Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

by Kate Conger

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.