Character Limit Quotes

“Employees were livid. Their leaders had not done enough. Many had long believed that Trump had no place on the platform. They watched as their peer companies, like Facebook, unilaterally banned the former president. Meanwhile, they were giving the president back his favorite megaphone after a night’s sleep.”
― Kate Conger, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

“That morning, a Syrian refugee entered a park in Annecy, France, and stabbed several children. A brutal video of the attack quickly emerged and began spreading across Twitter. The few employees who remained on the gutted trust and safety team scrambled to remove it. In the past, when violent imagery went viral on Twitter, the company used a data matching tool to detect any tweets containing it and wiped them out all at once. But the employees discovered that the tool they relied on wasn’t working. When they investigated, they learned that it was one of the bits of code that engineers had torn out months earlier. The tool had mistakenly flagged an image of a SpaceX rocket launch, so Musk had ordered the entire system be killed.”
― Kate Conger, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

“In March 2006, an early version of the service was ready to go. “just setting up my twttr,” Dorsey wrote. It was the world’s first official tweet.”
― Kate Conger, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

“I’m off the twitter board in mid May and then completely out of the company. I intend to do this work and fix our mistakes. Twitter started as a protocol. It should never have been a company. That was the original sin,” Dorsey texted.”
― Kate Conger, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

“Like many white male tech CEOs, he saw his companies as pure meritocracies, where hard work and smarts rose to the top. To Musk, diversity initiatives were antithetical to success, watering down his workforces with underqualified female or minority candidates and discriminating against white or male applicants.”
― Kate Conger, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

“Musk’s Twitter feed had become faster, louder, and increasingly unhinged. By the end of 2021, Musk was averaging more than 250 tweets a month, and they had taken a distinct rightward turn. He always fashioned himself a libertarian with liberal tendencies, a business scion who backed Barack Obama and deigned to join the Trump administration’s business councils, albeit holding his nose. The pandemic changed him.”
― Kate Conger, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

“No one has an inherent right to reach millions,” Agrawal told Graber. He and Dorsey had started using the catchphrase “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach” to describe their plans for Bluesky, he explained.”
― Kate Conger, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

“Most employees had no idea where Dorsey was and some executives tried to keep his whereabouts secret. It would be horrible for morale if workers—many of whom were cooped up working from their beds or couches—knew their leader was on an island with thirty-three private villas, kayak tours, and a vast spa with personalized massage treatments”
― Kate Conger, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

“In some ways, Musk was simply mimicking the means by which he learned about rocketry or automobile development, fields in which he had little prior experience. He consumed publicly available information, made quick judgments, and posited in his typical contrarian fashion that he could do better than the experts. With rockets and cars, he had been wildly successful. So why couldn’t he be right again, about COVID?”
― Kate Conger, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

“AT THE TIME OF WRITING, the story of Musk’s conquest is not over. It may yet end with a bang or a whimper—or an improbable success. But what is clear already is that Musk has destroyed the platform. What he owns is no longer Twitter—not in name, but also neither in substance nor in spirit. Gone are the people who built it idealistically, at a time when Silicon Valley’s utopian promises seemed much easier to believe, and gone is its company culture of debate, equality, and idealism.”
― Kate Conger, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

“By February 2024, the investment giant Fidelity had marked down the value of X, which was still paying off its onerous debt bill, to $11.8 billion, down more than 73 percent from its $44 billion purchase price.”
― Kate Conger, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

“The company was incurring more than $3 million3 a day in interest, with its first quarterly interest payment fast approaching at the end of December.”
― Kate Conger, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

“He aimed barbs at the comedian Kathy Griffin, who decided to turn her Twitter account into a parody of Musk’s in an attempt to test the limits of “free speech” and was subsequently banned by the billionaire.”
― Kate Conger, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

“The goal was to reassure the ad agencies that Musk’s Twitter wouldn’t descend into a cesspool of misinformation and hate speech.”
― Kate Conger, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

“The billionaire, racked with paranoia, had convinced himself that not all of Twitter’s employees were real.”
― Kate Conger, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

“Calacanis was told to sit in on product meetings, but Twitter engineers quickly began to view him as a joke when they realized Musk had little regard for him.”
― Kate Conger, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

“It quickly became apparent to the execs that Musk lacked basic knowledge of the merger agreement he had signed.”
― Kate Conger, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

“Employees began openly poking fun at their subdued chief executive. After suffering a series of embarrassing hacks over the years, Twitter had upped its security and forced top executives to use YubiKeys, hardware devices that generated random passwords, to shield Twitter’s digital empire. Once, Agrawal unexpectedly piped up in a Slack group that was open to all employees. But rather than a comforting missive, his message was a randomly generated collection of letters and numbers, apparently copied from his YubiKey. Employees mocked him by posting gobbledygook passwords of their own.”
― Kate Conger, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

“What was once called the digital town square is becoming Musk’s mirror.”
― Kate Conger, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter