Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

by Kate Conger

As the pandemic began to rage, Twitter’s headquarters, an Art Deco high-rise on San Francisco’s Market Street, lay empty. Dorsey initially retreated to his mansions in San Francisco’s Sea Cliff neighborhood and in Big Sur. But he soon hit the road, traveling to Hawaii, Costa Rica, and French Polynesia. His direct reports complained that they could sometimes hear roosters crowing in the background of his conference calls, a reminder that he was on an island, while they were trapped in their apartments. In May, Twitter became the first tech company to announce that its employees would work remotely, forever—a decision driven by Dorsey’s desire to stay away from the office. By the summer, he stopped chiming in during meetings entirely. He routinely kept his camera and microphone off, leaving employees wondering if he was still sitting near his laptop at all or if he had wandered off to surf.

The backlash was immediate and furious. Republican lawmakers and Trump campaign officials accused Twitter of censorship, and even some Democrats questioned whether Twitter, by cracking down on a mainstream media outlet, had overstepped. Even Dorsey objected. “Our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great,” he wrote. “And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why we’re blocking: unacceptable.” His statement seemed confusing. Who was Dorsey criticizing? Internally, however, employees knew where the message was being directed. While Dorsey had been a proponent of empowering the executives he put into positions of power to make their own decisions, he was now effectively admonishing Gadde. She took his tweet personally, particularly because he was more direct and harsh in what he said publicly than the criticism he shared in private, she told people close to her. On October 16, Twitter decided to limit the hacked materials rule only to prevent hackers themselves from sharing information they stole, and to add contextual labels to other tweets about the Biden emails, warning viewers that they came from an unknown source. The Post would once again be able to share its links, but the controversy continued for weeks.

Dorsey is a loser

Employees reeled. Dorsey’s departure, announced just after the holiday, seemed abrupt and ill-timed. Was another activist investor like Elliott creeping into the stock, forcing Dorsey out before he was ready to go? Much of Twitter’s rank and file didn’t know how absent Dorsey had become over the past year.

The convoluted structure tangled the chain of command. Agrawal considered it a five-headed monster. Agrawal didn’t need to stroke egos by handing out C-suite titles, and he didn’t want to waste time sorting out who was making bad choices. He wanted a few effective lieutenants, and clear accountability for screw-ups. He suggested thinning out Twitter’s top ranks to just three executives, including himself. The person on the other end of the phone call was overwhelmed. The timelines Agrawal proposed for firing executives and revamping the company were aggressive. Agrawal had a lot he wanted to do, and he was eager to act.

While Musk was lining up his cash, Twitter continued to lose money. That Thursday evening, the board of directors received a note from Segal. The chief financial officer wrote to tell them that, in just twenty-four hours, Twitter’s revenue projections had become even weaker. Segal had met with his team hours after the board meeting on Wednesday, and they told him Twitter was about $10 million short of meeting its revenue goals for the quarter. The swirl caused by Musk’s chaotic acquisition offer had caused some advertisers to hesitate, and employees who were supposed to be focused on sales were distracted. It seemed likely that Twitter would be short another $10 million by the end of the following week and, if the chaos continued, could fall $100 million short of the annual revenue Segal had described to the board.

Bad finance leadership

Fully aware of the revenue shortcomings, the board agreed to move forward with Agrawal’s layoff plans while they continued mulling Musk’s offer. They voted by email to approve the plan. Even Dorsey agreed to the cuts, responding to the email discussion with a simple thumbs-up emoji.

But Dorsey didn’t need to sell off his shares if he didn’t want to. Musk gave him the option to roll his shares into his new ownership, allowing him to remain involved with the company long after the rest of the directors were gone. Had Dorsey talked to Musk about sticking with Twitter? the board wanted to know. Dorsey swore he had no plans to roll his stake over to Musk. No one was sure they could believe him. Dorsey, always a cipher, had become even harder to read after he had resigned as chief executive five months earlier. Even the Twitter executives in the meeting—Agrawal, Gadde, and Segal—who had spent years working alongside Dorsey, had fallen out of touch with him. But Dorsey’s potential involvement in a new Twitter wouldn’t change the price that Musk paid. Several board members were livid with him and considered him a snake. After years of backing his leadership, they thought he had bad-mouthed them and gone behind their backs.

