Big Technology Podcast - Debate: Has Elon’s Twitter Takeover Worked? — With Ryan Mac, Kate Conger, Zach Coelius

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

Ryan Mac and Kate Conger are reporters at The New York Times and the authors of a new book, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. Zach Coelius is managing partner at Coelius Capital — and a VC who thinks Elon is doing a pretty good job with the social media company. In this episode, our guests debate whether Musk’s Twitter takeover is going to plan, with respectful back and forth about one of the most controversial projects from one of the world’s most controversial business leaders.  --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Questions? Feedback? Write to: [e-mail]

Let's debate how Elon Musk's Twitter takeover is going with the authors of a new book critical of his stewardship of the social media site and a VC who thinks it's going pretty well. That's coming up right after this. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Let's talk about Elon's takeover of Twitter. We're going to do it again, this time with the authors of a new book that has revealing new details about Elon's Twitter takeover. Ryan Mack and Kate Conger here. They're both reporters for the New York Times, and they're the author of Character Limit, how Elon must destroy Twitter.

And lest you think this is a one-sided discussion, it won't be. We do nuance here. We do debate on this show. And we are lucky to have, once again, Zach Collius here. He's the managing partner of Coelius Capital. Zach, Ryan, Kate, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks, Alex.

Thanks for having us. This is going to be fun. Yes, it will. And I think that, like I should say, for the, audience that at least from my standpoint, I have friendships with the three of you. I would say that. So that's my perspective. I hopefully we can have a constructive, good conversation about this. And there's, you know, even we can have different feelings about the way that this is going, well, like each other in the end.

So let me ask the first question. The subtitle of the book is how Elon Musk destroyed Twitter. I like picked the book up and I said, is Twitter really destroyed? Because it's still functioning as a site. It's still like when scandals break, like the Olivia Nuzzi thing with R of K, I wasn't on threads. I was on Twitter. So that concept of Twitter being destroyed, maybe it seemed like it was heading that way during book proposal stage. But is it really destroyed? Let's go to you, authors. I mean, I think we meant for that subtitled to be provocative. You know, it's meant to cause a debate. What we should say is that Twitter was never a perfect place. It was actually a very interestingly run company.

It's had a lot of issues. But what Elon has done with it since buying the company for $44 billion, you know, has kind of been undeniable. I mean, first of all, the company is no longer called Twitter. It's called X. So on that basis alone, you know, Twitter is gone, you know. From a financial standpoint as well, you know, he bought it for $44 billion. It's now worth $19 billion, I think, internally based on his own valuations. Fidelity has marked down to, I think, $11 or $12 billion, you know, that's a lot of loss of value

that he has erased in less than two years of ownership. You know, we can go into the other reasons. But, you know, that as a starting point is why we think that kind of subtitle is defensible. Let's go to Zach and then, Kate. What do you think about the premise of a book with that subtitle? I mean, look, the goal is to sell books. and they wrote a good book. I mean, I'm just finishing it right now,

and it's amazing the level of reporting that was done in this book. I mean, I don't know how many hours you two spent. I mean, the level of detail you get into, it's very impressive. Thank you. Yeah, and, you know, hating on Elon right now is a very, very popular vibe, and a lot of people would be excited to buy a book that enables them to hate on Elon. So I understand the goal. I think it still remains to be seen if Twitter will be successful.

But I come at this from a different perspective, which is that Elon bought Twitter in the same way that owning the New York Times or owning the Wall Street Journal or owning the Washington Post is valuable. The influence that it gives him at an international level is profound. And so for him, I don't think this is about the dollar amounts. I don't think he cares what the value of Twitter is. I think the way he's dealt with his advertisers is a testament to the fact that he doesn't really give a shit about the revenue of this business. And it's about influencing the political discussion for his wider goals. And there, I think he would consider this to be probably successful. I mean, you know, it's an open question, but I don't think it's clear-cut success, but I don't think it's a failure.

any stretch. Okay. And we're definitely going to talk about the influence of the platform. But, Kate, let's just go to you on this one. I mean, Zach is, I think, suggesting that the subtitle is just meant to sell books and, you know, you're the author. So you can respond to this one. What do you think? I think, you know, from an ideological perspective, Elon is absolutely getting what he wants out of this purchase. But, you know, I think as a platform for open discourse and conversation from multiple angles, I feel like we've had a real narrowing of what's possible on X these days, you know, specifically tailored to that ideological perspective that Elon Musk holds. And I also think, you know, as Ryan mentioned, there's a significant destruction of value here.

