Steve Jobs's drafts | Elon Musk's coinvestors
Welcome to Internal Tech Emails: internal tech industry emails that surface in public records. 🔍 If you haven’t signed up, join 50,000+ others and get the newsletter:
Larry Ellison: "We cannot remain in denial if we talk with our users every day"
From: Larry Ellison
To: Jeff Henley, Mark Barrenechea
CC: Jeffrey Henley, Jennifer Minton, Safra Catz
Subject: RE: IT CRM
Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2002 07:04:05 -0800
Our top priority is to get Oracle users are "delighted" with -the quality and functionality our CRM products. Until that happens I doubt we will achieve success in the market. The biggest problem is missing features as opposed to show stopper bugs. (There are a few of those as well but they are much easier to fix.) Every applications meeting now centers around representatives from our user community who report back on application quality and set priorities for development. We cannot remain in denial if we talk with our users every day. We need to work very hard to achieve a high degree of customer satisfaction for our sales and marketing products as soon as possible. We will have major improvements by June, but we are unlikely to deliver all we need until September. Doing it by September will require unrelenting focus and a Herculean effort. It can be done but not unless we change our development and testing process and do a better job listening to our user community. Larry
[This document is from In re Oracle Corp. Securities Litigation (2009).]
Previously: Larry Ellison: “I need daily reports until the customer is happy” (March 23, 2001)
Steve Jobs's open letter on third-party iPhone apps: draft vs. final
October 14–17, 2007
On Oct 14, 2007, at 8:59 PM, Steve Jobs wrote:
For your eyes only. Thoughts?
Steve
From: Scott Forstall
To: Steve Jobs
Cc: Phil Schiller
Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2007 22:06:13 -0700
I think we are making a hugely positive announcement: we are opening up the iPhone and iPod touch (do you want to mention touch?) to native development. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With a touch-screen interface and no molded buttons, paired with incredible developer APIs, we believe we have created the best mobile platform for developers ever.
But I think most of that positive message is lost in this statement. The letter sounds fairly defensive about why not now, and why it will take a while.
I think more positive intro and concluding text could help a lot.
[This document is from Epic v. Apple (2021).]
Previously: Bertrand Serlet to Steve Jobs: "Fine, let's enable Cocoa Touch apps" (October 2, 2007)
Previously: Steve Jobs decides on alert copy (May 15, 2008)
If you upgrade to a paid subscription, you’ll receive access to the full archive of internal tech emails, with 200+ documents from Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Tesla, and more. You’ll also support our work: every year, we track hundreds of court cases and review more than 10,000 filings to bring you @TechEmails.
Elon Musk on coinvestors for Twitter deal
From: Elon Musk
Sent: Tuesday, May 3, 2022
To: Sean Lynch
Subject: Re: Trading [Restricted - External]
Sounds good. We are seeing quite a bit of equity support coming in for Twitter.
On May 3, 2022, at 3:55 PM, Sean Lynch wrote:
Elon/Jared -
That is fantastic news. Some color on conversations we've had over last 24 hours.
1. OTPP: We received an inbounds from Jo Taylor, CEO of OTPP about Twitter. There are key personnel at that firm that are close/ex Barclays that reached out to us.
Jo is a big supporter of yours, having participated (I believe) in several SpaceX rounds, they are believers in your missions, and candidly "Elon has made us a lot of money"
Not investors in Tesla, which they call "the biggest miss of their life"
Has some familiarity with Twitter, having sold Fluther to Twitter years ago, and also was an investor in the platform in years past (admittedly sold early)
Wants to discuss the potential opportunity with Karen Frank (former Barclays, who is head of OTPP public and private equities)
Have asked if the Barclays team is available to discuss the opportunity through a public side lens tmw
Have not said in the affirmative there is interest in Twitter, but discussing
And lastly, said "If we were to print a $250mm...$500mm ticket, would want to understand your plans for the platform and the opportunity, including how you'd measure success and thoughts around how you'd exit"
Certainly the right sort of folks to engage with if there were to be interest in terms of providing certainty and speed
1. Jared we spoke with Max Gottschalk @ Vedra Partners (multi family office)
Jared is intending on coming back to us tmw with views on interest/size/feasibility
If interest and confidence in ability to speak for size with speed, we will connect
2. We also spoke to Baupost on opportunity (as discussed), and are reverting to us with feedback
Conversation was with Gianpaolo Burigo, who was discussing opportunity with top of house principals about passive common opportunity
As is the case with Vedra, If interest and confidence in ability to speak for size with speed, we will connect
3. GBL is seeking to engage with Barclays tmw about opportunity of passive common opportunity
4. Bill Ackman: Expressing keen interest to engage albeit the potential transaction in which he could participate is someone bespoke. He had mentioned he went into you Elon and to Orlando Bravo (we stayed silent on this point) expressing interest/
OPTION 1: $1-2 billion from the fund invested pre-close in Twitter public shares, that he would commit to rolling into the deal as long as a public stub remained outstanding (ala Kinder Care or Clear Channel form the old days) .. Presumably this options would be available to all Twitter shareholders and "could" allow you to fulfill a "public pledge" to allow other shareholders to roll if they want
OPTION 2: $5-7 billion from him and his SPAC – not workable in my view. He has a July 22 expiry date on his SPAC, so is very motivated to figure something out there
5. We spoke to Oaktree, and while appreciative, think it would be hard to work with their fund
6. Have discussion with Cobepa tomorrow
Lastly, and not something we have sought feedback on, Francisco Partners did probe us on "if there was interest how would we get involved, and if there was interest, is it too late".
Know we have hyper-jets on this thing (not a cuisinart), and train leaving station, but wanted to keep you current on latest.
From: Elon Musk
Date: Tuesday, May 03, 2022, 4:28 PM
To: Sean Lynch
Subject: Re: Trading [Restricted - External]
One simple message: invest on the same terms as Elon and you won't be sorry. I will make sure it works out.
[This document is from Pampena v. Musk (2025).]
Previously: Elon Musk’s Twitter texts with Jack Dorsey, Parag Agrawal, and Bret Taylor (March–April 2022)
Previously: Elon Musk texts Larry Ellison (April 20, 2022)
Elon Musk on Tesla compensation
From: Elon Musk
Sent: 11/9/2017 9:06 AM
To: Todd Maron
Subject: Re: My long-term option grant
Given that this will all go to causes that at least aspirationally maximize the probability of a good future for humanity, plus all Tesla shareholders will be super happy, I think this will be received well. It should come across as an ultra bullish view of the future, given that this comp package is worth nothing if "all" I do is almost double Tesla's market cap.
[This document is from Tornetta v. Musk (2024).]
Previously: “The added comp is just so that I can put as much as possible towards minimizing existential risk by putting the money towards Mars if I am successful” (July 30, 2017)
Thanks for reading!
-Internal Tech Emails
Sent from my iPad