Zoë Schiffer is the author of the new book Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter, which tells the full story of how the richest man in the world took over a major piece of the 21st century “public square.” Schiffer does not take a nostalgic view of pre-Musk Twitter, showing that the company was in many ways poorly run and Twitter highly dysfunctional. But she shows how Musk’s capricious, self-aggrandizing approach to running the platform have altered it. We discuss the role of Twitter in 21st century America, Musk’s political radicalization and embrace of “anti-woke” politics, and the harms that come from having someone with so much wealth be given so much power to shape our public discussions.
Nathan J. Robinson
Let’s start with why Twitter is significant in the first place. I think everyone knows what Twitter is, but begin by telling us why Twitter is important and a worthy subject for an entire book. This has taken you a lot of research and time.
Zoë Schiffer
Twitter’s cultural relevance always really outpaced its kind of underlying business fundamentals. It had, for a long time, the most important people across sports, media, politics, and tech, and if you wanted to know what the conversation on the internet was on any given day, it really felt like you had to be on Twitter. Particularly for a journalist, it was such a crucial tool for breaking news. During protests, it was the go-to platform to start social movements. It really did have this big cultural relevance before Elon Musk bought the platform.
Robinson
You cite some statistics in the book that I didn’t know about. I didn’t realize just how much smaller Twitter actually is than Facebook. You said Twitter in 2020 had 192 million active users, and Facebook had 1.84 billion. Twitter had 5% of Facebook’s revenue. And yet, there is something to Twitter where they’re talked about in the same breath, and Facebook doesn’t drive the conversation and never did it the same way.
Schiffer
Yes, I think Mark Zuckerberg described Twitter as a clown car that fell into a goldmine, and it really did feel that way, that it kind of accidentally reached this place of enormous success, even though the business model was almost entirely reliant on ads. Twitter’s underlying ad stack completely paled in comparison to Facebook and Google. And yet, it did have significance in the culture, regardless of the fact that it really lagged behind its closest competitors in terms of growth, size, and revenue.
Robinson
There is this extraordinary thing—I think a lot of us who have to use Twitter professionally have a very love-hate relationship with it, even pre-Elon Musk. It is a repulsive platform in many ways; it’s full of angry people and insults. But it’s also full of a lot of very funny jokes and things that you wouldn’t find out anywhere else. It’s the one place where you can be mean to someone famous, and they might get mad at you! You might get under their skin!
Schiffer
I know. It’s such a ridiculous platform in that way. And I think all of us who have used it and had to use it professionally have that tension within us that we have to be on it; we kind of hate it, but we’re also completely addicted to it. I think the phenomenon that’s so encapsulates this is the “main character” of Twitter, that on any given day, it could be a famous person, it could be Elon Musk, or it could be just a random person who said something, and they could be completely canceled, or their tweet could go completely viral because it was really funny. It was like never clear whether being that main character was actually a good or a bad thing. But regardless, the platform dynamics lent itself to kind of elevating random voices on any given day.
Robinson
“Here’s the person we’re all going to make fun of today.” You’re just a random person who had 100 followers, and then all of a sudden, you said something that was so unbelievably stupid that millions of people now want to mock you.
Schiffer
Yes, or you lose your job. There are such famous examples, Justine Sacco being the kind of quintessential one. She made a joke on an airplane and then lands. The joke is pretty racist, and she’s fired from her job. She becomes national news. It completely, I would think, changed her life.
Robinson
One of the things that you point out that I didn’t quite understand until reading it in your book is that Elon Musk’s Twitter is chaos and dysfunction, but internally, Twitter as a corporation wasn’t necessarily that well run before Elon Musk. You talk to a lot of people who worked there during the Jack Dorsey years, and Twitter always had its fair share of problems internally as a company.
Schiffer
Yes, absolutely. I think the dynamics that made it a really nice place to work, and sometimes that even made it a good place to be on the internet, also kind of set the stage for Elon Musk to be able to take over. Jack Dorsey, in particular, didn’t seem to have a huge interest in revenue growth, and this was actually something employees complained about. He seemed very apathetic about the stock price, and he wasn’t interested in monetization in the way that they were.
