the app is all that different. But the feeling you get on the app is totally night and day different in my opinion. And again, I think

Twitter used to lean very heavily into the it's what's happening slogan or tagline, right? You would expect to go there and see the discussion at the top of your feed be about, you know, today or this week would be State of the Union, right? We're about to hear the State of the Union from President Biden. And you would think, okay, there's sort of what's happening in the U.S. today. Therefore, that's what's going to be at the top of my feed. What I think Elon has tried to do, and what he's actually said publicly is that he wants Twitter to be the most entertaining app that people use, right? So it's no longer, in my opinion, about usefulness. It's not really about opening up and getting exactly what I feel that I need that day. It's more about feeling entertained, right? So I see,

you know, tons of memes on there. I see tons of videos that have nothing to do with like news or what's happening. They're just sort of recycled videos that are either, you know, head scratchers or they're funny or whatever it may be. It just, it kind of feels like he wants to be like a TikTok light or something like that where you're more scrolling to be entertained than you are to be informed. That's my personal opinion. I'm actually curious since you're a user yourself and you said you've seen a difference like, what's the difference in your mind between the two? Because again, the product itself feels sort of similar in the way that you use it. Well, I feel certain things are boosted.

Maybe I'm wrong. I think the good news for me is I was shadow banned on Twitter. I was a Trump supporter. And so I got shadow banned. And so I got unclipped from that. And so I was modulated and throttled down to a low ability to gain followers. He very fairly unclipped that. And so now I get followers and my stuff that I tweet out reaches a lot of people.

And so I was in love with that about. Twitter, but I feel like there's a lot of boosting going on of conspiracy theory, maybe. I feel a lot of sludge is on there, a lot of nonsense, made up stuff, you know, I feel bad about this because I really don't believe Elon Musk is an anti-Semite, but I do feel there's a lot of anti-Semitic activity going on on Twitter now, way more than there was prior. Okay. And, you know, this is the problem, though. you know, someone like Elon Musk, people don't want to say that to because they don't want to offend him and he's a powerful guy and blah, blah, blah, you know, you know what I mean? But if I was sitting in a board room where they might be like, look, you know, you've done a really good job of trying to flatten the playing field between conservatives and liberals and I respect that. But we probably need to clean up on aisle seven of all the conspiracy theories. I mean, you know, I mean, do you think the Rothschilds run the world?

You know, I don't think they do, but if you follow X, you know, you've got a good 10% of the tweets that come into my field of vision. The Rothschilds are running the world. That's a anti-Semitic trope that's lasted 300 years. You know, I'm not in love with that. Well, and that's the tradeoff between the free speech and the cleanup, right? That's true. You know, example of one, right? But like, X is less interesting to you.

I'm sort of speaking for you now. But, you know, and partly because they are not policing in the way that old Twitter did, right? And so, but old Twitter over-policed. And so now you're sort of like, okay, how do we, you know, draw that line? How do you find that balance? And again, everyone's going to be different. But that's the fear is that the more you let people say whatever they want and say, you know, I might not agree with it, but it should be allowed to be on there.

Well, people just don't want to be surrounded by that stuff, right? And so they use the product less or they leave altogether. And this is the dilemma that Elon will continue. to face. Okay. So before I brought you on, and before we had the recording start, we know that Fidelity, I believe, who made an investment alongside of Elon Musk at a $44 billion valuation, marked the investment down to $12 billion. Okay. You think it's worth $12 billion? There's a lot of debt on those books still. You have to remember that Twitter took on about, I want to say, is like $12 billion in debt to get this deal done, and which they're paying back, you know, for many more years. So 12 billion

honestly feels a little high for me. We don't know exactly what the revenue is because it's a private company, so they don't share that. I had a story in December that said that they were targeting around $2.5 billion in advertising revenue last year, which was down almost 50%. So, you know, you see a company that's bringing in, if we're generous, maybe two and a half, three billion in revenue, but has tons of debt on the books. And, you know, as you point out, a lot of other kind of cultural problems right now, I don't know if you could sell it for $12 billion. Maybe I'm being too harsh, but it seems a little high to me. Okay. So, but he's not interested to selling it. So let's fast forward a second. Okay. Here's a guy that took, I mean, this is one of the big misses of my life. You know, one of my best friends, Antonio Gracius, was on the board of a book. SpaceX and Twitter, now I think he's just on one of them. He gave me the opportunity to invest 20 years ago. And of course, I was too stupid.