“You and I are in complete agreement,” Musk wrote to Dorsey after the call ended in a stalemate. “Parag is just moving far too slowly and trying to please people who will not be happy no matter what he does.” Just as Dorsey had waived the opportunity to stand up for Gadde, he threw Agrawal under the bus. “At least it became clear you can’t work together,” Dorsey responded.

Still, the company would agree to grant Musk’s side access to the firehose sets of data anyway and prepared to provide credentials for his engineers to access the information. Twitter’s engineers set up the information on a tool that allowed them to track how Musk’s side ran queries of the data in order to audit what they were looking at. Early on, they realized the billionaire’s team wasn’t doing much of anything with the data or running particularly meaningful searches. The request, in their view, had been a farce.

Musk and the goons stayed away from the Halloween festivities, celebrating with the Morgan Stanley bankers in the war room. They sipped Pappy Van Winkle bourbon procured by Michael Grimes, a small token after the deal’s closing fees had made Morgan Stanley millions of dollars. Although Musk was grinning over his glass, he wasn’t satisfied with his conquest. He itched to start another fire drill. Firing the executives was a fine start, but he was eager to put his fingerprints on the product. 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...

Good or bad on Musk?

Sullivan told Davis that Twitter had actually tested the idea before. There were tradeoffs, he explained to Musk’s friend, and ultimately the company had decided against leaving an open timeline running for people who didn’t have an account. Davis brushed off the warnings. They had nothing to do with how product development worked in Musk’s world. Musk delivered an edict, and then it was done. Sullivan shrugged. It was the kind of nonsense he’d expected from Musk all along. He ended the call with Davis and went to work finding employees who were still awake and could execute Musk’s vision. He gave the task to Twitter employees in London, who were just beginning their day.

Rely on data or intuition?

In meetings with his employees, Musk cited Tesla’s autopilot team. It was fifteen times smaller than Twitter’s engineering staff but still managed to hit his demanding deadlines and regularly ship updates to the software. Autopilot was a matter of life or death for Tesla’s customers, he thought. Twitter was just a website with constantly scrolling text and media.

“Why don’t we build some of the product capabilities to make the rules less punitive, and reinstate accounts?” Roth suggested. It was a path forward that didn’t dismantle the rules. Musk agreed, and told Roth to get started building it, finally green-lighting the project that had stalled all summer under his looming acquisition. For now, the Babylon Bee would remain off Twitter. The conversation clearly impressed the billionaire. That weekend, in response to conservative users who called for Roth to be fired, Musk replied, “We’ve all made some questionable tweets, me more than most, but I want to be clear that I support Yoel. My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs.” It also made a deep impression on Roth, who had feared that Musk would hate him. Musk was clearly persuadable, Roth thought, and liked thinking through the nuances of technology. Maybe there was a path for him to stay at Twitter after all.

Musk seemed more swayed by Calacanis’s price than Sacks’s, except for the fact that he hated the number 9. Tesla never used the number on its website, and he saw any attempts to play mind games on customers as tacky. “That’s dumb. We don’t do it and it makes no sense,” he chastised the podcaster. “Fine, it can be $100, but it should be $99,” Calacanis relented. Musk also turned to his biographer for advice. “Walter, what do you think?” Musk asked during a meeting about pricing. “This should be accessible to everyone,” Isaacson said, no longer just the fly on the wall. “You need a really low price point, because this is something that everyone is going to sign up for.” To those in the room who designed or built Blue Verified, the discussions were baffling. There was Musk, a supposed genius leader who had built billion-dollar companies, soliciting advice from a small inner circle of advisers who had little experience working on social networks. Sure, they used Twitter, but these rich men were not representative of the hundreds of millions of people around the world who logged in to the platform every day. They were all making gut decisions based on their experiences in their own Twitter filter bubbles—and Musk lapped it up.

“But think of everyone with an iPhone,” Musk responded. “If you can afford an iPhone, you can definitely afford this.” He paused to think. “You know, like, what do people pay for Starbucks? Like $8?” Before anyone could raise serious objections, he whipped out his phone to set his word in stone. “Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit,” he tweeted on November 1. “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.”

