42 > Red Pilled
At Twitter, the cuts continued through January. In the U.S., rolling rounds of layoffs hit engineers working on the company’s ad product and trust and safety teams, while tweeps in Australia were cut. In some cases, employees were unsure if they had been exited at all.
In early January, one worker took it upon himself to figure out what was going on. He was a designer based in Europe and had resigned two months earlier. But for whatever reason, he still had access to his company email and Slack, and was still receiving paychecks. He had reached out to the company’s human resources representatives, but Musk had laid many of them off, leaving it unclear if the company received his messages in the first place. With no recourse, he messaged some people who he thought were in charge on Slack.
“I’m basically the stapler guy from Office Space,” he wrote, referencing the 1999 dark comedy that features a character who is unceremoniously moved into an office basement and forgotten. Eventually, someone figured out his predicament and properly exited him from the company.
Davis also continued to kill employee benefits, including family planning and company support for in vitro fertilization services. The moves left employees who had frozen their eggs scrambling to figure out how to pay for something they had expected their employer to cover. It all felt unnecessarily cruel and inconsistent. After all, didn’t Musk want people to repopulate the earth?
Musk had recovered from his “episode” at the end of December, but his tweeting continued at an unhinged pace, revealing a mind stewing within its own filter bubble. While he had always seen himself as a libertarian centrist, he tweeted in the early hours of January 5, that “Kevin McCarthy should be speaker,” pushing for the Republican representative from California who had supported Trump’s claims of voter fraud in 2020 to lead the House.
Musk also leaned on Twitter’s remaining content moderation team in the aftermath of the Brazilian election, second-guessing its employees when they took down tweets questioning the defeat of Bolsonaro. After Lula da Silva won the election in October, Bolsonaro’s supporters claimed the election had been stolen, an echo of Trump’s supporters after his 2020 defeat. Twitter’s moderators knew they had to act or risk an outcome like the U.S. Capitol riot, so they took down tweets that violated the platform’s rules.
When Musk discovered what was going on, he stopped them. Only tweets that explicitly called for violence or were the subject of government orders could be removed, he said, peeved by a Brazilian judge that sent regular takedown requests to the company. On January 8, people stormed Brazil’s federal buildings in an attempt to keep Bolsonaro in power.
By then, Musk had become openly conservative. He regularly replied to right-wing accounts and personalities including @Catturd2, the trolling alter ego of a Trump-supporting Florida man, and Jack Posobiec, an activist who promoted Pizzagate, offering to personally look into their complaints about Twitter. He also gave a tour of the office to Dave Rubin, a conservative podcast host, allowing him to spend two days at Twitter headquarters asking employees questions about why his own account had been limited in its reach.
While he faced questions about his political tweeting, notably on a Tesla earnings call on January 25, where he was asked if his politicization would hurt the automotive company and alienate some buyers, Musk portrayed his tweeting as a net benefit. He had 127 million followers, which suggested that he was “reasonably popular.”
“Twitter is actually an incredible tool for driving demand,” Musk said to analysts and investors.
The following day, Musk flew to Washington, DC, to meet with McCarthy on the politician’s birthday, discussing Twitter and its policies with the new speaker. He also found time for Jim Jordan, the Ohio representative and Trump attack dog, and Kentucky representative James Comer, who had announced his intentions to use his position on the House Oversight Committee to investigate President Biden. It was an area of interest for Musk, who was facing various government inquiries across his companies and began to wonder if Biden would weaponize federal agencies against Twitter.
With the FTC investigation well underway, he now saw himself as a direct target of the White House and aligned himself with those who seemed best suited to protect his interests. But he was also eager to worm his way out of the fight with the regulator, which had subpoenaed him for a February deposition. His team wrote to Lina Khan, the FTC chairwoman, asking for an informal sit-down during his DC trip, but she rebuffed him, telling him in a letter that he should focus his efforts on responding to her investigators.
“I recommend that Twitter appropriately prioritize its legal obligations to provide the requested information,” she wrote. “Once Twitter has fully complied with all FTC requests, I will be happy to consider scheduling a meeting with Mr. Musk.”
In February, Comer held a hearing in the House to examine the supposed ties between Big Tech and government. As Roth, Gadde, and others answered questions about what conservative lawmakers saw as supposed anti-right-wing censorship, Republicans praised Musk. Among them was Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia congresswoman and QAnon endorser whose Twitter account was suspended in early 2022 for spreading misinformation about the COVID vaccine.
“Thank God Elon Musk bought Twitter,” she said.