And Twitter was just incredibly slow and inefficient. Any project needed to go through many, many layers of management before it could get out the door. Products would get started or features would kind of begin, they would work on them for two years, and they would never ship. And so, there was a lot of frustration internally with the lack of innovation at Twitter. At Meta, Mark Zuckerberg’s motto at the outset was “move fast and break things,” and Twitter was kind of the opposite. It was “move very, very slow and try very hard to get things right,” which was a noble aspiration, but it often meant that they didn’t do much of anything at all.
Robinson
Again, it’s not something I quite realized until I read your writing, but the platform itself hasn’t changed at all over time, in terms of its features. Pre-Elon Musk, it’s the same. I can’t remember when they introduced slightly more characters, but it’s the same at the beginning as it is years later.
Schiffer
And so many of the features that we think of as fundamental to Twitter, being able to “at” [@] someone, “tweet” someone, having hashtags—those were all things that actually came from the user base. It wasn’t like Twitter product managers were necessarily out there innovating. It was that the users would demand a way to organize the conversation and started adopting these norms, and then they would literally beg Twitter to codify them in the actual feature set, and eventually Twitter would cave and do that.
Robinson
There’s a real dark side to this platform, and there certainly was pre-Elon Musk, which is that, on the one hand, it’s a clown car and just silly jokes, memes, insults, and whatever. But the company had always struggled with the fact that it can be a hotbed of false information and poisonous racist propaganda. They have always struggled with: what do you do when you open up to the voices of millions of anonymous people? You talked to many people who are involved in a very difficult project of trying to figure out how to do content moderation.
Schiffer
Yes. Unfortunately, this conversation today has become so politicized that it really lacks nuance. But for a really long time, Twitter’s stance on this was the more free speech, the better, and so they had very little content moderation on the platform. Black users in particular, and women, complained of rampant harassment, and the platform essentially did nothing to stop it, and it became a huge issue. At one point, Disney was toying with the idea of acquiring Twitter, and it didn’t. It pulled out of the deal, citing harassment specifically as the kind of issue that it just wasn’t prepared to take on. So, this had real business consequences.
In 2020-2021, when we started to see the rise of health misinformation and QAnon, Twitter started to take this a lot more seriously. Particularly when Donald Trump started to run his campaign around 2016, there was kind of a change that began in terms of Twitter wanting to take more responsibility and to be more proactive around content moderation.
But the way that this has been spun is that Twitter was full of lefty liberals who are trying to censor conservatives. And actually, when we look at the data, we see the opposite, that conservative voices were augmented on the platform and were able to gain more prominence. Twitter employees that I’ve spoken to took enormous pains in deciding: do we add even a small label to one of Donald Trump’s tweets that’s spreading misinformation about mail-in ballots? They would really argue about this decision. Ultimately, 2016 on, and then escalating during the pandemic, they decided to take a stronger stance on some of this stuff.
Robinson
Of course, in the pandemic, false information can get people killed. They can die if they believe things that are not true and follow bad advice. Their families could lose their lives for listening to things that are presented as medical information.
Schiffer
Yes, and Twitter was very aware of that responsibility, so they did take stronger steps during the pandemic. Plenty of people thought it was too little too late. But then particularly we saw that with the January 6 insurrection, it was kind of the ultimate breaking point where employees had been calling for years for management to take a stronger stance against Donald Trump because he had used the platform so masterfully to spread his narrative, a lot of which was factually inaccurate regarding the vote in the election in particular.
And then, when the riot happened, Twitter employees basically demanded that they finally boot him off the platform. Jack Dorsey really didn’t want to do this, so ultimately he decides on a suspension of about three days, I believe. Donald Trump then comes back and starts breaking the rules yet again, and then he’s kicked off the platform entirely. This actually becomes a key reason that Elon Musk gets interested in buying the company because he really feels like Twitter has been what he calls overtaken by the “woke mind virus”—god knows what that means. But in his mind, it was sliding in a bad direction, and he needed to save it.