He went on to become a billionaire. And I'm talking to you on Open Book. See, that's why I'm really not that smart. But he's a, he's a lovely guy. And I would never bet against Elon Musk. And so we know that Tesla and SpaceX were on the brink of bankruptcy 16 years ago during the 2008 financial crisis. And he went on to become the richest or one of the richest people in the world.

And he is a brilliant guy. So it's at 12, maybe less today. Where do you think it will be in five years? You think it's lights out for X? You think he can pull this, turn this around? What do you think? I agree with you that I don't think it's going away. I mean, I don't foresee Elon thrown in the towel or anything like that at this point.

One theory that's sort of interesting, I don't know if you follow it, but he has an AI company that he's just spun up XAI. Yeah, which makes Brock, the chat GPT type competitor. And they're using Twitter data. or X data, I should say, to train those models. And there's an interesting idea about sort of folding X the social network into XAI and making it the training ground for the AI products that they ultimately build, but sort of take the pressure off of X as this like standalone thing that, you know, might

need to become profitable because it's now more of a, you know, feature of this other AI company. And I think that's something that could very well have. happen. And that's a good outcome I would say or I would guess that would be a very good outcome for investors too, right? Because now suddenly they're sort of on the AI wave instead of this fledgling social network that no one's really sure what to do with. And so I could see Elon being creative trying to do something like that to try and sort of save the financials of this company. I just worry that X is going to become less and less relevant over time unless they can kind of figure out how to fix the problem that you were just talking about, right? Which is that

A lot of people feel that when they go on, they see stuff they don't want to see, and it makes them use it less and less. And so they got to figure that out. Otherwise, I'm worried the relevance is going to be a problem. Okay. We're at the point in this podcast now where I have five words. My producer and I would come up with them. And then we ask the author to react to these five words. It could be a sentence, a word, sort of like a Rothschilded test on your book. Great. You ready? Let's do it. All right. I'm going to say free speech. You say what? Complicated. Really complicated. Isn't it? It's fascinating. It is. It is. You can get a lot wrong being a free speecher. I'm going to say Elon Musk, you say what? I'm going to say, has some work to do. Right. I say resilient, brilliant, visionary. Now he's human, so he has flaws like the rest of us. Totally. And if I were a friend of Elon Musk, which unfortunately I'm not, I would love to be. But I would say, hey, surround yourself with some say no people as opposed to just yes people.

Yeah. Jack Dorsey. I would say kind of the villain, honestly. Like part of the story here is this rise from Jack Dorsey as being a beloved kind of person within Twitter, beloved to employees, you know, sort of the face of the company in many ways to, you know, being a bit of a villain to at least to people who feel that they're disappointed in the way that Twitter has gone. So, you know, I want to be clear, this is not all Jack Dorsey's fault by any stretch or anything like that. but I do think his story arc is sort of gone in the wrong direction over the last couple of years. And so that's why that word popped into my head. It's interesting. You know, it's because I see him and I have empathy for him because I'm not well suited to be

the White House communications director. I may be decent at talking on TV and I may be decent at managing money, but probably not well suited for all the muck and guck of politics. And Dorsey's a visionary, but is he the best operator for a business like that? Maybe he isn't. You know, maybe he just straight out. outside of his circle of competence. I don't know.

But I have empathy for him. And I do love the fact that he was wearing that Satoshi T-shirt, Kurt Wagner. At the Super Bowl. Yeah, that was good for me. Yeah. One other word, sorry, if I could add one other quick word. I almost went with idealist. Yeah, I see that.

The other thing about Jack is like, you know, he really does have this sort of pure mind in terms of where he thinks a lot of these things can go. It's just they don't always materialize in the way that, you know, he would want them to. So I totally. see that. Okay, I have, I have two last words. You're ready? Yep. Twitter. No longer. Twitter's dead. Okay. So Twitter's dead. And so then the next word is, or the next letter is X. Yeah. I knew that was where this is going. I'm going to, I'm going to throw X a bone and

I'm going to say X is everything at because that's what they wanted to be. Now, I don't know if it's going to succeed. But when I think of X now, to Elon's credit, he wanted to kill Twitter. He's killed Twitter in my mind. Twitter's gone. X is here. X is going to be something else. I don't know exactly what it will ultimately be, but they're trying to turn into this everything app. So I'll go ahead and that's the first thing that popped in. Okay. Well, he just, he's looking for a money transfer license here in the state of New York. And he's going to allow you to do telephone calls over that app shortly as well. Yeah. I'm not bad against Elon Musk. I would never short the Elon Musk freight train because I don't want to end up like one of those 1920 silent movie villains.

