Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter - Hardcover

Schiffer, Zoë

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593716604 ISBN 13: 9780593716601

Verlag: Portfolio, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

"Zoë Schiffer has written the definitive book on perhaps the weirdest business story of our time. A fast-paced and riveting account of a hilarious and tragic mess."
— Matt Levine, Bloomberg Opinion “Money Stuff” columnist

“the bird is freed”
- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 27, 2022

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, commentators were rooting for the visionary behind Tesla and SpaceX to succeed. Here was a tough leader who could grab back power from Twitter’s entitled workforce, motivate them to get “extremely hardcore,” and supercharge Twitter’s profit and potential. And it was all out of the goodness of his own heart, rooted in his fervent belief in the necessity of making Twitter friendlier to free speech. "I didn’t do it to make more money,” Musk said. “I did it to try and help humanity, whom I love.”  

Once Musk charged into the Twitter headquarters, the command-and-control playbook Musk honed at Tesla and SpaceX went off the rails immediately. Distilling hundreds of hours of interviews with more than sixty employees, thousands of pages of internal documents, Slack messages, presentations, as well as court filings and congressional testimony, Extremely Hardcore is the true story of how Musk reshaped the world’s online public square into his own personal megaphone.  

You’ll hear from employees who witnessed the destruction of their workplace in real-time, seeing years of progress to fight disinformation and hate speech wiped out within a matter of months. There’s the machine-learning savant who went all-in on Twitter 2.0 before getting betrayed by his new CEO, the father whose need for healthcare swept him into Musk’s inner circle, the trust and safety expert who became the subject of a harassment campaign his former boss incited, and the many other employees who tried to save the company from their new boss’s worst instincts. This is the story of Twitter, but it’s also a chronicle of the post-pandemic labor movement, a war between executives and a workforce newly awakened to their rights and needs. 

Riveting, character-driven, and filled with jaw-dropping revelations, Extremely Hardcore is the definitive, fly-on-the-wall story of how Elon Musk lit $44 billion on fire and burned down Twitter. It’s the next best thing to being there, and you won’t have to sleep in the Twitter office to get the scoop.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Zoë Schiffer is the managing editor of Platformer, where she covers Twitter, X Corp., and Elon Musk. Previously, she was a senior reporter at The Verge, where she reported on the labor movement in Silicon Valley. Her work has been featured in New York, San Francisco Chronicle, and Vox. She’s appeared on CNN, NBC, CNBC, and the BBC.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

INTRODUCTION
 
“This App Makes Zero Fucking Sense”  
 
On February 12, 2023, Elon Musk sat on his private jet, fuming. He was flying home from the Super Bowl in Glendale, Ari­zona, but his mind wasn’t on the game. Earlier that day, both
he and President Joe Biden had tweeted their support for the Philadelphia Eagles. But according to Twitter’s engagement metrics, Biden’s tweet had three times the number of views. What the hell?

Four months earlier, Musk had acquired Twitter, making him not just the social media platform’s most powerful figure, but also its most ubiqui­tous. He posted constantly—recycled memes, missives about free speech, promises about upcoming features. Day in and day out, he was the indis­putable main character of Twitter.

Then, in early 2023, Musk’s engagement started tanking. The richest man on Earth simply couldn’t fathom why. His photos of rockets were awesome. His jokes were never not funny. Plus, he had more followers than anyone else—and nearly a hundred million more than @POTUS. How could he lose to a damp sock puppet in human form who happened to be president of the United States? Musk had already called multiple meetings to demand answers from Twitter employees. “Jesus H. Christ,” they’d heard him muttering. “This app makes zero fucking sense.”

As the Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs traded touchdowns at State Farm Stadium, the engineering team at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco scrambled to come up with an answer. Musk suspected foul play. Had a spiteful employee planted a bug in the algorithm to suppress the Like count on his posts?

One week earlier, one of Twitter’s highest­-ranking engineers had dared to say what many understood to be obvious: that the drop in engagement was organic. “If you look at Google Trends, interest in your name is on the decline,” the engineer, Yang, told Musk. He showed Musk a graph with an impressive spike in April—when he’d first announced his plans to buy the platform. It was followed by a jagged downward slope. Interest had gone from a score of one hundred to a score of just eight.