Robinson
Yes, I suppose we now have to introduce your own “main character.” You do emphasize in the book that it is not a biography of Elon Musk, but sadly, he has made it so that we cannot help but to discuss this man. What leads him to get involved with this company? He’s always been a prolific tweeter, I take it?
Schiffer
Yes, he was involved as a fan and as a power user. There was a famous moment to employees, at least, in 2020, when everyone came together for an all-hands meeting. Jack Dorsey had flown everyone out to Houston, Texas, and they had this big party, and as part of his big rallying speech, Jack Dorsey gets on stage and actually facetimes Elon Musk and asks him for advice on how they should make Twitter better. And so, in a very informal sense, he’s been involved.
But a few things happen that really start to change the tide. One is that Elon Musk’s eldest daughter, who is trans, started to move away from her father. She stopped speaking to him. Ultimately, she actually petitioned the court for a name change, and that she didn’t want to be associated with her father in any way. Elon blames this, for whatever reason, on the elite private school that she’d gone to in Los Angeles, and says that the school is overrun by the “woke mind virus” and had infected his daughter, and this was the reason that she had turned against him. When Twitter kicks off Donald Trump yet again, this is the “woke mind virus”. Twitter’s overrun by it, and he needs to get involved. Then—and this is his decision-making, which seems to happen largely on a whim—he sells a bunch of Tesla stock, and he has about $10 billion burning a hole in his pocket. He’s thinking, what should I do with all this money? Elon Musk’s ambitions are very global. It’s not like he asks what he can do for fun. It’s like, how can he have this massive impact? And he thinks that “saving Twitter” is the way to do that. And so, he starts buying up Twitter shares.
Robinson
This man has what we might call a unique psychology. You quote the journalist Kara Swisher, saying that her understanding is that he believes that if he didn’t exist, the world would die, which is just a remarkable level of egotism. Off the charts. It also strikes me that for some people, if their daughter was trans and didn’t want to be associated with them, they might look at that situation and ask themselves some questions about whether they had been the optimal parent. It is very odd to go in the other direction and say, “there is a virus that I now have to destroy by buying this company.”
Schiffer
It is an odd reaction. Ronan Farrow did an incredible piece in the New Yorker on Elon Musk’s political influence, and there was this one line in it where one of his associates was quoted as saying, Elon Musk desperately wants to save the world, but only if he can be the person to save it. I think that encapsulates his mindset so beautifully. He does have this immense preoccupation with humanity and saving humanity, but he sees himself as a key player in that fight to save it.
Robinson
Yes, and if he can’t be the person, then the world can go to hell. He talks in these early stages about the importance of free speech, free speech, free speech. But the actual principle of free speech is not really something that he is personally committed to in a way that we can respect.
Schiffer
Yes, his definition of free speech seems to be his speech and the speech of people in his circle. When it’s journalists who are speaking about something that he doesn’t like, he’s been known to boot them off the platform. There’s been a lot of examples now of X, as it’s now known, caving to foreign governments at a rate far higher than its predecessor. And so, I think that definition is very flimsy. At the same time, it’s almost laughable for anyone who has written about or participated in social platforms, that you come in, you’re a free speech absolutist, and it just always ends up in kind of the same space because however much you believe that principle—and I think we can have serious questions about whether Elon even believes that principle—you can’t be a free speech absolutist and own a global social platform. What about child sexual exploitation material? What about misinformation about the vote? What about harassment? Also, when you open up the gates—and any early Twitter user could have told him this—and allow anyone to say anything, you actually limit the speech of the vast majority of users because it’s not safe to speak online if every time you speak you receive a deluge of death threats and harassment. You need some level of content moderation, both from a legal perspective, but also just to be a place that’s not overrun with AI generated nude images of a celebrity, which the average person probably doesn’t want to see.
Robinson
Yes, it strikes me as something that people most likely tried to explain to him before he bought the platform, that he probably waved away.