And I can't remember if it was Bloomberg or someone else reporting this, you know, one of the worst buyouts in history now at this point. So I think the destruction from, like you said earlier, a capitalist perspective, there's really no arguing with that. Yeah, I think it's a fair question. I mean, if someone came along and wanted to buy the company, he bought it at the very, very top of the market back when money was free and the entire tech ecosystem was marked at very high valuations. And so you have a sort of a macro drop in the valuation that's, you know, independent of his ownership. And I think that's an interesting question of where. would be if it continued to operate where it was before,

given the fact that it was losing money, hand of her fist and was, as you guys reported very accurately, made up a whole bunch of targets and then had no hope of actually hitting them. I would be skeptical that it would have a valuation substantially higher than $19 billion today as an independent company. I think it could be lower because given the way the company was operating wasn't good. But yeah, I would be curious to see if it did go on the, the market what it would be worth. I think it's a fair question. Yeah, I think it's an interesting

point. And what is also interesting about this is, you know, even if he has done this ideologically, if this is his goal to control, you know, the narrative or, you know, control a media outlet, he still has investors, right? He has investors who are sovereign wealth funds. He has major Valley VC funds. He, you know, large individuals. And, you know, I don't think these people gave him money just so he could prove an ideological point. I mean, maybe some did, but I'm assuming a lot of them did so because they thought it would be a good investment. And I think, you know, to mislead, I guess, in that way

or maybe change his mind on what the intent of the company is is quite interesting. And I don't know, I look back on those projections that you just talked about that he had that Morgan Stanley put in front of investors. And these were like, you know, massive numbers. he was projecting a lot of growth, a lot of revenue, a lot of revenue growth as well. So I guess just for him to go and say, you know, this is not, you know, financial endgame for me is,

is kind of, you know, moving the goalposts a little bit. Well, I'm putting those words in his mouth. I don't think, I don't think that he has come out and said, hey, this was never about the financial outcome. my view for is that for him on Twitter was substantially more than the financial outcome but yeah sure yeah the Morgan Stanley numbers were well I think I think he has though right like I remember the the TED conference he went and spoke right as he was announcing the deal and he says you know this is not about the money for me you know this is about freedom of speech exactly freedom of speech but he said before he was open about that before the investors got along for that ride

but yeah I think there's I think that this is what makes this story so complicated is that there's so many different interweaving elements and Elon is such an enigmatic figure that it's very difficult to know where the truth is

and where any number of possible explanations could be. I think he has a lot of explanations depending on his audience. But this is interesting though, this idea that he did go out in that TED conference and says he didn't care about revenue and yet all these people within Silicon Valley put all this money into Twitter knowing Elon didn't care as much about the finances and then it was ideological like this is a company that

I just want to put out there because this was a company that like did that struggled mightily from a business standpoint was finally turning it around right was went from like 3.7 to 5 something billion in the year before it sold now musk is taking a projection of them that it's going to have by 2028, 932 million users, and 26.4 billion in revenue. This is coming from the book. And my question is, do the investors really think that that was going to happen or was investing in Twitter just a ticket to be close to Elon and to have a chance to get involved in the other projects? For instance, maybe SpaceX or Tesla or Neurilink or whatever this guy comes up with next because he has had a knack at finding the next big thing. So Kate, I put that to you. I mean,

you know, do you think that the investors, even by losing money on this deal, might be getting their money's worth in some other way by associating with Elon? Yeah, definitely. I think there are some investors on the Twitter deal who maybe saw those projections and thought they were little ambitious, but wanted to be first in line when the SpaceX IPO rolls around. But I think some people really did buy into the power of Elon. Right. This is someone who is seen as a generational entrepreneur who's been able to do really incredible things with Tesla and SpaceX. And so I think there are some people that looked at that sheet and thought, yeah, sure, you know, he's been able to do so much other incredible stuff that no one thought he could do. Maybe the turnaround will happen at Twitter.