But you wrote an amazing book, and I really wish you great success with this book. Thank you. It's got everything. It's got intrigue. It's got ego. It's got business. And it's a book, I hope, business school professors pick up as well because it is the barbarians of the gate of your generation, our generation. It's mostly your generation, though.

And it's called the Battle for the Bird. It's Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and the $44 billion fight for Twitter Soul, written by Kurt Wagner, and it was a real pleasure to have you on Open Book today. Thank you, sir. Thank you for all the kind words. I appreciate getting the chance to talk about it. It was fun. I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book. For more about me, my childhood, early career, Skybridge, Bitcoin, and yes, the White House, my new book from Wall Street to the White House and back is available for pre-order on Amazon and wherever you buy your books. As Kurt and I discuss, we all witnessed the increasing power of Twitter, its influence and the high-stakes

struggle that then occurred. But I got to tell you, that book was incredible on a number of different levels. It talked about ego, or as Kurt and I talked about, the billionaire mind. It's not just Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk. We're seeing it all over the place. It could be a Bill Lackman as an example, or it could be the fight that's going on right now with Disney, with the slate of activists that are going after Disney. It is always a colossal struggle of egos in the American business community. There's layers of self-importance and insecurity. It's sort of wrapped in with each other. But these two men, Dorsi and Musk, they're completely different characters, but they're both incredibly brilliant and they're both great long-term innovators. They see the future

about as well as anybody. Dorsey, as it relates to the blockchain and Twitter, and Elon Musk as it relates to getting the species known as human beings off of planet Earth and making them eventually interstellar. So both of these guys are historic figures. In this book, you should read the book if you want to learn about business, decision-making, and how to get your ego out of the way to make right decisions versus wrong ones. All right, you want to come on the show? All right, you're ready? Go ahead. So what do you think is going wrong in the world of politics today? Do you think it's been influenced by all of the stuff that people are using on their smartphones?

Yes, I guess. Okay, so tell me, so tell me what you think. What's your opinion of what's going wrong in politics today? Well, first of all, you have people, but in my opinion, I think both of them are not right. Okay, so give me, give me an example. Give me a couple examples. I think I've watched Biden. You know, he's a mama land. He would have been good. Okay, so who would you rather have then?

Do you want the guy that's sleepy and sort of elderly, or you want the nut that wants to be a dictator? Who do you want? You could tell me, Mom. I would want you to be it. Okay, forget about me, Mom. I'm not running for president. You got two choices.

You can pick Trump. I don't care. Who do you like? Okay. If Biden is old and he's a little. little over the hill, God's a better if he should pass, and then she would be present. Okay. Okay. So that's going to be a big fight coming into the election season, right?

Because he doesn't have, he's not who he once was. You know what I mean? Right? No, he's not. Mm-hmm. And that doesn't look good as a president. Right. No, I understand that. So let me ask you this, though, Ma. Are the young people going to vote this time?

Yeah, I guess so. Okay. And they're going to vote for Trump. You think so. Okay, so tell me why they're going to vote for Trump. Okay. Okay. What would you say to Joe Biden to help his chances to retake the presidency? I think that, well, first of all, I do think the man is honest. Okay.

You know, when I follow, well, everything that he does, I mean, no politicians 100%. You were 100% and they threw you out. Mm-hmm. You were 100% honest. You fought for Trump from the very beginning, and he took... poke you out because you speak better. All right, but that tells you a lot about what Trump is like as a guy, though, Ma. That's why, not just me, you've got a lot of people that work for him think he's nuts.

He is nuts. I mean, I was in his company and his little boy tried to say something once. This is going way back when you were rooting for him, and he gave his son his funny look, and the kid clammed up. He has to be center stage. Yeah, no, I know that. He's got that kind of personality. He's not, I don't think he's, I don't think he's smart enough to see. what he's doing. If he would shut the hell up and try to collect his wits and not be so narcissistic

to be center stage, he would probably win with everybody. But because he's like that, he's going to win with the people that are not as educated. Okay. All right, Ma, thank you for joining Open Book. Okay, I love you, Ma. All right, I'll call you later. Are you coming Saturday? Yes, I'll be there on Saturday, of course. All right. All right. I love you. Bye. I am Anthony Scaramucci and that was open book. Thank you for listening. If you like what you hear, tell your friends and make sure you hit follow or subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast. While you're there, please leave us a rating or review.

If you want to connect with me or chat more about the discussions, it's at Scaramucci on Twitter or Instagram. I'd love to hear from you. I'll see you back here next week.