In January, the leaders of several venture capital firms that had taken money from Twitter received a note from their last remaining contact at the social media company. Sent from a personal account, the email informed them that the team that stewarded those investments had been obliterated as part of Elon Musk's shambolic takeover of the social media platform.

Someone in Musk’s sphere would likely reach out, the former Twitter employee explained. But neither they, nor their former colleagues, almost all of whom had quit or been laid off, knew who that might be or what would happen next. “The person who did this was trying to help some of the GPs [general partners] who were hurt by [the departures],” one venture capitalist told Forbes. “They apologized for their inability to do better by them.” READ MORE