Notes
He became intoxicated by the engagement offered to him, and like with so many other hardcore tweeters, the platform became his addiction. The difference between him and the other diehards chasing the constant dopamine rush of Twitter, however, was that he had the means to capture his addiction and the desire to remake it in his own image.
He had assumed Twitter was a knot of technical issues that a great engineering mind like himself could easily untangle, enabling the growth of free speech in the digital town square. But at its core, Twitter was plagued by social and political dilemmas, not merely technological ones.
Twitter executives were taken with the idea of labeling, no one more so than Dorsey, who was fed up with the pressure from Congress and the public over misinformation. His company had no business becoming an arbiter of truth, he thought, and it was in an untenable position in a polarized political climate where the idea of truth itself was contested. Labels allowed Twitter to avoid taking down anyone’s speech wholesale. Every day felt like another fire drill, and Dorsey was becoming inured to it. The approach of labeling some risky tweets let Twitter protect its reputation—it was doing something about misinformation—without needing to fact-check every single questionable post or overstepping into censorship of unverified content.
Musk’s reservations about joining Twitter’s board of directors began almost immediately, even before Agrawal’s celebratory tweet. As a director, his voice would be one among ten others. He would have no operational control. For his whole career, Musk had succeeded by being the lead decision-maker. He followed his gut and couldn’t be shackled by any corporate structure or opposed by dissenters. His leadership style was completely undemocratic.
As soon as Musk tweeted on April 14 that he had made an offer for Twitter, everyone on the platform began taking sides. A contingent of Trumpers, right-wingers, and libertarians, who believed the company had inappropriately censored accounts that shared their political beliefs, cheered the move. Musk was their savior, the man who nobly sacrificed his own money to rescue society.
Finding people who said they wanted to back Musk wasn’t hard. Turning around a stagnant company like Twitter was unlike anything he had done before, but his reputation was such that investors were willing to take a risk just to curry favor or be close to him.
Still, investors—some considered the savviest in Silicon Valley—wanted to place their faith in Musk. He dreamed of a different reality, one where humans were multiplanetary or put computer chips in their brains or built tunnels to avoid traffic. His appeal went beyond normal logic.
That one man could accumulate such a fortune, much less be willing to spend it on a company for ideological or personal reasons, was a testament to the world’s widening wealth inequality. This simply wasn’t what the elite did with their money. To buy and operate a global corporation for one’s own pleasure was unheard of. Musk was breaking the rules of what it meant to be rich.
“Turnarounds make the career.” Companies under pressure molded great leaders, he continued. The pain would be good for Segal in the end. Iron sharpened iron. Musk’s attack would make Segal a stronger executive.
The case advanced by Micheletti was clear: Twitter was run by complete idiots.
It quickly became apparent to the execs that Musk lacked basic knowledge of the merger agreement he had signed.
It was clear. Musk had not bought Twitter to be a responsible steward and guide one of the world’s most heavily used websites and forums for human communication. He had bought it as an object of personal obsession and was going to shape it to his whims. Musk had come to love Twitter, and he believed that the people who had run it had led it astray. He was going to make them pay.
A broad-shouldered man wore a pirate costume and mask. Rumors began to circulate that it was Musk himself, infiltrating the party. Another person in a shark suit also drew whispers—could it be the new owner? The revelry had a slapstick quality that felt classically Twitter. It was distressing yet funny, like the internet had come to life.
One of Musk’s gripes was that Twitter’s website required people to log in before they could peruse the timeline of fresh tweets. It seemed to be one of the problems that inhibited Twitter from attracting new users—no one really understood how the site worked before they started using it. Musk believed Twitter should entice people to try it, and so he demanded that its home page be transformed from a blank log-in screen into an “Explore” page that displayed a collection of trending topics and popular tweets. The move would surely increase traffic and interest, he thought. Musk tasked Davis with finding someone to execute the task, and the Boring Company leader ran full speed to deliver the results, no questions asked. The decision wasn’t informed by any research, user studies, or consultation with Twitter’s engineers or product specialists, but rather Musk’s gut. Had he asked people who worked on the product, he might have learned that the log-in page was a vital defense against spammers and bots that crawled Twitter’s site to pilfer content, forcing users to log in with credentials to prove they had an account.
Sriram Krishnan, a former product leader at Twitter who had been let go in late 2019. Since his departure from the social networking company, Krishnan had reinvented himself as a tech investor, podcast personality, and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, one of the firms investing in Musk’s Twitter. He was helping with the transition, he explained.