You know, I think there's a little bit of a flaw there in just understanding the businesses of social media companies. You know, Elon's someone who's famously rejected advertising. I think Tesla. has never advertised up until very recently that they ran a couple of ads on X to kind of help them out. And then I think the other potential avenue for the investors on this deal to recoup some of their money is through XAI. You know, Elon has said that he's going to try to kick some of that back over to them. And XAI is obviously using Twitter as its training data. So maybe there's a silver lining there for folks who lost money on the Twitter deal. Maybe they'll get some of that back if XAI succeeds. But again, that's also a company that's, you know, second, third, fourth comer behind Open AI and other competitors that have a

pretty significant head start. So, Zach, I'm curious, go to you on this one. Do you think that that was worth the price of admission to investors, even if they don't make back their Twitter investment? Do you think that Elon still has a chance of turning around the Twitter business? And should we believe that xAI is going to be the big business breakthrough that's going to save this deal in the end I think if you were to go into any of the companies that Elon has started or run at this point in their life cycle they would not be considered to be successes and a large number of people would consider them to be basically doomed to failure. SpaceX certainly Tesla was not not particularly successful for many years and then and then almost died many times so i think it's way way way too early to

to say where twitter's going to end up um i agree it's a very different much harder problem it's very different than you know physics and manufacturing and launching you know rockets into space um dealing with humans is a giant colossal cluster fuck of a mess so um him him him biting this off is is is a big lift but I do think it's I think it's very early we'll see how it's out and then when it comes to XAI yeah that could be the thing that saves the whole thing I don't know

it's the great thing about these businesses I've learned over and over again is it like when you're outside when you're looking here from the outside and you don't actually have your hands on the metal you're not inside these businesses you're not dealing with them on a day to day basis it's almost impossible to know what's actually going on and the outward sort of perception

and vibe around a business can be so far off of the reality that I've learned a lot of humility when it comes to trying to understand what these things are going to go, because I have no idea. Zach, let me ask you this. So you and I met when you were working for an advertising technology company back in the day. When Elon Musk took the stage with Andrew Ross Sorkin, and we already had the explicit thing on, so on this episode, I'm just going to say, when he took the stage and told advertisers to go fuck themselves and then looked at Disney and said, yes, you go fuck yourself.

How did you respond there? Like, what did you react when you saw that? you couldn't do that back in the day could you well i mean um the the the the twitter advertising business because just to kind of give a little bit of background here twitter at the very beginning of its business had a decision to make about whether or not it wanted to build an effective ad platform or if it wanted to basically kow to a set of beliefs about what twitter was and put advertising in a little box and be like this is what advertising is and it will never be what works. And they made the choice because they believed in Twitter being a bigger, more important

thing to not build an effective ad platform and instead to basically force advertisers to play inside of a very narrow confined operating system for their ads that made it highly ineffective. It didn't work very well. And so in order to make that work, Adam Bain and the rest of his crew had to go out and sell big brand advertisers on the conception of the value of Twitter, not on the measurable reality of Twitter. The ad platform sucked, and so they had to basically be sold on this idea. The problem is that when you have advertisers who can't measure their outcomes and who actually don't get good outcomes, they can be very flighty. They can go wherever they want, whenever they want to go, and they're there because they get to go to the Super Bowl with you, and they get

to hang out with celebrities with you, and, like, they're cool, but not because it's like it actually matters. And so when you have a platform like Google or Facebook who can measure all of their ads, the advertisers, you could tell them to go fuck themselves, and they would keep buying from you because they don't have any other choice. But when you're someone like Twitter who doesn't have a good platform, you do that and you're basically shooting yourself in both feet. And yeah, so colossally dumb. I think, I think he, he was responding to the, to his belief that there were a conspiracy of sort of left-wing advocates and advertisers getting together trying to force him to do certain things. And he was like, fuck him, I don't need to do that.