She quickly learned that she could challenge him, but typically in one-on-one settings where he was jovial and willing to learn from the person in front of him. Individually, Musk could be charming, willingly engaging in discussion and listening to the expertise of his counterpart. Put him in a larger group setting with people outside of his inner circle or those he didn’t trust, however, and Musk’s ego ran wild. He could never be seen as inferior or uninformed. The people who survived in his orbit learned this quickly.

In the same meeting, Musk wanted to review the descriptions of Twitter Blue that would be used online and in the Apple App store. “It should be: ‘Rocket to the top of replies, mentions, search, and topics,’ ” he said, reading through some of that copy. “Remove the comma before ‘and.’ I find it troubling.”

The longer the Blue team worked under Musk’s direction, the more they realized his decision-making was driven solely by gut instinct. Musk’s unparalleled success in building two world-changing companies had given him—and his allies—the belief that he was the alpha when it came to product decisions. No one was better or more qualified, and he made that readily known. Despite running his other companies, Musk seemed like he was constantly available, if not in person, then over text or email, and he wanted to call every shot, no matter how small. After the initial round of layoffs that removed many, many executives and managers, Musk had more than a hundred people reporting to him.

When Musk reentered the room, the chatter died. People clacked away on their laptops monitoring the launch, while Musk stared at his phone. No one had expected Musk to be with them for so long, yet he continued to sit at the table, seemingly with no other obligations or places to be. He picked through the snacks, at one point eating half of a doughnut in a single bite, and at times blurting out whatever crossed his mind.

Over the coming weeks, Musk’s mood swings and periods of depression would become routine. The ad threats sent Musk on a tailspin and exposed something particularly human about him—he could be terrified into submission.

Musk called Roth directly, and the two debated Roth’s decision for half an hour. But Roth stayed firm.

“Btw, I’d like to apologize for Twitter being super slow in many countries. App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!” Musk wrote on Saturday. The tweet was wonky enough to soar over the average user’s head, but to Twitter’s engineers, it was blatantly false. In #social-watercooler, they called out Musk’s mistake, showed he had conflated various technical terms, and poked fun at his lack of expertise with laughing emojis.

It was important to move fast, he continued, because the bottom was about to fall out of the economy. Advertising was getting crushed and Blue was his way out of ad dependence. “I just got off the phone with Disney,” he said. “The reason they had an emergency CEO change is they’re going to have severe financial issues next year. Disney. Even fucking Disney. “It’s gonna be bankruptcy city in 2023,” Musk continued.

Totally incorrect

On Saturday, December 10, Musk erupted with frustration. Twitter was still hemorrhaging money and he decided to take the budget into his own hands. He summoned workers in San Francisco to the Caracara conference room at headquarters and insisted that finance executives and team leads from around the world dial in on a conference line. Then he opened up a spreadsheet that documented Twitter’s total expenditures and began to read it, line by line. As he ticked through different parts of the business, Musk demanded that the employees responsible for the spending explain their budgets to him. If Musk agreed the expense was necessary, the spending could continue. But if he didn’t, the team’s expenditures would go to zero immediately.

The discussion, which lasted for six hours, was a wake-up call for Musk. He had thought that Davis had already eliminated every possible expense, but he had determined for himself that Twitter was still spending tens of millions of dollars that it didn’t need to. In his mind, there was no accountability. Musk believed he would need to become even more hands-on in his management of Twitter.

Davis totally poorly focused (built Twitter Hotel)

By the time he touched down in London, 57.5 percent of the more than 17.5 million accounts that had voted were calling for him to resign. It was a shock to Musk’s system. For a man who read sci-fi and superhero fantasies growing up as a kid, the rejection felt like Gotham voting to exile Batman. Musk was shorn of the deep confidence he often had in himself and driven into further misery by Tesla’s tumbling stock. The company’s shares set a new two-year low upon his return stateside on December 20 and were down nearly 66 percent since the start of the year. Musk spent the day in Austin at Tesla, attempting to do damage control and prove to the market he wasn’t an absentee boss. The stock continued to fall in the days after. When he arrived back in San Francisco, he stopped responding to some emails and texts, while those who did come in contact with him reported to others in his circle that he was in the throes of a manic event. His behavior would begin a period of what Marc Andreessen, a cofounder of Twitter investor Andreessen Horowitz, would term “an episode.” The venture capitalist became so concerned that he messaged Twitter staffers to see if Musk, who confined himself largely to his conference room, was in the right headspace.

In one conversation with a confidant, Musk choked up and began to doubt his ability to run the company. He wanted to be liked, and his realization that millions of people—including some of his friends and supporters—could turn against him in an instant sent him further into depression. “I’m never going to recover from this,” he said.

Those who had survived the billionaire’s blast radius knew never to speak out of turn or offer guesses. They also learned to create presentations that Musk could easily digest from his phone—as he rarely, if ever, used a computer. No one told Tang.

Standing up, the engineer began riffing with a presentation from his laptop. Instead of saying he didn’t know the cause of the issue, he pointed to other trends. Likes on the platform were decreasing overall, he said, before Musk cut him off. “I’m not talking about likes,” he growled. “I’m talking about view counts.” Tang pushed on, citing external factors. There were decreases in Google searches for Musk’s name and he correlated that with internal engagement data. Perhaps the answer was simply that people were less interested in Twitter’s new owner now that the deal had concluded. Maybe it had nothing to do with Twitter’s algorithm. Musk snapped. “You’re fired! You’re fired!” he bellowed at the engineer.

Silly

During the first quarter of the football game, he had tweeted, “Go @Eagles!!!,” a harmless show of support for the team from Philly, where Musk had spent time as an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania. About forty minutes after Musk’s tweet, President Joe Biden used the official @POTUS Twitter account to broadcast his own Super Bowl message. “As your president, I’m not picking favorites,” he wrote, including a video of the First Lady in a custom Philadelphia jersey. “But as Jill Biden’s husband, fly Eagles, fly.” The president’s tweet rocketed across the platform. Despite the account having less than a fourth of Musk’s followers, the @POTUS post quickly surpassed Musk’s own pro-Eagles proclamation, eventually racking up 29 million views to Musk’s 8.4 million. As an enthralling game played out in front of him, Musk ignored the cheers and the bone-crunching tackles, and kept comparing his tweet against Biden’s, before deleting his post in anger. He fired off an email to Twitter’s product engineers, demanding they immediately find the cause, and then began making arrangements for people to meet him back at Twitter’s office that night. Musk left the game early and was already back on his private jet flying to San Francisco before the red and white confetti fell for the Chiefs’ victory. Dozens of people arrived at headquarters on Sunday night, some coming straight from their own Super Bowl parties to deal with Musk’s five-alarm fire.

Intense

By Monday, however, several engineers had found the root of the problem. Musk’s tweets were not being surfaced to his followers at the expected rate by Twitter’s algorithm. In turn, a system called “out of network tweets,” which recommends posts from accounts that users do not follow into their feeds as a way of potentially building new connections, was not surfacing Musk’s tweets to non-followers, further depressing his engagement. The issue affected only a handful of high-profile users, the engineers determined.

So Musk was right after all

Davis pored over monthly spending reports and then called up managers at random, blindsiding them with questions about the employees who reported to them. “What does this person do?” Davis would ask. “Are they any good?”

The company had become so lean that everything was on the verge of falling apart. At one point, the last remaining person in charge of approving expenses went on vacation. During the employee’s two-week absence, no one’s expense reports were processed.

Some Twitter workers spotted him one last time near the end of June, when Davis and Nicole Hollander flew to Boulder, Colorado. The company was being evicted from its office there, and the couple was responsible for clearing out any remaining valuables before the property manager changed the locks. Hollander showed up with several moving trucks and started loading up anything she thought Musk wouldn’t want to lose, including servers and a few flat-screen TVs. She even packed up a massage chair that she thought Musk might want. With the trucks piled to the brim, Hollander hosted a yard sale for employees, allowing them to buy their own desks and art from around the office. She accepted payments for the items on her personal Venmo account.

Bizarre focus by Davis

In Muskian fashion, the name change was a surprise order with a harsh deadline. By Sunday, his loyalists were ripping through Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco like looters, tearing down any bird insignia they could find. They took down a ten-foot blue bird logo from the cafeteria and began projecting X’s on the walls instead. In one instance, someone tried to remove a logo from the security desk but partly failed, leaving a broken bird. Conference rooms, which were all named after species of birds, were also rebranded to words with X in them, like “eXposure” and “eXult.” Caracara became “s3Xy.”