Crawford and her team tried to develop safeguards that would protect the usefulness of verification. On October 31, they presented two options to Musk and his team. In the first, there would be two badges: people who were already verified would keep their filled-in badges designating importance, while those who had purchased them through Blue Verified would get transparent badges. To illustrate the differences, they created mock-ups of two tweets. One, from the legacy verified @JoeBiden account, advocated for people to vote. The other, from the Blue Verified @JoeB1den account, which replaced the “i” with a “1,” tweeted it was “starting nuclear war with Russia.” The only marker to distinguish between the two accounts, besides the slight change in spelling, was the transparent badge on the fake one. The second option from the Blue team showed both accounts with the same type of verified badge. But in addition to that badge, official accounts, like @JoeBiden, received another label to clarify their importance. In Biden’s case, his account was delineated as a “United States government official.”
At its core, SpaceX was a physics problem. Tesla was a manufacturing challenge. But Twitter was a social and psychological problem. Beyond the engineering challenges of keeping one of the most trafficked sites online, the company boiled down to empathizing with other human beings and understanding what kept them coming back to the platform; sharing their unfiltered thoughts; or clicking, engaging, and reading whatever came across their feed. It became clear that Musk struggled to understand how anyone else used the platform.
Despite this, Crawford and her team had been able to convince Musk that certain very, very high-profile accounts should be given “official” badges. She began rolling them out on Election Day. The gray, transparent badges sat under an account’s username and, as Crawford would describe in a tweet, were a way to “distinguish between @TwitterBlue subscribers with blue checkmarks and accounts that are verified as official.” Essentially, the “official” label would serve the function of the old verified check mark, ensuring that users could tell when an account truly belonged to a celebrity, brand, or politician. By Wednesday morning, however, Musk had come to hate it. The label was being ridiculed on the site, and Musk absorbed the blows. One user, an anonymous fan account for the rapper Nicki Minaj called @NipTuckReload, which had 5,000 followers, tweeted that the labels were “ugly.” The billionaire took a screenshot of the post and emailed it to Crawford and her team, who immediately scrambled to create an alternative before Musk did something drastic. But they were too late. By 8:38 a.m., Musk tweeted that he had “killed” the label and declared they would be no more. “Please note that Twitter will do lots of dumb things in coming months,” he posted six minutes later. “We will keep what works & change what doesn’t.”
“Governments are terrible at execution,” Musk continued. “The government is the DMV. That’s who we are fighting here.”
The fake verified accounts caused so much confusion that the stepmom of Brooklyn Nets point guard Kyrie Irving, who was also his agent, called Twitter’s Partnerships Team to get the company to take down a tweet from an account pretending to be an ESPN reporter. The post claimed the basketball superstar had been released from his team.
Davis and Musk continued to cut. To employees, it seemed they had moved beyond saving money and were enthralled by seeing how much pain they could inflict on workers.
Musk’s impact, however, went far beyond the amnesties. “People on the right should see more ‘left wing’ stuff and people on the left should see more ‘right wing’ stuff,” he tweeted on January 16. In practice, however, people began seeing the amplification of right-wing voices. While Musk had espoused the idea of “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach,” Twitter’s recommendation algorithms began pushing conservative accounts and posts into people’s timelines.
Activist groups that study online platforms, including the Center for Countering Digital Hate and the Anti-Defamation League, found that slurs against Black Americans had tripled, while antisemitic speech was up more than 60 percent since the change in ownership. Accounts showing terrorist affiliations with groups such as the Islamic State (IS) also surged in the wake of the takeover.
While they had found the problem, the engineers lacked an elegant solution and instead went about cobbling together a fix to calm Musk. Within the recommendation algorithm, they introduced code “author_is_elon,” essentially ensuring that the system would place a heavier emphasis on pushing his posts into users’ personally curated feeds. In effect, Musk’s tweets would have higher priority over any other post. By Monday afternoon, some users who opened the site saw “For You” feeds that featured only Musk tweets over and over again, with little other content in between. The billionaire had finally built his very own echo chamber.
Some of Musk’s views in 2024 had become indistinguishable from those at a Trump campaign rally.
Over time, the idea of Twitter itself splintered, just like the minds of the men who had tried their hands at running it. Twitter was no longer the only place where the world came together to discuss wars, news, or celebrity beefs. Instead, Twitter became a feature that one could find on nearly all social media services. On Instagram, tweets were Threads. On Substack, they were Notes, while Mastodon, the open-source platform that had inspired Musk to embark on a jealous crackdown, had toots. On Bluesky, to Graber’s chagrin, the community referred to their posts as skeets, a slant rhyme on tweets that also referenced ejaculation. One no longer had to be a part of Twitter to join the conversation—the conversation was now conversations, and they were everywhere.
Musk may have convinced himself he bought Twitter to protect the global town square or build the world’s most important app. But the truth was much simpler. Whether or not he wanted to admit it, he had bought it for himself, and for a brief moment, he had the thing he wanted most. He owned Twitter—and then it was gone.