“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk hissed. Yang walked out. Then Musk turned to the rest of the team. “This is ridiculous. I have more than a hun­dred million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impres­sions,” he said, according to three employees who were present. No one said a word.

“Why is nobody else here speaking?” Musk said, sounding exasper­ated. He told the group they’d reconvene the next day. If he didn’t get a straight answer, they’d all be fired.

After that, no one else tried to challenge Musk’s reality.

Musk’s fraught takeover of Twitter had captivated the country for months. The genius behind Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Neuralink had grandly declared that his next mission was to restore free speech to the public town square. “This is a battle for the future of civilization,” Musk tweeted in November 2022. “If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead.” But now, in early 2023, after months of firing staffers, banning journalists, and twisting content pol­icies into pretzels, the acquisition increasingly looked like a vanity project. Twitter had never been profitable on the scale of its competitors (it made a modest $5.08 billion in 2021), but now its revenues were collapsing, down 40 percent from the year before. Advertisers had fled the platform. The circle of people who saw the billionaire as a visionary was shrinking—not that the billionaire seemed to realize it.

After Musk’s jet touched down in Oakland, his cousin, James Musk, jumped into action. The Tesla Autopilot engineer had joined Twitter the previous October to help usher the company into its new era. “@here we are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform,” James wrote cryptically on Slack at 2:36 a.m. “Any people who can make dash­boards and write software please can you help solve this problem. This is su­per high urgency. If you are willing to help out please thumbs up this post.”

One of Twitter’s core values had been “defend and respect the user’s voice.” Now, the only voice that mattered was Elon Musk’s.

Many employees viewed the late­-night demand as a desperate attempt to placate an insatiable ruler. But Randall Lin, a machine-­learning engi­neer, knew it was also an opportunity. Lin’s job was to make Twitter’s home timeline as relevant and engaging as possible. He didn’t have to drop everything to prioritize Musk’s urgent project—he wanted to. Musk was mercurial; a high achiever like Lin could easily rise up the ranks if he played his cards right. “Everything else you are focusing on is great,” James had told him before the Super Bowl, “but there is nothing else on Elon’s mind but the engagement issue.”

Lin and around eighty colleagues worked through the night rewriting the Twitter algorithm. First, they applied a special signature to Musk’s profile to ensure he showed up in almost every user’s feed, whether they followed him or not. Then they applied a “power user multiplier” to arti­ficially boost his tweets by a factor of one thousand.

The next day, a Monday morning, Twitter users logged on to see an entire feed of Elon Musk. His replies to obscure right-­wing accounts were showing up at the top of the app. People were furious. “why the absolute fuck is elon musk all over my for you on twitter?” asked Twitter user @kenminkim. “My ‘For You’ page is literally just Elon Musk replies and ads lmao,” wrote @TayInLA_. “Is Twitter literally just his personal mouth­ piece now?” asked @johnjsills.

The outrage made Musk more ecstatic. He roamed the halls of Twitter HQ, thumbing through his feed, delighted. “It’s just like that meme of that girl pouring milk down her friend’s throat,” he told employees hap­pily, shaking his head. “That’s like me with the tweets.” Moments later, he tweeted the meme, labeling the blond girl pouring milk as “Elon’s tweets” and the brunette being force-­fed “Twitter.”

Just fourteen months earlier, Time named Elon Musk the Person of the Year. “This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad; a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, P. T. Barnum, An­drew Carnegie and Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan, the brooding, blue­ skinned man-­god who invents electric cars and moves to Mars,” the magazine wrote.

Musk had recently asked his 62.8 million Twitter followers whether he should sell 10 percent of his Tesla stock (and raise his taxable income). The richest man in the world had grown tired of getting criticized for not paying enough taxes. His followers thought it was a good idea: 57.9 per­cent voted yes.

The sale left Musk with $10 billion in ready cash. He could have bought fifteen private islands. He didn’t. He started buying up Twitter shares.

Musk offered to buy the company and take it private in April 2022, then changed his mind as the stock market tanked, then changed it back. By the time the deal closed in October 2022 for $44 billion, including a $24 billion investment from Musk himself, he’d overpaid by roughly...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Portfolio
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593716604
• ISBN 13: 9780593716601
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Portfolio; https://www.wetones.co.uk/; ; 105 Golborne Rd; London; W10 5NL; Vereinigtes Königreich
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar