This paper shows that wirelessly powered backscatter communications is subject to a fundamental tradeoff between the harvested energy at the tag and the reliability of the backscatter communication, measured in terms of SNR at the reader. Assuming the RF transmit signal is a multisine waveform adaptive to the channel state information, we derive a systematic approach to optimize the transmit waveform weights (amplitudes and phases) in order to enlarge as much as possible the SNR-energy region. Performance evaluations confirm the significant benefits of using multiple frequency components in the adaptive transmit multisine waveform to exploit the nonlinearity of the rectifier and a frequency diversity gain.