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- Elon Musk didn't feel too bad about tweeting a baseless conspiracy theory about Paul Pelosi, according to a new book.
- "I am who I am," Musk reportedly said during a series of meetings with Twitter staff and advertisers.
- "I'm going to tweet some things that are going to be stupid," Musk also reportedly said.
Elon Musk was largely unrepentant when Twitter staffers and the company advertisers confronted him about his since-deleted tweet featuring a baseless conspiracy theory about the violent attack on Paul Pelosi, according to his biography.
"I am who I am," biographer Walter Isaacson quotes Musk as saying during a series of meetings. "My Twitter account is an extension of me personally, and, like, I'm going to tweet some things that are going to be stupid, and I'm going to make mistakes.
Privately, Musk considered the Pelosi tweet "one of his dumbest mistakes," Isaacson wrote. But in this series of meetings, the billionaire offered "cold diffidence" about his action.
Musk had posted a link to a story in the Santa Monica Observer which claimed Paul Pelosi was drunk and arguing with a male escort at the time of the attack. There was no evidence suggesting that at the time, though conservative media was awash in speculation. Evidence about the October 2022 attack later illustrated just how baseless these theories were. The Twitter CEO — Musk has since rebranded the company as X — quickly deleted the post. He later apologized for it too.
Isaacson previously told CNBC that Musk would also just "impulsively" post things.
"He does that very often, which is very impulsively tweet things out and then I think — clearly by the fact that he deleted it — he thought, 'Well, that ended up being something that was unwise to have out there,'" Isaacson said in an interview with CNBC Squawk Box.
Advertisers, Isaacson wrote, were not amused.
"Twitter was supposed to be a billion-dollar business, not an extension of Elon Musk's quirks and flaws," Isaacson wrote.
Musk did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.