For Esther Crawford, Twitter Blue represented an opportunity. In private, she told those working on the project with her that charging users to become verified was an idea with limited possibility for success. At the same time, she saw it as a chance to impress Musk and gain influence. Musk’s fans and lieutenants had hammered the company as bloated and lazy.
“This is our chance to show the best of what Twitter has to offer,” she told her team. It was also a chance to build karma with Musk. If they could accomplish this one task now, she suggested, they would be able to negotiate for what they wanted—raises, new positions, new products—after gaining his trust.
While she saw the upside of getting Musk’s approval, the absurdity of being asked to launch a product built to his specifications in less than two weeks amid widespread layoffs was not lost on Crawford. In one group gathering, she presented her team with customized mugs that wouldn’t have been out of place at a tech-themed Bed Bath & Beyond. “Chance made us coworkers, crazy psycho shit made us Tweeps,” read the mugs’ inscription.
Depending on who you asked, Crawford was either a Musk loyalist or a rank opportunist. She certainly wasn’t the only one in either case. Musk’s fanboys were everywhere, and some emerged in the wake of his acquisition to celebrate and critique their coworkers who lost their jobs. After the Snap, an air of self-preservation hung heavily over Twitter. One engineer, who was desperate to cling on to her healthcare, privately criticized Musk and his ideas to her colleagues, while commending the billionaire in public Slack channels, claiming that “Elon is the Steve Jobs we need.” Others believed that the Musk shake-up could be their opportunity for a promotion or job change that had been hindered by Twitter’s previous bureaucracy.
Most of the employees Crawford brought to the Blue Verified team came to view the project as pointless at best and, at worst, something that could drastically undermine trust on the platform. Paying for verification badges would lead to impersonation and undermine the whole principle of the check marks, they thought. Crawford shared their worries. But it was what Musk wanted. No amount of reasoning or lessons from Twitter’s past would convince him otherwise.
>>> Before the check marks, impersonation on Twitter—as with the original @ElonMusk account—was pervasive. While the company’s founders knew it was a problem, cracking down on accounts pretending to be famous people was always a secondary concern as they struggled to keep the site online. By June 2009, however, the situation became untenable.
Tony La Russa, the World Series–winning manager for the St. Louis Cardinals, became fed up with a parody account that made jokes about unsavory team incidents—including the death of one of his players—and sued Twitter for hosting the content. The fake tweets were “derogatory and demeaning” and damaged his image, La Russa’s lawyers argued. In response, Twitter took down the imposter and rolled out a solution: Verified Accounts.
The company began slapping the verification badge on the accounts of athletes, politicians, musicians, and public officials. With the introduction of the blue seal, Twitter became the first social network to verify its users, sparking one of its most lasting impacts on internet culture. Other services began verifying prominent users—including Google+ in 2011, Facebook in 2012, and Instagram in 2014—creating coveted social media status symbols and spreading a class system across the modern internet.
While many people saw the check mark as a designation of fame, it became an important part of Twitter’s public utility. It marked the real accounts for brands like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, making the platform much more attractive to advertisers as well as to government and emergency service accounts, which provided enormous utility for those looking for train times or searching for information in the wake of a natural disaster.
>>> Musk’s Blue Verified program was going to destroy the whole system. If Musk’s paid subscription service allowed anyone to be verified, then no one would be, in the traditional sense. The utility of the check mark would evaporate. As one Blue Verified worker later put it: “It was such an obvious trainwreck, that the main job of everyone on the team was to make sure it was the safest trainwreck possible.”
Crawford and her team tried to develop safeguards that would protect the usefulness of verification. On October 31, they presented two options to Musk and his team. In the first, there would be two badges: people who were already verified would keep their filled-in badges designating importance, while those who had purchased them through Blue Verified would get transparent badges. To illustrate the differences, they created mock-ups of two tweets. One, from the legacy verified @JoeBiden account, advocated for people to vote. The other, from the Blue Verified @JoeB1den account, which replaced the “i” with a “1,” tweeted it was “starting nuclear war with Russia.” The only marker to distinguish between the two accounts, besides the slight change in spelling, was the transparent badge on the fake one.
The second option from the Blue team showed both accounts with the same type of verified badge. But in addition to that badge, official accounts, like @JoeBiden, received another label to clarify their importance. In Biden’s case, his account was delineated as a “United States government official.”
