Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

by Kate Conger

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