I'm just going to keep going the direction. I'm going. Do you think that was true, the belief that? I don't have any. I don't, they wouldn't, Ryan and Kay would know about it. They've done. so much reporting on this stuff? Like I, yeah, I have no idea. So yeah, Ryan, let's go to you. I want to hear if you think there's any merit to that, but also you and Kate did some good reporting on the state of the business of Twitter itself, sort of the repercussions of laying off a lot of the sales team, you know, telling the advertisers to, you know, shove it where it hurts and then trying to build but failing to build new revenue streams of, you know, within Twitter. So like, what is the financial state of the company right now? How are they

measuring up those goals? It's not pretty. You know, I think revenue has dropped dramatically. You're at a point where large brands have significantly cut back on their spending on the platform. You know, they might not have completely left. And what a lot of brands are doing is maybe they're keeping a little bit of spending on the platform just to kind of placate and not draw the eye of soren to them with Elon. But they aren't spending a lot less. I look at something like the explore page, for example, that kind of large banner ad that you see. across the top, a lot of times these days it's empty. You know, that used to be the next Disney movie. It used to be the next TV show, the next Apple product. You know, that goes unsold pretty regularly. That's about a $500,000 ad spend a day. Or it's being filled by a lot of political advertisers now.

You get a lot of Trump ads there. But for the most part, it's not the same as it was before. and that is just kind of one signal, I guess, for us. You know, after Elon goes and does these kinds of, you know, crazy go fuck yourself moments, we've also seen a drop in expenditures. We had a story in the New York Times that ran that showed, you know, he lost, you know, I think more than $50 million in spending during the holiday period after those comments. You know, so the picture inside the company is not a good one.

And it's, it's, it goes back to something that Zach said earlier, which is like, you know, we, we don't know what, what's going on in these companies until you get your hands on the medal, essentially. And I think there was an incredible amount of hubris from someone like Elon to believe, you know, he could get into this place. He didn't, first of all, he didn't sign any NDAs before he signed the deal. So he wasn't getting any non-public information. He wanted to rush this deal through. And, you know, it was just this kind of hubris. he thought he could run the company better than the current management team. There was no understanding of advertising.

And it wasn't until he got inside that, you know, he realized this company is completely reliant on advertising and he's going to need to kind of play ball. And, you know, that has gone every which way. And it's kind of just been an absolute mess for him. So just to go back to Zach here, Zach before we hopped on, we were talking about like how's Elon doing? like, you know, between one and 10. And you said he's like, 10 being great. One is not so great. And you said you're like at a six or seven. So it seems like you're agreeing with like a lot of like

the business issues. So where are you seeing him doing a good job? Well, I think the question goes back to is, is buying Twitter for him? Will it be a success? I think there's two separate questions, obviously. Is it a business success for his investors? Is it a success for him personally? I think if you look at what's happening with Twitter or with Elon and the Biden administration, if you're Elon and he publicly says, and I just take him out of his word, that his goal is to make, you know, humans on multi-planetary species, and he really, really, really cares about that. If that's your goal, you have this wider objective, the Biden administration has been a disaster

for that. And his goal of trying to basically create a more centrist or potentially right-leaning political administration that would support him in basically launching rockets and doing the things that he wants to do, I think can only be helped by owning Twitter. Twitter is an incredibly powerful platform and influence it provides in helping to push forward that agenda is incredibly meaningful. And so if that's his wider goal, then yeah, owning Twitter is useful in that process, both from a personal perspective and also from helping

to shift the total sort of dialogue in the general population. I mean, Twitter is the place that the conversations happen. And if you're in there basically allowing the conversations to move in one direction versus another, that is pretty substantial influence. So from that perspective, I think he's probably succeeding. The business, yeah, we'll see if he can figure out how to make this business work. So far, it doesn't look like he's doing. doing a great job of that. Yeah, and I think that's one of the things that's sort of, I don't know, just sort of interesting to see because people do have this view of him as such a successful business

mind. And it's something we really dove into in sort of in the second act of the book, the middle section. We're talking about Jack Dorsey, one of the co-founders, thinking that Twitter had really gone astray and wanting to change a lot and kind of wanting to almost tear the company down to the studs and rebuild. and then his successor, Parag Agarwal, trying to push a lot of those visions through and make really drastic changes to the way the company operated.

And I think it's interesting to see Elon talk so much about how much Twitter and now X needed to change without really implementing a lot of those plans. You know, he said he doesn't want advertisers money. He said that, you know, he wants to build a subscription business, but we're not really seeing a lot more than that. We're not seeing him actually walk away from the advertising industry and try to develop new revenue streams. We're seeing him sue advertisers and try to force them back onto the platform. And so it's just not the kind of innovation that I think people expect from him. And I think that's where it's sort of damaging a little bit to his public image.

