Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

Musk seemed amazed as he wandered around Twitter’s headquarters, which was in a ten-story Art Deco former merchandise mart built in 1937. It had been renovated in a tech-hip style with coffee bars, yoga studio, fitness room, and game arcades.

salads. The signs on the restrooms said, “Gender diversity is welcome here,” and as Musk poked through cabinets filled with stashes of Twitter-branded merchandise, he found T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Stay woke,” which he waved around as an example of the mindset that he believed had infected the company.

Between Twitterland and the Muskverse was a radical divergence in outlook that reflected two different mindsets about the American workplace. Twitter prided itself on being a friendly place where coddling was considered a virtue.

“We were definitely very high-empathy, very caring about inclusion and diversity; everyone needs to feel safe here,” says Leslie Berland, who was chief marketing and people officer until she was fired by Musk. The company had instituted a permanent work-from-home option and allowed a mental “day of rest” each month.

One of the commonly used buzzwords at the company was “psychological safety.” Care was taken not to discomfort. Musk let loose a bitter laugh when he heard the phrase “psychological safety.” It made him recoil. He considered it to be the enemy of urgency...

He had privately come to the conclusion that Twitter’s biggest competitor was going to be Substack, the online platform that journalists and others were using to publish content and get paid by users.

Also speaking up, though somewhat reticently, was a young midlevel engineer, born in France, named Ben San Souci. “Can I give you an idea in nineteen seconds?” he asked. It was about ways to crowd-source moderation of hate speech. Musk interjected with his idea for giving each user a slider they could manipulate to determine the intensity of tweets they were shown. “Some will want teddy bears and puppies, others will love combat and say ‘Bring it all on.’ ”

a woman tried to say something and he did a surprising thing for a tech bro: he deferred to her.

“Are you going to fire seventy-five percent of us?” Musk laughed and paused. “No, that number didn’t come from me,” he answered. “This unnamed sources bullshit has to stop. But we do face a challenge. We are headed to recession, and revenue is below cost, so we have to find ways to bring in more money or reduce costs.” It wasn’t exact...

its conference rooms were filling up with a mercenary force of loyal engineers from Tesla and SpaceX who, at Musk’s direction, were combing through Twitter’s code and sketching org charts on the whiteboards to determine which employees were worth keeping. Another two rooms were occupied by his platoon of bankers and lawyers. They seemed girding for battle.

Twitter’s cofounder and former CEO Jack Dorsey had been initially supportive of Musk buying the company, but in the past few weeks had become unnerved by the controversy and drama. Musk, he worried, was going to gut his baby.

methodically planned a jiu-jitsu maneuver: they would force a fast close on Thursday night. If they timed everything right, Musk could fire Agrawal and other top Twitter executives “for cause” before their stock options could vest. It was somewhat audacious, even ruthless. But it was justified in Musk’s mind because of the price he was paying and his conviction that Twitter’s management had misled him.

In addition to extracting vengeance and saving some money, there was a gamesmanship that was driving Musk. The surprise finale would be dramatic, like a well-timed strike in Polytopia.

Agrawal had his letter of resignation, citing the change of control, ready to send. But when his Twitter email was cut off, it took him a few minutes to get the document into a Gmail message. By that point, he had already been fired by Musk. “He tried to resign,” Musk said. “But we beat him,” Spiro replied.

After a court previously dismissing the execs' case, a judge ruled Nov 2024 that Agrawal and the other execs can sue Musk for "terminating their roles with the social media company during his acquisition and before they could resign, in order to cheat them of their severance" (Live Mint, 2024).

Michael Grimes, the lead banker at Morgan Stanley, flew up from Los Angeles and arrived in the war room bearing gifts. The first was a montage showing historical defenses of free speech, beginning with John Milton in 1644 and culminating with Musk walking into Twitter headquarters and saying, “Let that sink in!”

James, Andrew, and Ross became the three musketeers of Musk’s takeover of Twitter, the kernel of a corps that included three dozen engineers from Tesla and SpaceX who gathered that week in the company’s second-floor conference spaces to execute the transformation.

James & Andrew were Musk's cousins, Ross was a random friend of theirs.

When James, Andrew, and Ross described how their layoff lists were progressing, Ben was not afraid to speak his mind. “In my experience, individuals are important, but the teams are also important,” he said. “Instead of just singling out good coders, I think it would be useful to find the teams that work really well together.”

“Also a down-vote button for tweets,” Beykpour said. “You need some negative user signal that can feed into rankings.” “Only paid and verified users should be allowed to do a down-vote,” Musk said, “because otherwise you could be subject to a bot attack.”

Musk was in no hurry to bring in anyone else to run Twitter right away, even after he conducted an online poll that said he should. He

Musk did not agree. He wanted deep cuts not only for financial reasons but also because he wanted a hardcore, fanatic work culture. He was willing, indeed eager to take risks and fly without a net.

Twitter’s human resources managers pushed back. They wanted to vet the list for diversity. Musk dismissed that suggestion.

About half of the company’s employees worldwide, and close to 90 percent of some infrastructure teams, were let go, their access to company computers and email immediately switched off. He also fired most of the human resources managers. And that was just round one in what would be a three-round bloodbath.

Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, was a friend of Musk, sort of, in that odd way that the word is sometimes applied to celebrity party-pals who share energy and limelight but little intimacy.

Ye and his models wore “White Lives Matter” T-shirts at a fashion show, which spun into a social media firestorm culminating with a tweet from Ye proclaiming, “When I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” Twitter then banned him. A couple of days later, Musk tweeted, “Talked to Ye today & expressed my concerns about his recent tweet, which I think he took to heart.” But the musician remained banned.

