A trove of Elon Musk’s private texts, made public last week, reveal that his ex-wife Talulah Riley was among the people who pushed for the Twitter deal. Hundreds of the billionaire’s text messages were released as part of the pretrial discovery process in his ongoing court battle against Twitter – the social media giant he was all set to acquire before backing out of the deal.
Talulah Riley, 37, is the person identified as “TJ” in the text messages, according to Fortune. Her middle name is Jane, which could have led to the “TJ” nickname.
On March 23, the English actor and writer texted her ex-husband, Elon Musk. “Can you buy Twitter and then delete it, please!? xx,” she wrote.
Further text messages between the two show that Riley was concerned about what she called “woke-ism” on the platform.
“Please do something to fight woke-ism.” she wrote, “I will do anything to help! xx.”
Riley also criticised Twitter’s decision to suspend the account of right-leaning satirical site The Babylon Bee after it referred to transgender Rachel Levine as “man of the year.”
According to a Bloomberg report, she called the suspension of The Babylon Bee’s Twitter account “crazy”.
“Raiyah and I were talking about it today,” she wrote. “It was a f*****g joke. Why has everyone become so puritanical?”
Riley was likely referring to Raiyah Bint Al-Hussein, the Princess of Jordan.
It wasn’t just Musk’s conversations with his ex-wife that were released as part of court filings. Hundreds of messages between the Tesla CEO and people like Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman were also made public.
Internet users were quick to note that in a text dump filled with investors jostling to get a piece of the Twitter deal, friends stoking Musk’s ego and journalists angling for an interview, only one person came out looking good – Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal.
(This article was curated by Sanya Jain)