Schiffer
Yes, that was one of the most surprising things to me, just the remarkable lack of curiosity that he came in the room with. He didn’t come into Twitter asking a lot of questions or wanting to learn from employees. His stance—and I really say this based on my reporting, not on my personal feelings—was, all of you people are idiots and I don’t really want to hear what you have to say. And I think when you come in with that stance, it’s very hard to get things right because the people who worked at Twitter, whether you agree with them or not, have labored over these questions for years and years, and they’ve made mistakes and learned from them. But he was not willing to have those conversations, it seemed like.
Robinson
If you buy a company, and you sit down with an employee and think, I don’t understand what it is that you do, there’s one approach that says, “I need to ask the person to better understand what they do around here because clearly, there’s a lot I have to learn about this company I’ve just bought.” And there is another approach that says, “I can’t understand what they do, so they must be useless and should be fired.” And it does strike me that Elon Musk’s attitude towards things he doesn’t understand is much more on the “we can probably get rid of them” side of things.
Schiffer
And with Tesla and SpaceX, it’s worth pointing out that he has so many people in the room who know exactly what they’re doing. They’re experts on building electric vehicles or rockets, and so, he doesn’t necessarily need to be the ultimate expert. He can kind of come in and make management decisions. Sometimes there’ll be on the line making decisions, and he has an intuitive understanding of the facts, but that’s enough in a lot of those circumstances. But at Twitter, he lacks empathy. He will say this himself. His brother says that he got the empathy gene in the family and Elon did not. And so, his intuition, I think, for a social platform is just not as accurate. Also, he was the one who was involved in those decisions. He wasn’t delegating except to his lieutenants, most of whom also had not worked at a global social platform and were coming in with a similar posture as him, of hubris, I would say.
Robinson
There is a certain satisfaction almost—maybe it’s a bad part of me—that I get seeing him buying this platform and then having to engage day to day with people saying, “look at this bad content moderation decision.” He says, I’ll get involved in that, and now he’s gotten himself in a situation where he is now making all of these decisions that could have been made by other people with expertise. And it’s like, you brought this upon yourself. Now this is your life. Now you have to deal with this platform that you bought.
Schiffer
I write about this in my book that he thought he was buying Twitter, but what he was buying in reality was the biggest content moderation challenge that the world had seen at that point. He was buying an enormous headache, and I don’t think he was fully prepared to take that on, which is why X looks remarkably different—the same in terms of the feature set, but I would say the quality of the conversation is very different from what it used to be.
Robinson
Now, you’ve mentioned that it is now officially called X. I don’t think that’s caught on very well, try as they may. They purge the birds; no birds allowed anywhere. You don’t even tweet anymore, you just post. This seemed a very weird decision. You’ve got a global brand. Everyone knows what a tweet is. It’s in the dictionary.
Schiffer
Yes, I know, it was a lot of brand equity and brand recognition to destroy overnight. But this had actually been his plan from the outset. One of his first startups was called x.com, and he was eventually pushed out of that, which became PayPal. He had, I think, a certain amount of obsession with the letter X—one of his kids is named X, along with a string of other characters I haven’t memorized. But he really, after that kind of early failure, harbored this vision of a platform called X that would kind of combine payments and social aspects. This became more and more true as the internet shifted to be more mobile. And so, from the moment that he decided to buy Twitter, he was saying, this is my chance to resurrect X, this long-standing dream that he had had. He really disliked the kind of touchy-feely, fun, quirky vibe that Twitter had. He disliked how the office looked, how the logo looked, how the blue was kind of friendly looking. He was always going to overhaul all those things.
Robinson
Well, everything has to look like the Cybertruck. It’s got to be all post-apocalyptic and bleak and industrial and miserable.
Schiffer
The Twitter office was extremely beautiful, light filled, and there was a Black Lives Matter mural on the wall right when you walked in. There was this early moment in the acquisition where employees walked into the front lobby, and there used to be these framed iconic tweets on the wall, kind of big moments in Twitter’s history, and someone had swapped out the tweets that were displayed. Instead of “Hello, world.”—the first tweet ever sent by Twitter—it was, “Next I’m buying Coca-Cola and putting the cocaine back in.” It was a tweet that Elon Musk had sent, and it had been just printed out really poorly and was missing all the metadata, but the statement was so clear that the office today is going to look very different from what it used to.
