Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

by Kate Conger

Musk sat on one side of a large oak table, his sagging, six-foot-two frame scrunched into a Herman Miller office chair.

Whether he fully realized it at the time or not, Musk had gambled his reputation and billions of dollars on the haphazard acquisition of his favorite toy.

But at its core, Twitter was plagued by social and political dilemmas, not merely technological ones.

People walked away from a session scrolling through their timelines feeling angry, frustrated, disgusted—and yet they couldn’t wait to log back on.

What was once called the digital town square is becoming Musk’s mirror.

She also studied harassment and found that vitriolic threats from a handful of accounts were enough to drive users off the platform, even if their overall experiences were positive—powerful data that she used to convince Twitter executives that good speech wouldn’t naturally drown out the bad.

“Freedom of expression means little as our underlying philosophy if we continue to allow voices to be silenced because they are afraid to speak up,” Gadde wrote in a 2015 op-ed for The Washington Post.

it was an addictive app for a subset of influential people and organizations, and hard to use and intimidating for the average person.

Musk was summoning a deluge of online conspiracists to harass an otherwise anonymous civilian whose expertise had just aided the successful rescue of children.

Musk had tasked one of his most trusted staffers, Jared Birchall, with hiring a private eye to dig up dirt on Unsworth and reverse engineer the truth of his allegation.

Even in those early years, Musk understood the value of a good story. He was a salesman at heart, developing narratives around his work ethic and visions of the future that would serve him in the decades to come. And he gravitated toward anyone with a tape recorder or camera that would give him airtime. He was also image-conscious, later correcting his receding hairline.

“The way that my role has been portrayed to date, where I am referred to merely as ‘an early investor’ is outrageous,” he wrote. “We need to make a serious effort to correct this perception.”

Just factually untrue

For those who worked with him, it was one of his greatest superpowers: the ability to stay consistently on message, despite the criticism and uncertainty.

“With Twitter, we can talk directly to the people,” Musk added. “Why do we need to go through journalists?”

By 2017, Musk’s Twitter habit had become an addiction. That year, he tweeted 1,162 times, increasing his output by nearly 60 percent from the previous twelve months to average more than three tweets a day.

They brought up the twenty-three-year-old Sports Illustrated swimsuit model he had dated, teasing him for buying her a house. She was two decades younger than the Twitter cofounder.

Pig

young men who believed they were uniquely capable of changing the world and clogged Sand Hill Road as they traipsed to investor meetings.

oh to be a mediocre Whiteman