Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

If he wanted the survivors at Twitter to be hardcore, he was going to have to show them how hardcore he could be. He had slept on the floor of his first office at Zip2 in 1995. He had slept on the roof of Tesla’s Nevada battery factory in 2017. He had slept under his desk at the Fremont assembly plant in 2018. It wasn’t because it was truly necessary. He did it because it was in his nature to love the drama, the urgency, and the sense that he was a wartime general who could rally his troops into battle mode. Now it was time for him to sleep at Twitter headquarters.

Unfettered free speech did not extend to the workplace. He told them to root out people who were making very snarky comments. He wanted to rid the workforce of negativity.

James and Ross spent Tuesday thinking of ways to determine which employees were truly driven. Then they saw a post someone had made on Slack. “Please let me go with severance and I will leave,” it said. It dawned on them that they could rely on self-selection.

If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below. Anyone who has not done so by 5pm ET tomorrow (Thursday) will receive three months of severance.

Elon changed it to an opt-in to stay at Twitter rather than an opt-out to take severance and leave

How many would say yes? James thought it would be 2,000 out of the approximately 3,600 remaining employees. Ross wagered it would be 2,150. Musk chimed in with a low prediction: 1,800 would choose to stay. In the end, 2,492 said yes, a surprisingly high 69 percent of the workforce.

In making the reinstatements, he announced the “visibility-filtering” policy that he and Roth had devised. “New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach,” he wrote. “Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter. You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out.”

He drew the line at Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who claimed that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was “a giant hoax.” Musk said Jones would stay banned. “My firstborn child died in my arms,” Musk tweeted. “I felt his last heartbeat. I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame.”

“Let’s always remember this as my final tweet,” Ye wrote, then posted a swastika inside a Star of David. “I tried my best,” Musk announced. “Despite that, Ye again violated our rule against incitement to violence. Account will be suspended.”

“If he’s engaged in criminal activity—it seems increasingly that he has—that’s not okay,” Musk said. “It’s not free speech to subvert democracy.”

on struggling with the idea of reinstating Trump to Twitter

a poll question: “Reinstate former President Trump? Yes. No.” Leaving aside the propriety of lifting the ban on Trump and of letting a free-for-all online poll make the decision, there was the engineering issue. Conducting a poll, where millions of votes would have to be tabulated instantly and populated in real time on user feeds, could push Twitter’s undermanned servers into a meltdown. But Musk relished risk.

When the poll closed the next day, more than 15 million users had voted. The tally was close: 51.8 percent to 48.2 percent in favor of reinstating Trump. “The people have spoken,” Musk declared. “Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.”

I asked him right afterward whether he had a sense in advance of how the poll would turn out. No, he said. And if it had gone the other way, would he have kept Trump banned? Yes. “I’m not Trump’s fan. He’s disruptive. He’s the world’s champion of bullshit.”

In the future, he told them, the teams at Twitter would be led by engineers like themselves rather than designers and product managers. It was a subtle shift. It reflected his belief that Twitter should be, at its core, a software engineering company, led by people with a feel for coding, rather than a media and consumer-product company, led by people with a feel for human relationships and desires.

Musk had wrought one of the greatest shifts in corporate culture ever. Twitter had gone from being among the most nurturing workplaces, replete with free artisanal meals and yoga studios and paid rest days and concern for “psychological safety,” to the other extreme.

He did it not only for cost reasons. He preferred a scrappy, hard-driven environment where rabid warriors felt psychological danger rather than comfort.

“In some ways, Musk was vindicated,” they wrote. “Twitter was less stable now, but the platform survived and mostly functioned even with the majority of employees gone. He had promised to right-size a bloated company, and now it operated on minimal head count.”

Ellison, who had been a mentor of Steve Jobs, gave Musk a piece of advice: he should not get into a fight with Apple. It was the one company that Twitter could not afford to alienate. Apple was a major advertiser. More importantly, Twitter could not survive unless it continued to be available in the iPhone’s App Store.

Over the years, Twitter’s content moderators had become increasingly active in banning what they considered harmful speech. Depending on your outlook, there were three ways to view this:

(1) as a laudable effort to prevent the spread of false information that was medically dangerous, undermined democracy, provoked violence, stirred up hate, or perpetrated scams;

(2) as an effort that was originally well-intentioned but had now gone too far in repressing opinions that dissented from the medical and political orthodoxy or offended the hair-trigger sensi...