You're right that he is gaining a lot of political clout. X certainly opens a lot of doors for him all around the world. But I do think his stewardship so far has been really. chipping away at the idea that he does have this, you know, really strong future vision and a really strong innovative mind when it comes to figuring out these tough problems. Zach, what do you think? Yeah. I mean, I think your book does a great job of explaining the chaos that happened when he took

over Twitter. I mean, you had a staff of people that they cut by an insane amount. And then I think the majority of the people that were there, actively hated Twitter. In fact, most of my friends who were there definitely hated, not Twitter, it hated Elon. And so shifting a culture is like literally one of the most impossible things ever to do in a business. And then getting a new set of staff in place and then getting them up to speed and then getting them executing is a non-trivial endeavor. So I think it's too early to say that they haven't done anything because I don't think they're going to be able to

to know we're not going to be able to know if we're there for another couple years but um i i think that's a that was a hard lift um i think i think i think i think he definitely his image has definitely taken a beating a massive beating uh through this whole process um he certainly probably would have been not probably he would have been better off not owning twitter from his image perspective um but uh influence is a long-term game i i think i think if you take him at his word um he is very worried about the sort of political discourse in this country and the ideological bent of where this country is headed. And he's equally unhappy with the regulatory morass that we have that makes us so that we can't build housing anymore. We can't build trains anymore. We can't

build anything in this country anymore. The fact that our government has become incapable of not spending money, but at the same time doesn't actually get anything for that money. So you can look at their electrification program to build basically like car charging across the country. They spent billions and done nothing or their installation of fiber into homes across the country where they spent billions and done nothing or on and on and on and if you take him in his word he's unhappy about those things if you if you think you only have one life to live his goal may be simply to try to shift the dialogue towards a different direction and then he may consider that to be a very long-term agenda and pattern for him so kate and Ryan do you think the tradeoff you know

for image loss but influence gain has been worth it for him it's hard to quantify that in any way you know you go to more liberal cities these days and you see these bumper sickers that say you know I bought before knew he was an asshole or something like yeah exactly and it's like I don't know I mean everybody he was an asshole beforehand he was just like very effective at you know running businesses but not everybody knew he was an asshole before exactly or he was he was an asshole that supported, you know, clean energy. And exactly. And I think this is a very important point to make is that prior to this recent election,

he hasn't been very overtly political. I mean, this is a development that happened in the last two years. I think of something like 2016, a very tepid endorsement for Taylor Clinton. 2020, he kind of stayed out of it. You know, I think he realized back then that, you know, politics wasn't his game. He would rather not alienate folks, rather have them support his companies or his causes, whether that was clean energy or getting to Mars, and not have to engage with politics because he knew that, you know, by doing so, it would alienate half the country. And I think at this point, you know, he's kind of obviously thrown that all at the window, you know, and it's a complete shift for him. And, you know, he's dealing with the effects of that now, you know, people that won't buy a Tesla because of who he is.

or what he says, you know, people that won't use Twitter anymore, X, they'll go to blue sky or threads because of his politics. And I think this is, it's like a relatively new development. We'll see where this goes. But yeah, I just think for, yeah, for his own personal brand is certainly taking a hit. You know, he's now telling people, you know, maybe we should drill for more oil or, you know, maybe we shouldn't phase out, like, you know, gas powered cars. And that's a dramatic message change from that kind of, you know, what he was saying, like a couple years ago when he built that massive fan base among Tesla supporters. So, you know, I think we'll continue to see the effects of that. I have like three questions that are coming up now. So we've talked about the business.

