After waiting for nearly four hours, the senior data scientist was growing restless. He hadn’t planned to be in the Twitter office. It was Veterans Day and most of his colleagues were logging out, but he was loitering outside a tenth-floor conference room at the company’s San Francisco headquarters, waiting to be summoned by Twitter’s new owner.
Elon Musk was in his element. The fifty-one-year-old billionaire thrived on tests of his endurance, thrilled by his own strength when he slept on a conference room couch at Tesla’s factory, or stayed up all night putting together the final flourishes for a rocket launch at SpaceX. Now he was pitting himself against Twitter. In the aftermath of his $44 billion takeover, he was straining the bounds of the social network. How quickly could he bend it to his will?
The data scientist, a lanky man with tousled reddish-brown hair and cutting blue eyes, had started working at Twitter only a year earlier. His colleagues had quickly come to see him as a deep thinker who was fascinated by the good—and bad—that came from connecting communities of humans online. He had honed his talent for distilling the vast landscape of social media into digestible sound bites during his five years at Facebook, where he had delved into reams of user data to explore thorny topics like hate speech and misinformation that contributed to people rioting at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. An academic at heart, the data scientist often critiqued his employer’s faults with a level of candor that executives rarely heard from other employees.
When Musk had offered to buy Twitter that April, the data scientist was optimistic. Musk was a man who had revolutionized two industries, mainstreaming electric cars and privatizing space exploration. Perhaps he was the visionary who could give the social media company a much-needed shot in the arm.
But over the past two weeks, Musk had fired half of the data scientist’s colleagues with no plan and little explanation of his vision. He had alienated advertisers, undermining the foundation of Twitter’s business. And he had fallen for a blatant conspiracy theory, tweeting out a fake story about the husband of Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, suggesting he was enmeshed in a tryst with a disturbed man who had attacked him in his home. It was the kind of absurd fiction that only someone with a warped mind—radicalized by hours spent online every day in their own filter bubble—would believe. The data scientist was horrified. Musk, apparently, was one of the easily misled conspiracists he had studied in his work.
Despite all the changes Musk had already made to Twitter, the billionaire had signaled he wouldn’t be resting that Friday. Early that morning, he sent out an email to his employees extending “a note of appreciation to those who were there with me.”
“I will be in the office again today,” Musk wrote. “Stop by the 10th floor if you’d like to talk about taking Twitter to the next level. The priority is near-term actions.”
The data scientist decided to take the plunge. He trekked through the fog and gloom of the San Francisco winter, making his way up Market Street to Twitter’s looming Art Deco headquarters. Just after 10:00 a.m., he set up camp at a bank of desks outside Caracara, a conference room with sweeping views of downtown and the gleaming dome of city hall. Its glass walls allowed people passing by to gaze in at executives as though they were lions at the zoo. Musk was the main attraction, and the workers waiting outside to meet with him whispered quietly about what they hoped to tell their new boss. As the data scientist clacked away on his laptop, working on a pair of memos he planned to share with Musk, he eavesdropped. Some employees murmured concerns about how few people had signed up for Twitter’s new subscription product. Others were trading tips on how to best communicate with their new leader.
Behnam Rezaei, a warm man who wore round, tortoiseshell glasses and had led engineering teams at Twitter for more than five years, approached the data scientist to offer advice. Rezaei had climbed the ladder into Musk’s good graces, avoiding the firings that took out his fellow managers and rising to a vice president role. Rezaei thought highly of the data scientist and had cashed in some of his newfound political capital to get him face time with Musk.
“Elon only wants to hear positive things,” Rezaei instructed him. “Don’t tell him about what we can’t do or try to justify the status quo.”
“Elon just wants to do what benefits humanity.”
Rezaei wasn’t aware, however, that the data scientist had already decided to quit. When he saw Musk’s email early Friday morning, he delayed his departure by one day so that he could speak directly to the new owner. He still believed in Twitter and the power of large social networks, and he hoped Musk would listen. Maybe Musk’s cohort of yes-men, who had arrived at the company following his takeover, hadn’t dared to tell him how badly he was screwing up.
As he waited, the data scientist finalized two documents he had prepared for his encounter. The first was a list of ideas for running Twitter more effectively. The second, a bolder statement, outlined why Musk’s plans to earn significant revenue from subscriptions and alter content-moderation policies wouldn’t work, and how his paranoia and instability were damaging the company.