Robinson
Did they do that because he instructed them to do that, or was that people trying to please him?
Schiffer
That was the question. Either way, it’s very funny. Did he look around and say, I want one of my tweets displayed, or did one of his sycophantic followers just say, I know what will make him very happy, we print this out on butcher paper, and then frame it really poorly on the wall?
Robinson
Because you do note in the book that he was very clear that he wanted to have Twitter’s internal architecture modified so that the words that he decided to post would be put in front. When you buy a company, it is your right to defy the usual algorithm determining what people might be interested in, and subvert it and replace it with an Elon Musk based special algorithm. This is an actual thing that he made people do.
Schiffer
He really does think of himself as a quality control guy. Tesla engineers would say he would drive to work and have all this feedback about his car, and they would make little tweaks and specifications to improve his driving experience. But that tweak and modification doesn’t impact all the other Tesla drivers who might not want the exact same thing as Elon Musk. Unfortunately, when you make those tweaks and modifications on Twitter, what he wants is maximum attention, and that automatically makes everyone else’s experience a little bit worse. This was kind of his number one priority in December 2022, and January-February of early 2023. He’s seen a decline in his popularity, and he’s convinced that it’s sabotage, that an engineer has planted a bug in the algorithm to suppress his posts or his tweets, and engineers, data scientists, everyone, tries to tell him, look, it’s not that, you’re just not as popular as you used to be. But even his cousin who’s working at Twitter at the time said, I know that the data says that, but I trust Elon’s intuition more than the data. And so, ultimately, they’re forced to make this change.
Robinson
I mean, he’s a genius, so… By the way, I have a something that has made my Twitter experience better than ever before, and I highly recommend to everyone listening and reading: mute Elon Musk. You can mute him, and you don’t have to see a single thing he says ever again. I’m shocked that he didn’t eliminate the ability to mute him. But it is still there right now, and it’s an improvement. Try it!
Schiffer
Are you still using the platform like you used to? Or has it changed?
Robinson
I have to use it. Because we’re a small independent outlet, we’ve got to promote the stuff. I feel like I do the same thing I always did.
Schiffer
But do you notice that engagement has declined? Or does it feel about the same?
Robinson
Yes. Maybe you know more about the actual decision-making process here, but he definitely removed headlines from articles. He sees articles that send people on to a news organization’s website as parasitic on Twitter because they’re taking them away. And so, it’s been much harder to get people to get pieces of journalism from our publication to get any attention.
Schiffer
I think there’s no question he has an enormous antipathy towards the mainstream press, and this definition of his includes basically all classic journalistic outlets. I think there’s been an enormous deprioritization of news on X and even downranking of links, like you said.
Robinson
Yes, although Facebook is pretty similar, too. It’s been a real challenge.
Schiffer
Yes, Threads says it doesn’t, but they’re not leaning into these news sites that well.
Robinson
In the time Elon has owned it, in some ways, it seems like not much has changed. He introduced paying for two-factor authentication now, which seems a stupid policy. But it seems like maybe it hasn’t changed as much as we might have expected. He hasn’t turned X into what he called the “everything app”. It’s just Twitter, but without the bird. But in another way, it has changed a lot. So, tell me more about what has changed.
Schiffer
I’m trying not to over prioritize my own experience because I feel like it has become a lot more toxic and there’s a lot more misinformation. But when I talk to journalists in other countries, they say that it seems very similar to what it used to be. So, I don’t know how much of this is my own experience, and how much of it is true across the board. But one thing I will say is that X’s cultural relevance, I think, has declined enormously. You can see this on a few different metrics. When outlets like NPR are completely off X and posting on other platforms, I think that’s a significant shift from a platform that used to be the primary way that news was distributed online. And then also, with high-profile users and celebrities, I think there’s a big shift away from X. This isn’t true for everyone, but I think when you loosen the reins on content moderation, you allow maximum speech for high-profile users in particular, that’s a lot less attractive because they’re already getting kind of a lot of hate mail and harassment. And so, to get more of that, and open the floodgates and actually say that is okay, makes it a lot less stable for high-profile individuals.
