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“When you’re at Tesla, you’re afraid to go anywhere else, because you will become so bored.”
Musk could be fiercely stubborn. He had a reality-distorting willfulness and a readiness to run roughshod over naysayers. This steeliness may have been one of the superpowers that produced his successes, along with his flameouts. But here’s a lesser-known trait: he could change his mind. He could take in arguments that he seemed to be rejecting and recalibrate his risk calculations. And that is what happened with the steering wheels.
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, progress, orbital velocity. His preferred buzzword was “hardcore.” Discomfort, he believed, was a good thing. It was a weapon against the scourge of complacency. Vacations, flower-smelling, work-life balance, and days of “mental rest” were not his thing. Let that sink in.
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. He wasn’t sure he wanted to condone that. More significantly, he was balking at allowing his stock in Twitter to be rolled over into equity in the new Musk-controlled private company. If he didn’t roll over his stock, it could be bad for Musk’s financing plans.
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.
Roth had been working on such a plan for downplaying the reach of certain tweets and users. He saw it as a way to avoid banning controversial users outright.
Ironically, when that message emerged as part of Musk’s transparency data dump known as “the Twitter Files” in December 2022, it was seen as a smoking-gun confirmation that conservatives had been subjected to “shadow banning” by liberals at Twitter.
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.
“This is one of the most terrifying financial pictures I have ever seen,” he said. “I think we may see in excess of a $2 billion shortfall of cash next year.” To be able to tide Twitter over, he sold another $4 billion of his Tesla stock.
“Let me be crystal clear,” he began, slowly and coldly. “If people do not return to the office when they are able to return to the office, they cannot remain at the company. End of story. If you can show up in an office and you do not show up at the office: resignation accepted. End of story.”
“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.”
“I just wanted to walk away while my reputation was still intact and I could still be employable,” he says, wistfully. He also wanted his safety. He had been hit by frightening anti-Semitic and anti-gay death threats when the New York Post and other outlets wrote about his earlier tweets supporting Democrats and denouncing Trump.
“However bad you may think the Twitter culture is, multiply that by ten,” he said. “The laziness and entitlement here is insane.”
“I’m a big believer that a small number of exceptional people who are highly motivated can do better than a large number of people who are pretty good and moderately motivated,”
Andrew, who like James was very sensitive to the privacy concerns, said they did not look at private messages. “It’s striking a balance in a company,” he says. “To what extent do you allow dissent?” Musk did not share these qualms. 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.
Don’t make the choice opt-out. Instead, make it opt-in. We want to make it sound like the Shackleton expedition. We want people who declare they are hardcore.”
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.”
Kanye West, he was still teaching Musk lessons about the complexities of free speech. He appeared on Alex Jones’s podcast and declared, “I love Hitler.” He then posted on Twitter a picture of Musk in a bathing suit being sprayed with a hose by Ari Emanuel, which oozed controlled-by-Jews, anti-Semitic undertones. “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.”
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.”
the impending round of exits would be firing people “for cause” because their work was allegedly not good enough, rather than reduction-in-force layoffs, for which people would be due a generous severance. He was making a distinction that most people missed. “There are no more RIFs planned,” he declared at the outset of the meeting, to great applause.
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.
He showed me a gif of a flaming dumpster rolling down a road and admitted, “Some days I wake up and look at Twitter to see if it’s still working.”
it began to innovate and add features faster than it ever had before.
“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.”
he realized that being at war with Apple was not a great idea.
new shorter-term missions that he had set for Neuralink. “The first is restoring vision,” he said. “Even if someone was born blind, we believe we can allow them to see.” Next, he talked about paralysis. “As miraculous as it may sound, we’re confident that it is possible to restore full-body functionality to someone who has a severed spinal cord.” The presentation lasted three hours. He stuck around until 1 a.m., partying with his engineers. It was, he later said, a welcome break from the “dumpster fire” at Twitter.
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 sensitivities of Twitter’s progressive and woke
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Musk was generally in the middle category, but he came to harbor darker suspicions that pushed him toward the third category.