The attempts to make clearer distinctions between legacy and paid verified users, however, was not embraced by some of Musk’s friends. The first option “feels like a second-class citizen,” Sacks wrote in an email that night, adding that it would “disincentivize purchase.” He expressed more support for the second option, but cautioned against using the labels beyond government officials.
Sacks’s email kicked off a reply-all discussion. Crawford noted that settling on the aesthetic was a “high priority decision” because it would dictate what the team would move to build. Soon the email thread ballooned with responses from engineers, Sriram Krishnan, and Musk’s own assistant. With the boss watching, everyone felt like they needed to weigh in.
“There are too many cooks in the kitchen here,” he wrote. “Over time, we can introduce tiers with more features, but the goal right now is to maximize the number of verified users as fast as possible to improve the user experience for everyone (verified or not) on Twitter.”
>>> Musk’s hyperfixation on Blue extended beyond the design. He also engaged in seemingly endless deliberations about how much it should cost. Meanwhile, advertisers were bolting for the exits and Twitter was bleeding revenue. Sacks insisted they should raise the price from its current tag of $4.99 a month to $20 a month. Anything less felt cheap to him, and he wanted to present Blue as a luxury good. In emails, he compared Blue to a designer purse.
“Chanel could make a fortune selling a $99 bag, but it would be a one-time move,” he wrote. “A ‘promotional offer’ may not be the position we want. A luxury brand can always move down-market, but it’s very hard to move up-market once the brand is shot.”
Calacanis, however, vehemently disagreed. “It should be $99 a year,” he insisted. During one meeting, he launched into a spiel about how Twitter users were more likely to open their wallets for a $100 per year subscription if it seemed slightly cheaper at the $99 price, as though he had just watched a YouTube video explaining the basics of consumer psychology.
Musk seemed more swayed by Calacanis’s price than Sacks’s, except for the fact that he hated the number 9. Tesla never used the number on its website, and he saw any attempts to play mind games on customers as tacky.
“That’s dumb. We don’t do it and it makes no sense,” he chastised the podcaster.
“Fine, it can be $100, but it should be $99,” Calacanis relented.
Musk also turned to his biographer for advice. “Walter, what do you think?” Musk asked during a meeting about pricing.
“This should be accessible to everyone,” Isaacson said, no longer just the fly on the wall. “You need a really low price point, because this is something that everyone is going to sign up for.”
To those in the room who designed or built Blue Verified, the discussions were baffling. There was Musk, a supposed genius leader who had built billion-dollar companies, soliciting advice from a small inner circle of advisers who had little experience working on social networks. Sure, they used Twitter, but these rich men were not representative of the hundreds of millions of people around the world who logged in to the platform every day. They were all making gut decisions based on their experiences in their own Twitter filter bubbles—and Musk lapped it up.
Musk had largely come to peace with his price of $100 a year for Blue. But during one meeting to discuss pricing, his assistant, Jehn Balajadia, felt compelled to speak up.
“There’s a lot of people who can’t even buy gas right now,” she said, referencing skyrocketing inflation. It was hard to see how any of those people would pony up $100 on the spot for a social media status symbol.
“But think of everyone with an iPhone,” Musk responded. “If you can afford an iPhone, you can definitely afford this.”
He paused to think. “You know, like, what do people pay for Starbucks? Like $8?” Before anyone could raise serious objections, he whipped out his phone to set his word in stone.
“Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit,” he tweeted on November 1. “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.”
>>> Crawford grew closer to Musk, texting with him regularly, and members of his inner circle started opening up to her. In the chaotic early days of November, Balajadia sat Crawford down to coach her on managing Musk. She was one of the few women Musk trusted, and while she technically worked as an operations coordinator for the Boring Company, she was treated as a glorified assistant. She monitored his calendar, followed him at some public events, and set up his laptop for him when Musk needed to do work that couldn’t be done on his iPhone. Balajadia also made some public appearances on behalf of the Boring Company and, in 2018, presented a “proof of concept” plan to the Culver City Council to build a 6.5-mile tunnel from SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, to West Los Angeles. The tunnel was never built, but Balajadia continued to devote her life to Musk.