As the hours ticked by, he scrounged for whatever snacks remained in one of the nearby kitchens. His heart beat heavily as he rehearsed in his head what he would say to Musk. Finally, just after 2:00 p.m., Musk’s assistant approached him. Musk was busy, she said. He would have only five minutes.
The data scientist strode into the conference room. Musk sat on one side of a large oak table, his sagging, six-foot-two frame scrunched into a Herman Miller office chair. The data scientist quickly introduced himself before launching into his presentation. Musk listened intently as he explained his ideas for growth, verification of users, and motivating employees. He then sketched out a vision for content moderation that placed decision-making power in the hands of an organization outside of its owner’s direct control.
“Newspapers and magazines have editorial independence, meaning owners don’t get to make final judgments about what stays and what goes,” the data scientist explained. “Social media companies should have the same structure.”
Musk wasn’t impressed. “Or not,” he muttered.
Musk’s assistant peeked back into the room and said he had another meeting. “Do you have any final thoughts?” she asked.
“Yes, I want to say one thing,” the data scientist said. He took a deep breath and turned to Musk.
“I’m resigning today. I was feeling excited about the takeover, but I was really disappointed by your Paul Pelosi tweet. It’s really such obvious partisan misinformation and it makes me worry about you and what kind of friends you’re getting information from. It’s only really like the tenth percentile of the adult population who’d be gullible enough to fall for this.”
The color drained from Musk’s already pale face. He leaned forward in his chair. No one spoke to him like this. And no one, least of all someone who worked for him, would dare to question his intellect or his tweets. His darting eyes focused for a second directly on the data scientist.
“Fuck you!” Musk growled.
The data scientist grew bolder. He was not prone to conflict or insults, but Musk’s reaction reinforced his belief that the billionaire was nowhere near fit to run a company crucial to the world’s online discourse. He remained collected, but uttered something he had not planned to say.
“I hope you’ll declare bankruptcy and let someone else run the company.”
“Well, resignation accepted,” Musk snapped.
The data scientist made his way for the exit.
“I’ll take your laptop,” Musk’s assistant said meekly. He handed the device to her and left.
As the data scientist walked back to the desk where he had left his belongings, he could hear the patter of two of Musk’s security guards jogging to catch up with him. He wondered if they would try to hassle him or perhaps even rough him up, but they simply watched over him as he packed his things before escorting him to the elevator bank. As they all got into the elevator car and rode down to the first floor, one of the guards turned to smile at him.
“What did you say to him?” he asked.
“I told him some things he didn’t like,” the data scientist responded.
“It must have felt good.”
“Yep,” he said, before stepping out of the elevator shaft, handing over his ID badge, and leaving Twitter’s headquarters for the last time. “To be honest, what I said is what everyone is saying behind his back. But nobody’s saying it to his face.”
>>> Elon Musk arrived at Twitter a conquering hero in the eyes of many—not least of all his own. Surrounded by a cadre of loyalists who enabled him to make many reckless maneuvers—like buying the company in the first place—he was cheered on by millions of online supporters who liked and retweeted his every move. He dragged friendly investors along for the ride as he seized control of one of the world’s preeminent online spaces for political and cultural discourse and attempted to transform it to suit his whims. With his successful and eye-wateringly expensive takeover, Musk had seemingly surpassed all other tech executives in wealth, influence, and fame. He was untouchable.
But incidents like the data scientist’s confrontational exit scarred him. 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.
His takeover had not been welcomed by the company’s leaders nor many of its users, but Twitter had placed itself on the auction block through years of mismanagement. Its embittered founder, Jack Dorsey, had neglected the service in the twilight of his tenure as chief executive. Over time, Dorsey came to believe the company he once prized shouldn’t be a business at all—but as he ignored Twitter’s profit margins, investors swooped in to squeeze it for cash. When he stepped down in 2021, the company embarked on a hasty cleanup job to assuage Wall Street.
But no one was prepared for Musk’s hyper-aggressive campaign, and no one could stop him. He saw Twitter not only as a business but as an ideological tool, a weapon, that was being wielded by San Francisco liberals who suppressed views he enjoyed. Policies at Twitter set the tone for other social media companies as they debated sensible online speech, and Musk wanted to drive a new set of mores into the conversation.