Musk finally shows a limit, however it ended up just being an 8-month suspension (BBC, 2023)

There was also a financial problem: jittery advertisers did not want their brands to be in a toxic-speech cesspool.

Musk paused for a while and decided to back off a bit. He was familiar with the issue. His own child had transitioned. “Look, I want to be clear, I don’t think misgendering people is cool. But it’s not sticks and stones, like if you threaten to kill somebody.”

Roth put his laptop on a counter to show some ideas he was developing to put warning messages on tweets rather than deleting them or banning users. Musk nodded enthusiastically. “That sounds like exactly what we should do,” he said. “These problem tweets shouldn’t show up in search. They shouldn’t show up in your timeline, but like, if you navigate to somebody’s profile, maybe you see them.”

Musk had declared his opposition to censorship, and now swarms of trolls and provocateurs were testing the limits. Use of the N-word went up 500 percent in the twelve hours after Musk took control. Unfettered free speech, the new team quickly discovered, had a downside.

“He told me that he thought some of my old tweets were funny, and he was genuinely supportive even though a lot of conservatives were calling for my head,” Roth says. Musk even responded to one conservative on Twitter with a defense of Roth. “We’ve all made some questionable tweets, me more than most, but I want to be clear that I support Yoel,” he wrote. “My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs.”

Musk’s tweet showed his growing tendency (like his father) to read wacky fake-news sites purveying conspiracy theories, a problem that Twitter had writ large. He quickly deleted the tweet, apologized, and later said privately that it was one of his dumbest mistakes. It was also a costly one. “It’s definitely going to be a problem with advertisers,” Roth texted Alex Spiro.

Musk had begun to realize that creating a good venue for advertisers conflicted with his plans to open the aperture to more raucous free speech.

Musk has an intuitive feel for engineering issues, but his neural nets have trouble when dealing with human feelings, which is what made his Twitter purchase such a problem. He thought of it as a technology company, when in fact it was an advertising medium based on human emotions and relationships.

“I am who I am,” he said at one point, which was not actually reassuring to any of his listeners, who somehow hoped otherwise.

On one of the Zoom calls, some of the advertisers could be seen folding their arms or signing off. “What the fuck?” one of them muttered. Twitter was supposed to be a billion-dollar business, not an extension of Elon Musk’s flaws and quirks.

The next day, many of Twitter’s top executives who were trusted by the advertising community quit or were fired, most notably Leslie Berland, Jean-Philippe Maheu, and Sarah Personette. More major brands and advertising agencies announced their intention to pause Twitter advertising or just did so quietly. Sales fell 80 percent for the month.

Musk’s messages moved from reassuring to cajoling to threatening. “Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists,” he tweet...

He finished crafting the new misgendering policy he had promised Musk. The plan was to put a warning on any offending tweet, lower its visibility, and not let it be retweeted. Musk approved.

He called Roth and ordered him to stop users from urging advertisers to boycott Twitter. This did not, of course, align with his professed fealty to free speech, but Musk’s anger takes on a moral righteousness that can brush away inconsistencies.

Roth was appalled. There was no rule on Twitter against advocating boycotts. It was done all the time. Indeed, it was the type of advocacy, Roth felt, that made Twitter important.

Henry Kissinger once quoted an aide saying that the Watergate scandal had happened “because some damn fool went into the Oval Office and did what Nixon told him to do.” Those around Musk knew how to ride out his periods of demon mode.

Subscriptions were a key part of Musk’s plans for Twitter. He called it Twitter Blue.

Musk’s idea was to create a new authentication badge for anyone willing to pay a monthly fee. Jason Calacanis and others suggested that it would be elitist to have different marks for those who had been knighted as “notables” and those who paid, so Musk decided that both categories would get the same blue check mark.

Twitter Blue would serve many purposes. First, it would cut back on troll farms and bot armies, because only one verified account would be permitted on any one credit card and phone. Second, it would be a new revenue stream.

“There is only one priority: stopping the massive impersonation onslaught that’s going to happen.” One problem was that this required humans as well as lines of code. Musk had laid off 50 percent of the staff and 80 percent of the outside contractors who worked on vetting users.

There was a tsunami of fake accounts with blue checks pretending to be famous politicians and, worse yet, big advertisers. One purporting to be the drugmaker Eli Lilly tweeted, “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.” The company’s stock price fell more than 4 percent in an hour. A

Roth’s feelings toward Musk were complex. Most of their interactions had been good. “He was reasonable, funny, engaging, and would talk about his vision in a way that was a bit bullshit but mainly something you could totally be inspired by,” Roth says. But then there were the times when Musk showed an authoritarian, mean, dark streak. “He was the bad Elon, and that’s the one I couldn’t take.”

“People want me to say I hate him, but it’s much more complicated, which, I suppose, is what makes him interesting. He’s a bit of an idealist, right? He has a set of grand visions, whether it’s multiplanetary humanity or renewable energy and even free speech. And he has constructed for himself a moral and ethical universe that is focused on the delivery of those big goals. I think that makes it hard to villainize him.”

he vented his frustrations about Twitter. “I don’t know why I did it,” he said, looking tired and dejected. “The judge basically said that I have to buy Twitter or else, and now I’m like, okay, shit.” It was exactly two weeks after Musk had closed the Twitter deal.

“I’m hoping to be out of Twitter hell at some point,” he said,

The moderator asked what advice he would give to someone who wanted to be the next Elon Musk. “I’d be careful what you wish for,” he replied. “I’m not sure how many people would actually like to be me. The amount that I torture myself is next level, frankly.”