Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

by Kate Conger

“What did you say to him?” he asked. “I told him some things he didn’t like,” the data scientist responded. “It must have felt good.” “Yep,” he said, before stepping out of the elevator shaft, handing over his ID badge, and leaving Twitter’s headquarters for the last time. “To be honest, what I said is what everyone is saying behind his back. But nobody’s saying it to his face.”

Dorsey had strategized for years to complete his Steve Jobs character arc. He was unceremoniously fired as Twitter’s chief executive in 2008 and had plotted a route back to the top job ever since,

Dorsey began work on a digital payments processor, tapping some of his old interests in relaying and dispatching information, and developed an elegant credit card reader, reminiscent of Apple products in its design, that could be plugged into an iPhone’s headphone jack. He gave the project a simple name: Square.

But despite his success at Square, Dorsey couldn’t take his eye off Twitter. He still was bitter toward Williams and dreamed of going back.

Obsessed with X.com after reportedly spending a small fortune on the web domain, he lobbied to change the name of the PayPal feature to X, despite the fact that PayPal already had brand recognition.

“I support the current thing,”

Since Tesla and SpaceX had moved more operations to the Lone Star State, Musk had started to think of Texas as “home,”

This will be reflected in our 8-K tomorrow. I’ve asked our team to share a draft with your family office today,” Taylor wrote to Musk, using a term for an SEC financial filing that Twitter was obligated to share with the public whenever major changes occurred at the company.

TED Conference, the annual confab where willing people gave inspirational talks in front of rich people under the motto “ideas worth spreading.”