Taibbi’s initial thirty-seven-tweet thread showed how Twitter had set up special systems for politicians, the FBI, and intelligence agencies to provide input on what tweets should be considered for deletion. Most notably, Taibbi included messages from 2020, when Yoel Roth and others at Twitter debated whether to block links to a New York Post story about what was purported to be (correctly, as it turned out) a laptop abandoned by Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
Roth and Jack Dorsey would later concede that doing so was a mistake.
These and subsequent revelations by Taibbi were covered by some big press organizations, such as Fox News, but much of the traditional media labeled it, as one Twitter hashtag put it, a “#nothingburger.”
“A long list of government enforcement agencies essentially got to operate Twitter as an involuntary contractor,” Taibbi wrote.
Taibbi’s revelations illustrated the problematic but unsurprising fact that the moderators at Twitter were biased in favor of suppressing stories that would help Trump. More than 98 percent of the donations made by people at the company went to Democrats.
algorithms can reinforce the ideological pigeonholing that sends people into far-left or far-right echo chambers. My Twitter’s “You might like” section immediately suggested that I follow Roger Stone, James Woods, and Lauren Boebert.
Weiss called herself “a reasonable liberal concerned that far-left critiques stifled free speech.”
In one of his giddy moods, he took them running around the building showing off the stashes of “Stay Woke” T-shirts and other vestiges of the old regime. “The barbarians have crashed through the gates and are pillaging the merch!” he proclaimed. Weiss marveled that he was like a kid who had just bought a candy store and still couldn’t believe he owned it.
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. At stake was “the future of civilization,” he said. “Birth rates are plummeting, the thought police are gaining power.” Twitter was distrusted by half the country, he believed, because it had suppressed certain viewpoints. To reverse that would
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“What the fuck?” she texted Musk. “You’re like asking the guy to do searches on himself? This makes no fucking sense.” Musk flipped out. “It’s like asking Al Capone to, like, look into his own taxes,” he said.
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.
beginning in the 1990s and accelerating after 9/11, established journalists felt increasingly comfortable sharing information and cooperating with top people in the government and intelligence communities. That mindset was replicated at social media companies, as shown by all the briefings Twitter and other tech companies received.
he was betraying the things he was claiming to want Twitter to be about—a public square that wasn’t rigged in favor of one side or the other. And just from a purely strategic perspective, he was martyring a lot of assholes.”
“You can’t be a journalist and watch journalists get kicked off Twitter and say nothing,” she says. “Principles still matter to me.” She knew it might mean that she would lose her access to report on the Twitter Files. And, as she joked to Nellie Bowles, “I guess Elon won’t ever be our sperm donor now.”
“Rather than rigorously pursuing truth,” Musk responded on Twitter, “you are virtue-signaling to show that you are ‘good’ in the eyes of media elite to keep one foot in both worlds.” He then restricted her access to the Twitter Files.
“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.”
“No, tomorrow,” Musk ordered. “I’ve built server centers myself, and I can tell if you could put more servers there or not. That’s why I asked if you had actually visited these facilities. If you’ve not been there, you’re just talking bullshit.”
SpaceX and Tesla were successful because Musk relentlessly pushed his teams to be scrappier, more nimble, and to launch fire-drill surges that extruded all obstacles. That’s how they had cobbled together a car production line in a tent in Fremont and a test facility in the Texas desert and a launch site at Cape Canaveral made of used parts. “All you need to do is just move the fucking servers to Portland,” he said. “If it takes longer than thirty days, that would blow my mind.” He paused and recalculated. “Just get a moving company, and it will take a week to move the computers and another
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They were somewhere over Las Vegas when James made his suggestion that they could move them now. It was the type of impulsive, impractical, surge-into-the-breach idea that Musk loved. It was already late evening, but he told his pilot to divert, and they made a loop back up to Sacramento.
“These things do not look that hard to move,” Elon announced. It was a reality-distorting assertion, since each rack weighed about twenty-five hundred pounds and was eight feet tall.