>>> The far right had plenty of reasons to celebrate Musk’s acquisition. In him, they saw a leader who would loosen the site’s speech rules—many of which had led to the suspension of notable figures. Greene’s accounts had been reinstated in late November—after McCarthy used his influence to push Twitter’s leadership to bring her back—beginning what Musk would term a “general amnesty” of previously suspended accounts.
The returnees were a who’s who of the far right. Ali Alexander, an organizer of the Stop the Steal election denial movement who was banned in the aftermath of January 6, came back, as did Ron Watkins, the suspected creator behind QAnon. Musk also welcomed back Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist and incel whose hateful ideologies found a following among a group of racists known as the Groypers. Fuentes, however, didn’t last long, logging in to a Twitter Space on the same night as his reinstatement to scream that he liked Hitler and was “going to war with the Jews.” He was eventually re-banned, though Musk allowed him to return again in May 2024.
Musk’s impact, however, went far beyond the amnesties. “People on the right should see more ‘left wing’ stuff and people on the left should see more ‘right wing’ stuff,” he tweeted on January 16.
In practice, however, people began seeing the amplification of right-wing voices. While Musk had espoused the idea of “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach,” Twitter’s recommendation algorithms began pushing conservative accounts and posts into people’s timelines. Users setting up new accounts were given recommendations to follow the likes of Republican Florida governor Ron DeSantis; Texas senator Ted Cruz; and Posobiec.
Activist groups that study online platforms, including the Center for Countering Digital Hate and the Anti-Defamation League, found that slurs against Black Americans had tripled, while antisemitic speech was up more than 60 percent since the change in ownership. Accounts showing terrorist affiliations with groups such as the Islamic State (IS) also surged in the wake of the takeover.
In mid-January, Twitter’s recommendation algorithms pushed a post featuring a video of a man stabbing a woman multiple times in a bedroom and killing her as something “you may like” on users’ “For You” feeds. The promotion of the video, which racked up more than 1.2 million views, 7,500 retweets, and nearly 22,000 likes, was the result of Musk’s prioritization of engagement combined with the removal of the site’s guardrails.
Twitter was also still crawling with child sexual exploitation material. The problem wasn’t an easy one for any social media company to solve. The material is illegal to look at, which prevents companies from deputizing employees to go out and proactively scour their platforms for it. Instead, the companies largely rely on databases of hashes, digital signatures created to match abuse images that had previously been caught by law enforcement. By searching for the hashes, tech companies could take down material they knew was illegal without ever looking at it.
Twitter used the same mechanisms, but somehow known material was still slipping through. In the chaos of layoffs and cost cutting, it seemed that the company had lost some of its ability to detect and remove the material. One of the contracts Twitter had stopped paying was its deal with Thorn, a tech company that had built a hash database for videos of child exploitation.
The gaps left up a graphic video of a boy being sexually assaulted on Twitter, where it was viewed more than 120,000 times, a New York Times investigation revealed. Twitter’s recommendation algorithm also surfaced and suggested other accounts that posted images of child abuse.
>>> As Musk’s Twitter elevated conservative voices, the billionaire was developing a budding relationship with one Republican congressman in particular. During the February 8 hearing, Representative Jordan made it clear that he believed Musk’s ownership had turned the company around.He slammed the company’s previous management, notably Roth and Gadde, for censoring posts and communicating with federal law enforcement agencies, which the congressman saw as violations of the First Amendment and free speech. In Jordan, Musk saw potential for a new political terrier who could argue on his behalf as he faced scrutiny from Democratic lawmakers and regulators.
Some of the heaviest scrutiny came from the FTC. By early February, the agency had sent twelve letters to the company demanding information and had interviewed former executives, including Lea Kissner, Twitter’s old chief information security officer, and Damien Kieran, its former chief privacy officer.
To Musk, this was government harassment by the Biden administration, which he had come to loathe for its positions on immigration and organized labor. He authorized one of the company’s top remaining lawyers, Christian Dowell, to share the FTC’s requests and other documents with Jordan’s office, giving the congressman ammunition for his House select subcommittee on “the weaponization of the federal government.” Musk later invited staffers from Jordan’s office to visit SpaceX’s facilities in Texas.
He also found a sympathetic ear in the FTC’s lone Republican commissioner, Christine Wilson. In February, he secured a meeting with Wilson and confided in her about the government persecution he believed he was facing. Jim Kohm, a leader in the FTC’s enforcement division, sat in and listened to the complaints. Wilson agreed that the FTC had gone beyond its mandate in pursuing him personally—but there was nothing she could do. Shortly before her meeting with Musk, Wilson had tendered her resignation. He would get no protection from her. The meeting seemed to do little to spook Kohm—the demand letters from his team kept coming.