Robinson
And then he did some disastrous things, like when he said you have to pay if you want your blue checkmark. He seemed to antagonize some of the most well-known people who are the draws to the platform, who essentially create free content for it. And he said, I’m going to get your $8 if you want verification, and they said, we don’t need that.
Schiffer
Again, this is because he has such disrespect for journalism and journalists, and that felt like a clear example. Supposedly, verification was for high-profile people who were at risk of being impersonated. But if you worked at any large outlet, as you know, you could get verified really quickly, even if you’re just starting out in your journalism career, and this really rubbed him the wrong way. He is a fan of what he calls citizen journalism. He doesn’t support mainstream media. And so, he felt that in taking away the blue check, it was a way to ideally boost excess revenue. This didn’t actually happen because not enough people signed up at the time, but at the same time, it kind of punished the mainstream press.
But when we think about cultural relevance, just think about the cultural significance of the blue checkmark. It used to mean that you were a journalist, a high-profile person, and someone legitimate. It wasn’t always true, but it was a pretty good indicator of those attributes. Now, it essentially means that you’re a fan of Elon Musk a lot of the time, and the ranking algorithm is such that it prioritizes tweets with blue checkmarks. And in moments of crisis, what we’ve seen is that those accounts are the ones spreading misinformation about what’s going on in Gaza, for example, or in Israel. We’re seeing the platform dynamics just totally shift because of this product decision that he made.
Robinson
It seems strange in some ways to dwell on the significance of blue checkmarks. On the other hand, what had happened was, as you say, they’ve built up such cachet that implicitly, when you read Twitter and see the blue checkmark, you kind of assume that it’s coming from someone credible, but he flipped it. So, the checkmarks are still there, but now they’re just people who are not credible at all. I’ve seen horrible antisemitic racist posts coming from people with blue checkmarks because they bought them. And there’s something where, for years, users of the platform have built up this association that this is probably coming from a news outlet. This is probably, if not completely true, then at least not just being made up randomly by someone. And now this stuff that’s being made up randomly has a verification badge.
Schiffer
Completely. It was so ironic. Elon Musk had actually chosen to let accounts with I believe over a million followers retain the blue check whether they paid for it or not, for at least a lot of accounts. In the days that followed, celebrities were on there saying, I didn’t pay for my blue check. It had become overnight such a mark of embarrassment, almost, that they wanted to make it really, really clear that they didn’t choose to have it on their profile.
Robinson
You mentioned that business-wise, a lot of the decisions that he has made have not been good for Twitter. What has happened to Twitter, as a business?
Schiffer
So, as we said, Twitter wasn’t the most profitable tech company of all time, and has really struggled in this area of growth, but it wasn’t in dire straits, either. The cyclical ads market was always going to bounce back. So, they would have low moments and then high moments, and they had enough in the bank to kind of weather the storms. But this changed overnight when Elon Musk bought the company because he saddled it with billions of dollars in debt, and thus the intense interest in cutting costs in every way possible, right from the outset.
Unfortunately, Elon Musk has said blatantly that he hates advertisers and advertising. One of his core goals was to shift the revenue model away from advertising and towards subscription, and that’s why Twitter Blue, the model of tying verification to a subscription, was his big project for the launch shortly after taking over the company. But Twitter Blue was a disaster for a bunch of reasons. One of which is just that when you allow anyone with $8 to buy a blue checkmark, the platform can be overrun with scammers and impersonators. This happened. And then the other issue was simply that not many people bought the subscription. For the first six or eight months, they were looking at the signup rates, and they were pretty anemic. There were little events that would kind of spike this, but overall, it was a flop in terms of helping shift that model. And so, he’s been forced to kind of make nice with advertisers. But as we’ve seen time and again, Elon Musk is basically incapable of not saying what he thinks.