(3) as a dark collusion between Deep State actors conspiring with Big Tech and legacy media to preserve their power. Musk was generally in the middle category, but he came to harbor darker s...

Thus was launched what became known as “the Twitter Files,” which could and should have been a healthy linen-airing and transparency exercise, suitable for judicious reflection about media bias and the complexities of content moderation, except that it got caught in the vortex that these days sends people scurrying into their tribal bunkers on talk shows and social media.

there was a more significant finding exposed in Taibbi’s threads: Twitter had become a de facto collaborator with the FBI and other government agencies, giving them the power to flag large amounts of content for suggested removal.

Why was he doing this? they asked. At first he answered that he had been forced into buying the company after having second thoughts about his April offer. “Really, I wasn’t sure I still wanted to do it, but the lawyers told me I had to chew down this hairball, so I am,” he said. But then Musk began talking earnestly about his desire to create a public forum dedicated to free speech.

Twitter did not engage in outright shadow banning in a technical sense, but it did use visibility filtering. In discussions with Yoel Roth, Musk himself had embraced the idea as an alternative to outright user bans, and he had publicly touted the policy a few weeks earlier.

The problem came when the visibility filtering was done with a political bias.

“The people in charge of these institutions enforced the new parameters by expanding the definitions of words like ‘violence,’ ‘harm,’ and ‘safety.’ ”

Weiss found that Twitter was too willing to suppress posts that did not comport with official pronouncements, including ones on legitimate topics for debate, such as whether mRNA vaccines caused heart problems, whether mask mandates worked, and whether the virus emerged from a lab leak in China.

Twitter put Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya on the Trends blacklist, which meant that the visibility of his tweets was curtailed. He had organized a declaration by some scientists arguing that lockdowns and school closures would be more harmful than helpful, a controversial view that turned out to have some validity.

“The old regime at Twitter governed by its own whims and biases, and it sure looks like the new regime has the same problem,” Weiss tweeted on the morning of December 16, the day after the journalists had been kicked off. “I oppose it in both cases.”

For example, he retweeted comments by Robert Kennedy Jr., a fervent antivaxxer who alleged that the CIA had killed his uncle the president.

“Musk made the decision to share a defamatory allegation that I support or condone pedophilia,” Roth later said. “I had to leave my home and sell it. Those are the consequences for this type of online harassment and speech.”

As for Saxon, who is autistic, he again showed his wisdom. At one point the family was discussing how they needed to use pseudonyms when they went to a restaurant. “Oh, yes,” he said. “If anyone finds out I’m Elon Musk’s son, they are going to be mad at me because he’s ruining Twitter.”

During launch week, Antonio Gracias and some other friends talked to Musk about the need to restrain his impetuous and destructive instincts. If he was going to lead a new era of space exploration, they said, he needed to be more elevated, to be above the fray politically.

After the launch, he displayed a touch of self-awareness. “I’ve shot myself in the foot so often I ought to buy some Kevlar boots,” he joked. Perhaps, he ruminated, Twitter should have an impulse-control delay button.

But would a restrained Musk accomplish as much as a Musk unbound? Is being unfiltered and untethered integral to who he is? Could you get the rockets to orbit or the transition to electric vehicles without accepting all aspects of him, hinged and unhinged?

Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training. They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world.

Elon Musk allowed me to shadow him for two years, invited me to sit in on his meetings, indulged scores of interviews and late-night conversations, provided emails and texts, and encouraged his friends, colleagues, family members, adversaries, and ex-wives to talk to me. He did not ask to, nor did he, read this book before it was published, and he exercised no control over it.

a few who provided special help, photographs, and guidance: Maye Musk, Errol Musk, Kimbal Musk, Justine Musk, Claire Boucher (Grimes), Talulah Riley, Shivon Zilis, Sam Teller, Omead Afshar, James Musk, Andrew Musk, Ross Nordeen, Dhaval Shroff, Bill Riley, Mark Juncosa, Kiko Dontchev, Jehn Balajadia, Lars Moravy, Franz von Holzhausen, Jared Birchall, and Antonio Gracias.