“I can tell you’re going to be around for a while, so let me tell you something,” Balajadia said. “Elon is special in this world. It is our job to protect him and make sure what he wants to have happen, happens. We need to protect the mission.”
To Crawford, the message was eerily similar to those she grew up hearing in a Christian cult in Oklahoma. But instead of a prophet, Balajadia had Musk. She had spent large chunks of time away from her young child so she could travel with him. But the mission merited those sacrifices.
Crawford came up with her own tactics for dealing with Musk. Knowing that she needed his approval, she avoided upsetting him at all costs. Maybe she could live up to her Old Testament name, protecting her people from a king who planned to exterminate them. She quickly learned that she could challenge him, but typically in one-on-one settings where he was jovial and willing to learn from the person in front of him. Individually, Musk could be charming, willingly engaging in discussion and listening to the expertise of his counterpart. Put him in a larger group setting with people outside of his inner circle or those he didn’t trust, however, and Musk’s ego ran wild. He could never be seen as inferior or uninformed. The people who survived in his orbit learned this quickly.
In one meeting, days after the deal closed, Musk was sitting in his second-floor conference room scrolling Twitter as some of the transition team chatted about product ideas. After reading a tweet about the FBI and Hillary Clinton—a constant fixation for the right-wing internet—he announced to the room that he had drafted a tweet about Clinton, hoping to elicit some laughs. Crawford stood up. “You can’t do that right now!” she said dramatically. They had product matters to discuss and she didn’t want it to be a distraction. Maybe do it later, she suggested, before bursting out laughing. The histrionic, joking approach worked. “Are you my tweet adviser now?” he asked, raising an eyebrow at Crawford. He never sent the tweet.
Publicly, however, Crawford was seen as a cheerleader. Through the chaos and callousness of the early days of the takeover, she remained outwardly optimistic, giving others the impression that she had become Musk’s devoted fan. On the night of November 1, after working long hours with the Blue team, she and her colleagues decided to tweet a joke. She had brought an eye mask and silver REI sleeping bag to the office for nap breaks, and after a product leader named Evan Jones had snapped a photo of her actually sleeping, she asked him to retake the picture before he posted it. He climbed on an office couch to get a better overhead angle of her in a sleeping bag, then tweeted the photo. Crawford then retweeted it with her own message: “When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork.”
The image rocketed around the internet. To Musk’s detractors, it symbolized the cringeworthy hustle culture that dominated the tech world and normalized the idea of working at all hours to appease a corporate overlord. To Musk’s supporters, the photo showed the impact a once-in-a-lifetime innovator was having on a company that needed a revolution. In reality, it was a joking, if not shrewdly calculated bit of self-promotion by Crawford. She and Jones faced a maelstrom of criticism across Twitter, and the product designer wanted to delete his post. But Crawford demanded he keep the photo up. This was her time to shine.
>>> The hustle wasn’t completely fake. The Blue team stayed up late fielding requests from Musk and his transition team, and created a twenty-four-hour rotation where projects could be passed to other employees around the globe to ensure that work never stopped.
Crawford tried to share her concerns about burnout with Musk. Some people on the Twitter Blue team had taken to monitoring their elevated heart rates on their Apple Watches and sharing them with their colleagues to make light of their situations. “I don’t want to push the team to die over this,” Crawford told Musk.
“Well, push them to just before they die,” Musk responded, laughing. While those who heard the exchange understood it to be a joke, they also wondered if there was an element of reality to it. They had heard the stories over at Tesla and SpaceX.
Given the quick turnaround, the Blue employees knew they’d likely launch a minimally viable product and could only pray that there wouldn’t be any major bugs or issues. At times, they worried they were going too fast and could run afoul of regulations. In one meeting, Crawford raised a potential pitfall. The company’s lawyers had warned that there were consumer protection laws outside the U.S. that would require the company to refund subscribers who were later suspended by the company for breaking its rules. We might be liable to give some money back, Crawford explained.
“Don’t care,” Musk said. “Fuck it. Do I seem concerned about legal battles? Move forward. Get this thing done.”
The only thing that seemed to hold Musk somewhat accountable was a fear of public shame on Twitter. In one meeting he blurted out that House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Twitter power user and darling of the progressive left, would roast him if the Blue relaunch went poorly. Calacanis chimed in to agree, stating that he thought Ocasio-Cortez would run for president one day.