Still, Musk managed to get the agency to delay his deposition. He was not interested in answering the agency’s questions under oath.
>>> As Musk stewed over the external government inquiries, he also became fixated on Twitter’s internal platform issues. Beyond the site’s outages that were the result of the SMF shutdown and reckless tweaks to internal tools and services, Musk became obsessed with the falling engagement on his tweets.
Twitter’s engineers could see the drop-off in Musk’s engagement as well but didn’t have any explanations for it. There had been various changes to the algorithm and in Twitter’s overall product since Musk took over, and any multitude of factors could have caused it. At one point, Twitter’s owner took his account private—preventing non-followers from seeing his posts—in an attempt to see if that would rectify his engagement problem. “Something fundamental is wrong,” the billionaire tweeted on February 1. He stayed late into the night at Twitter’s offices attempting to rectify what he believed was an existential problem.
To the engineers who had to field Musk’s questions about his own tweets, there was a certain level of absurdity to the requests. On one hand, this was the world’s richest person, obsessing over the dissemination of his posts, which were still getting millions and millions of views even with the supposed decline. On the other hand, they sympathized with Musk’s intuition that perhaps his account was simply a canary in the coal mine, warning of potential drops in engagement for others. Tests, though, didn’t show meaningful declines for other users.
On Tuesday, February 7, Musk’s anger would come to a head. He had called another meeting to deal with the subject of his engagement, calling the situation “ridiculous,” as Davis backed him up by pulling up old tweets and comparing their stats with newer ones to sycophantically drill home the point. “Somebody tell me what’s going on,” Musk said, growing more and more upset.
While the employees in the room still didn’t have a reason, they put forward Yang Tang, a machine-learning engineer with almost a decade of experience at the company. Tang, an expert on the artificial intelligence used to drive the social network’s personalized feeds, had little experience in talking to Musk. Those who had survived the billionaire’s blast radius knew never to speak out of turn or offer guesses. They also learned to create presentations that Musk could easily digest from his phone—as he rarely, if ever, used a computer. No one told Tang.
Standing up, the engineer began riffing with a presentation from his laptop. Instead of saying he didn’t know the cause of the issue, he pointed to other trends. Likes on the platform were decreasing overall, he said, before Musk cut him off.
“I’m not talking about likes,” he growled. “I’m talking about view counts.”
Tang pushed on, citing external factors. There were decreases in Google searches for Musk’s name and he correlated that with internal engagement data. Perhaps the answer was simply that people were less interested in Twitter’s new owner now that the deal had concluded. Maybe it had nothing to do with Twitter’s algorithm.
Musk snapped. “You’re fired! You’re fired!” he bellowed at the engineer.
Tang closed his laptop and walked out of the room. Silence descended across the room, as the rest of his now former colleagues shifted their eyes away from Twitter’s owner hoping they wouldn’t be called on.
Eventually, after an awkward silence, a senior manager spoke up and said the team would figure out the issue and get back to Musk in twenty-four hours.
By Saturday, however, the issue still hadn’t been corrected and workers stayed at the office late into the night with Musk to come up with answers. At one point, some of them decided to call a recently departed colleague, a former principal engineer with nearly a decade of experience at Twitter, who they believed was the only person with the know-how to fix the problem. After dialing him, the workers put Musk on speaker with the principal engineer, who was a bit taken aback, but still offered up some potential solutions out of pity for his former coworkers. Musk, impressed, asked him if he wanted to come back to the office that night and perhaps work for a half day to straighten everything out.
“I’ll make it worth your while,” the billionaire said. But the principal engineer had seen how Musk had treated his former colleagues in the months since he left. He turned him down and hung up.
>>> The following day, Musk was sitting, despondent, in a suite at a cavernous football stadium in Glendale, Arizona. It was Super Bowl LVII between the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs, and despite having one of the poshest seats as a guest of Rupert Murdoch, the media tycoon whose Fox network was broadcasting the game, Twitter’s owner simply could not look away from his phone. During the first quarter of the football game, he had tweeted, “Go @Eagles!!!,” a harmless show of support for the team from Philly, where Musk had spent time as an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania.
About forty minutes after Musk’s tweet, President Joe Biden used the official @POTUS Twitter account to broadcast his own Super Bowl message. “As your president, I’m not picking favorites,” he wrote, including a video of the First Lady in a custom Philadelphia jersey. “But as Jill Biden’s husband, fly Eagles, fly.”