That he had enough money at his disposal was truly extraordinary, an aberrant feature of twenty-first-century capitalism. By the start of April 2022, Musk had a net worth nearing $270 billion. With the main source of his wealth, Tesla’s shares, reaching new heights and giving him unfathomable purchasing power, he set his sights on his one true passion. While most tech billionaires might have spent the money on mega yachts, sports teams, media publications, or faraway islands, Musk coveted a megaphone, a website where his voice could be broadcast directly to hundreds of millions of people. He wanted Twitter.
Musk’s blitzkrieg takeover had no cultural or social precedent. This simply wasn’t the type of transaction a single human pulled off. Corporations or private equity firms were supposed to buy companies that size, not individuals. But Musk had reached a pinnacle of wealth that only a handful of titans had ever come close to, and the rules of traditional business no longer applied.
Musk’s love for Twitter was simple, relatable, and even humanizing. He had spent hours every day scrolling the site—reading posts, laughing at memes, and firing off stream-of-consciousness thoughts—like any regular user. He became intoxicated by the engagement offered to him, and like with so many other hardcore tweeters, the platform became his addiction. The difference between him and the other diehards chasing the constant dopamine rush of Twitter, however, was that he had the means to capture his addiction and the desire to remake it in his own image.
>>> On the morning of April 14, 2022, we—Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, reporters at The New York Times—woke up to a four-word tweet, the unbelievable but inevitable culmination of two storylines we had pursued for a decade as journalists in Silicon Valley: “I made an offer.”
We threw ourselves into reporting a monumental story. Silicon Valley’s most consequential entrepreneur was buying one of its most iconic companies. How would this end?
We had written extensively about social media’s content moderation wars, Twitter’s shortcomings as a business, and Dorsey. We had also covered Musk’s enterprises and his constant boundary pushing. Suddenly, those stories became one—and the whole was much, much greater than the sum of its parts.
Musk’s decision to buy Twitter seemed to have been a snap judgment. He had assumed Twitter was a knot of technical issues that a great engineering mind like himself could easily untangle, enabling the growth of free speech in the digital town square. But at its core, Twitter was plagued by social and political dilemmas, not merely technological ones. Its leaders constantly grappled with questions about what people should be allowed to say, and they made enemies of governments, activists, celebrities, and even their own employees. The questions confronting Twitter were not simple. They have been debated across the internet since its advent. They may not have static answers at all. It is not for nothing that Twitter’s most loyal users referred to it as a “hellsite,” a corner of the internet where something—or someone—was always burning. People walked away from a session scrolling through their timelines feeling angry, frustrated, disgusted—and yet they couldn’t wait to log back on. The company needed a leader who deeply understood psychology, politics, and history, and the messy ways people connect instantaneously and constantly online. Instead, it got someone whose offer for the company—$54.20 a share—included a weed joke.
Musk found his quixotic ambitions for the platform thwarted as he attempted to govern Twitter, and he became increasingly convinced that employees were rebelling against him. They should be thanking him, he thought. The way he saw it, he alone was brave enough to gamble $44 billion on saving the social media platform he loved. Didn’t they realize he was saving humanity? He tasked some of his lackeys with ferreting out other dissenting voices so he could fire them. He instituted code freezes that prevented anyone from making changes to Twitter’s apps or website, in case an employee sabotaged them. His personal bodyguards began following him to the office restrooms, ensuring that few employees could encroach upon him during his sacred time.
As his takeover unfolded, Musk’s paranoia intensified while those close to him worried about his increasingly fragile state of mind. The chaotic nature of the platform and the repercussions of his actions would expose his limits. The more he tried to impose his will on Twitter, the further it seemed to spin out of his control, and the deeper his obsession became. Holes began to show in the capabilities of an entrepreneur considered by many to be one of mankind’s most successful business leaders.
>>> 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. What that means for a world in which the news media is in a state of constant existential peril, and democracy itself is in danger, remains to be seen. But the early signs are not good.
Out of Twitter’s rubble, Musk is building X, a harsher and much more cynical social media company. With it, he is ushering in a new era of anything-goes online speech that is governed by his own whims. There have been plenty of promises. Musk has said that X can be the world-dominating “everything app,” where people will not only be able to post their thoughts but also pay for goods, make phone calls, or watch movies. X will have it all, he asserts, and deep-pocketed investors have bet billions of dollars that he will be right.
But those lofty promises are so far just that. To those users who have hung around, one of the most important modes of global communication has become practically unrecognizable and now serves the interests of one man. What was once called the digital town square is becoming Musk’s mirror.