Sam explained what he wanted to talk about: Elon Musk really was going to buy Twitter, but he didn’t really want to pay for it himself. He was looking for allies to pick up some of the $44 billion it was going to cost. They want us among them. But we only have three hours to get back to them. “What do you get out of this?” asked Nishad, reasonably.

in McConnell, Sam had found someone as interested as he was in another existential threat to humanity: Donald Trump. Trump’s assault on the government, and on the integrity of US elections, belonged, to Sam’s way of thinking, on the same list as pandemics and artificial intelligence and climate change.