Robinson
Is that what counts as making nice? Didn’t he give them the finger and say, I don’t care, go away?
Schiffer
“Tell them to go F themselves.” Yes. But in hiring Linda Yaccarino, that was a moment of clear acceptance that advertising was going to be very important because that’s her bread and butter. And so, you could see that he was making decisions in a manner of acknowledging what the problems were and what needed to be done to fix them. At the same time, he continues to piss off advertisers and scare them away.
Robinson
What’s frustrating about Elon Musk’s position as the wealthiest man in the world is that there is no discipline on him whatsoever. The market doesn’t discipline someone like that. Because ultimately, if he breaks this platform that some people liked and used for their jobs, and a lot of people suffer as a result, he doesn’t have to care. All the advertisers could go away. This thing could go up in flames, and he’s got these other companies. It doesn’t matter. He can break his little toy.
Schiffer
Yes, this is why with Tesla, in particular, he’s cultivated fandoms so intensely. Tesla’s stock price has always kind of outpaced its business, and that’s because I think it’s one of the most popular retail stocks for individuals to buy because he has so many fans. So, regardless of what he does, if he jokes about taking the company private and doesn’t actually have the funding secured, and he calls someone online a pedophile who’s clearly not, his fans support him no matter what. They help to buoy the stock price through all of these mini scandals.
Robinson
The SEC could fine him $20 million. Well, he makes like $300 million in a day or whatever.
Schiffer
That’s kind of my theory about the future of X. This is just a theory, but I think that it will become subsumed by xAI, which is his new artificial intelligence company that he’s creating, and Twitter or X will become an input to train the large language models. I think his focus is increasingly going to shift toward artificial intelligence.
Robinson
Okay, I’m sure that’s going to be wonderful. I do want to mention one more thing, which is his treatment of the people who work at Twitter because it seems pretty bad.
Schiffer
That’s a good way to put it. Like I said, he came into the room really dismissive of people’s expertise and wanting to cut costs as quickly as possible. And so, he fired half the company right away, took away most of their perks, and cut maternity leave from 20 weeks down to the legal minimum plus a top-up of two weeks. So, he really doesn’t like worker power, which had started to grow during the pandemic, in particular. We saw tech workers unionizing and getting concessions from bosses in a way that they hadn’t historically. He really links that to, again, the “woke mind virus”. And suddenly, if you want to be able to have a flexible working environment because you’re a parent, or a caretaker of any sort, and you have other responsibilities, that is a sign that you are lazy, lefty, and you don’t want to work hard—basically, you’re not extremely hardcore, for lack of a better term. The company that he’s creating is the opposite of that: fast, efficient, and full of people who will work their asses off all night and day, and are willing to do what it takes to make X successful.
Robinson
Or just to carry out every one of his whims.
Just to conclude here, your book is fun. You read it, and it’s a fun story in many ways. The great Matt Levine calls it “a fast paced and riveting account of a hilarious and tragic mess.” It is indeed a hilarious and tragic mess, and we can read it as just a crazy story. But it does strike me that you don’t dwell too much on the wider political implications of the story. As I read this, it does strike me as an illustration of the dangers of having concentrated wealth and power, that you can have a guy who has not a shred of empathy, who is like a child and is malevolent, bigoted, believes in conspiracy theories, and is transphobic. He is just a deeply unpleasant person, in a position of such power that they control access—and destroy access, if they want—to an important part of the public square.
Schiffer
Yes, absolutely. I think one key takeaway for me from this whole thing is that the open internet is fragile and really susceptible to billionaires like Elon Musk, who can come in and just buy huge swaths of it and change it to their liking. Arguably, he is the most powerful person in the world who’s not in control of the nuclear arsenal—that we know of.
Robinson
Just give it time.
Schiffer
Yes, so far. There are very few checks on his power, like you said, and I think that puts all of us in a precarious position because he doesn’t have to operate by the same rules as the rest of us, and yet his actions have enormous consequences.
Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.