The president’s tweet rocketed across the platform. Despite the account having less than a fourth of Musk’s followers, the @POTUS post quickly surpassed Musk’s own pro-Eagles proclamation, eventually racking up 29 million views to Musk’s 8.4 million.
As an enthralling game played out in front of him, Musk ignored the cheers and the bone-crunching tackles, and kept comparing his tweet against Biden’s, before deleting his post in anger. He fired off an email to Twitter’s product engineers, demanding they immediately find the cause, and then began making arrangements for people to meet him back at Twitter’s office that night. Musk left the game early and was already back on his private jet flying to San Francisco before the red and white confetti fell for the Chiefs’ victory.
Dozens of people arrived at headquarters on Sunday night, some coming straight from their own Super Bowl parties to deal with Musk’s five-alarm fire. At the office the billionaire addressed the engineers directly.
“I don’t know whether this is due to incompetence or sabotage,” Musk said, a bit calmer.
With James Musk running point on the “high urgency” issue, some eighty employees ran through the possibilities for Musk’s sinking engagement through the night. One theory was that Musk had been blocked or muted by so many users in recent months that it led to fewer people seeing what he posted and caused the algorithm to penalize him when it came to distribution.
By Monday, however, several engineers had found the root of the problem. Musk’s tweets were not being surfaced to his followers at the expected rate by Twitter’s algorithm. In turn, a system called “out of network tweets,” which recommends posts from accounts that users do not follow into their feeds as a way of potentially building new connections, was not surfacing Musk’s tweets to non-followers, further depressing his engagement. The issue affected only a handful of high-profile users, the engineers determined.
While they had found the problem, the engineers lacked an elegant solution and instead went about cobbling together a fix to calm Musk. Within the recommendation algorithm, they introduced code “author_is_elon,” essentially ensuring that the system would place a heavier emphasis on pushing his posts into users’ personally curated feeds. In effect, Musk’s tweets would have higher priority over any other post.
By Monday afternoon, some users who opened the site saw “For You” feeds that featured only Musk tweets over and over again, with little other content in between. The billionaire had finally built his very own echo chamber.
Sensing how embarrassing it was, the billionaire attempted to defuse the situation with humor. He shared a meme of a woman, labeled “Elon’s tweets,” force-feeding another, labeled “Twitter,” at 9:35 p.m., on Monday night as engineers worked to undo the heavy emphasis.
>>> Musk’s mistrust of his own employees only grew. In an attempt to enforce his policy of working from the office, he had Davis and others monitor employees’ badge swipes. Those who were not scanning into the office as much as expected were earmarked for firings and placed on “performance-improvement plans.” In response, some employees traveled to the office simply to run their badges, then returned home to avoid Musk or his lackeys.
On Thursday, February 23, Twitter’s Slack went offline for what employees were told was “routine maintenance.” Following the dissent firings in November, chatter on the platform in large channels had slowed to a trickle, and few dared to say anything that could be remotely construed as criticism of Musk or his management. Slack, however, was still the company’s main communication platform, allowing workers to contact one another quickly, track issues on the site, or monitor the deployment of new features. Without it, work ground to a halt, as employees grew suspicious. Twitter was late on paying its Slack bill, but a spokesperson for the service confirmed that it had not cut off the company or any of its accounts.
A few days earlier, a handful of managers had also been told by Davis to start creating lists of their best performers for the distribution of potential stock bonuses. At the start of February, three of the company’s top engineers had been fired by Musk after they asked for improved compensation for them and their teams, as they worried low morale and long hours would lead to attrition. Perhaps the ask from Davis was a sign of compromise from management, some thought. Maybe they realized they would need to incentivize the best to stay.
On Saturday, the real reason for the lists became clear. Musk was engaging in another large layoff, cutting hundreds of jobs across the organization. One engineering manager who oversaw about twenty people and who had marked four of them as “high performers” for Davis, realized that the only people that still had jobs at Twitter were those four. The “bonuses” were the gift of their continued employment.
Esther Crawford would be locked out of her email and computer on Saturday as well. Her time serving Musk had run its course, and she was part of a group of well-paid employees who had come to Twitter through the acquisitions of their companies. These founders were contractually due large payouts in stock bonuses that vested over time, or would have to be paid in full if they were terminated early. To Musk, though, these contracts could be challenged, and he saw their compensation as another cost that could be excised. Crawford, who had come off to some as a booster of Musk’s methods, tweeted nothing about her firing.