At Tesla and SpaceX, engineers often joked that the only laws they respected were those of physics and Musk’s own demands. At Twitter, the Blue team got a crash course. In the same meeting, Musk wanted to review the descriptions of Twitter Blue that would be used online and in the Apple App store. “It should be: ‘Rocket to the top of replies, mentions, search, and topics,’ ” he said, reading through some of that copy. “Remove the comma before ‘and.’ I find it troubling.”
Crawford, a fan of the Oxford comma, tried to defend it. “I find the opposite with commas,” she said with a smile. Some in the room shifted nervously in their seats.
“Too bad, I’m the law,” Musk replied.
>>> As the new Twitter Blue features came into focus, so did the fears about how it would be exploited for impersonation. What would happen if an account pretending to be a local fire department declared an emergency? Or a fake account posing as a politician or election authority spread misinformation about an upcoming vote?
Stopping election interference was of paramount importance to Twitter employees. Brazil, one of Twitter’s largest markets outside the U.S., held its presidential runoff election the weekend after Musk walked into Twitter. The populist incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, was unseated by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva but said he would challenge the results. As Musk dismantled Twitter’s trust and safety team, hashtags in Portuguese that questioned the veracity of the vote trended on the platform. Employees who remained on civic integrity initiatives gamed out situations in which Bolsonaro, who Musk claimed to sometimes speak with, could spread disinformation using paid verified accounts.
Twitter users and employees also raised concerns about the upcoming U.S. midterm elections, which were set to occur on November 8. The Federal Bureau of Investigation shared those fears. About a week before Election Day, an agent from the bureau’s Foreign Influence Task Force reached out to the company to better understand Twitter’s plans for Twitter Blue.
Musk was briefed on the outreach during a November 3 meeting and was told that the FBI was interested in whether there would be changes to currently verified official government, state or federal, election accounts. The agency also asked whether fraudulent accounts posing as government officials would be able to become verified.
“They are generally concerned with any changes that might impact election misinformation operations during the election,” Crawford said.
Musk’s response didn’t exactly breed confidence. “We can launch Blue, but wait until after the election to change ranking,” he said. Musk had planned to prioritize tweets from Blue subscribers in the algorithmic Twitter timeline, giving his paying users an advantage when it came to getting the most attention on the platform.
Musk also said he planned to give an “official badge” to all government entities “of significance” to indicate that they were authentic accounts. But Musk didn’t define what he meant by “of significance.”
Employees knew it was impossible to filter through the thousands of verified accounts that could potentially deal in official U.S. elections and determine if they should receive “official” billing just five days before the vote.
>>> On the evening of November 4, as the company was being gutted by layoffs, Crawford and her team submitted the final changes for the Twitter Blue launch to Apple’s App Store. Initially the subscription service would be available for purchase only through Apple devices, partly because the rush meant there had been less focus on the Android app, and partly because Musk believed he could piggyback off Apple’s ID and payment systems. Everyone had to have a unique user ID to use and pay through Apple devices, and by relying on that, Twitter would have to do less verification of users on their own, he argued.
The billionaire called Crawford to personally congratulate her on the effort. It was a validating moment. The product manager had proved to Musk that people at Twitter could get shit done. But his praise didn’t erase the pit in her stomach as some of her colleagues who worked on the project were being terminated.
She was also still fretting about Musk’s plan to launch paid verification on November 7. Despite the warnings from the FBI, Musk didn’t seem to register the problems with his agenda.
That Friday, an employee took to a company-wide Slack channel and tore into the timing of the launch.
“Why are we making such a risky change one day before elections, which has the potential of causing elections interference by malicious groups that could abuse the new rules to their advantage in the spread of misinformation?” they asked.
Crawford made one last attempt that weekend in a private chat with her boss. “Do you want to be blamed for the outcome of this election?” she asked.
“Well, when is it?” Musk replied.
“It’s in two days,” Crawford said, stunned that he hadn’t clocked the date that she and her team had been warning him about since the start of the project.
Musk paused, processing. “Oh, I didn’t realize,” he said after a moment. “Okay, yeah, it’s fine. We can wait. Why don’t we wait?”
The launch was moved to November 9.