We've talked about whether this is good for Elon. And we've taken as sort of granted that Twitter is influential. And one of the things that I thought about is while I was reading is is Twitter as influential as it was under Elon because a lot of a lot of the dialogue has left the platform but then again this is that was question one now question two is does it really matter who who's running Twitter because like I was talking about earlier with the olivia nuzzi thing or with the I've been hooked to it for the P. Diddy updates. I mean it is just the one real-time feed in the world and it's it's gonna you know do its thing no matter what and you know I remember one time talking about talking with Mark Zuckerberg about how powerful he is and

you know the powerful hand he wields you know controlling Facebook and he's like listen it's not that simple because ultimately it's like user generated content and you know it's harder than you think to put your thumb on the scale of a platform like this, clearly you're seeing discussion from all angles on Twitter. It's not like true social. It's a big deal. I mean, for everybody. So let's just start with those. Is Twitter still influential and doesn't matter who runs it? And whoever wants can grab that one. Yeah. I mean, I think Twitter is still incredibly influential, although, you know, I think those of us in the media have always overestimated that influence a little bit because it's so enmeshed with the way that we

pursue the news these days. But yeah, I mean, I think it's still sort of the destination for those breaking news moments. You know, but there is this very tight relationship that has existed for a long time between the news media and Twitter. It's been a place for breaking news and some of these stories you mentioned, the P. Diddy stuff, the Olivia Nizzy stuff, those are all coming from media outlets and then being discussed on Twitter. And I think that that might shift. You know, as Elon has sort of driven a wedge between himself and the media, really criticized the media, and tried to shift the primary use case of X to be eyewitness news kind of citizen journalism, the discussion and the utility might change a little bit.

So, you know, if people are breaking stories not on X but on other platforms, there's still going to be discussion of them on X, but if you think about the kinds of breaking news that you can get from sort of eyewitness account, you're thinking more maybe natural disasters, protests, kind of moments on the street, right? That's where X. will still be very effective, but some of these other bigger conversations that involve global participation might begin to happen somewhere else. Does it matter who owns the platform? I think yes, especially as Elon Musk has really changed the platform to almost be synonymous with himself. You know, I don't know that everyone who was using Twitter back in the

day could necessarily name the CEO, but I think that's quite different now. With Elon owning X, people really think of it as his megaphone, his place to be. And so they're going to associate it with him for better or for worse. And I think it also matters who owns it because, you know, they ultimately get to decide the direction of the platform. Elon's decided to shift it more to the right and to really throw the weight of the platform behind Donald Trump's campaign. Maybe it a little bit less in the past since Dorsey was kind of an ineffectual leader. But I think it does matter. And I think he's really, you know, put his stamp on it as an owner.

All right, Zach, I'm curious what you think about those two. Yeah, I think owning the platform, I think you can you can really have an effect on cultural norms. So I think we've seen it in a number of different sort of edge. sort of or newly sort of accepted norms where when Twitter was Twitter before it became Elon's, it pushed aggressively towards a set of beliefs, largely progressive beliefs that it then normalized and then extended across, you know, everyone who's on it and then theoretically everyone who's not on it. And so I think the power from a normative setting perspective is massive. And it's always hard to sort of see the direct correlations but behind all of that

because it is obviously a dynamic social order that we live in. But yeah, it's a really powerful platform. Okay. Yeah. Let me ask you a question about that. I mean, I would say, yeah, a lot of liberal norms became mainstream through Twitter, but also Donald Trump, right, probably became president because of his Twitter account or with a lot of help from it. So what makes you say that it was mostly a left-leaning norm establisher versus... Look, this is humans getting together and debating

and talking and engaging in what humans do, which is a messy thing. And so everyone is part of that conversation. But norms can be basically set both from a rule perspective and then also from an enforcement of the rule perspective and also from an amplification perspective. And so at each of those levels at the platform,

you can make changes either on the margins or you can make pretty dramatic changes that have very consequential effects on how the platform operates. And then if you then zoom out and come back from a sociological or political science or whatever sort of perspective and do the research 10 years later,

you could be like, oh, here's where we started to say that this was okay or not okay. And then here's how we can then see how that norm then spreads across culture and then changes. But, you know, these are very difficult anthropological questions, which are non-trivial. And certainly we can't basically say cause and effect. But just from a impact perspective, the number of people who are impacted on a daily basis as a result of those decisions that are made at the Twitter level is so big that it would be shocking to me if we didn't.

have very, very significant long-term consequences. I mean, I think you can look at it from a partisan perspective, which is where, you know, Elon leaning to the right as opposed to the left leaning of the former administration, I think has had a really significant impact on the number of people from that perspective on the platform, the way that they engage with each other, the way that conversation happens. And then the same thing on the left. A lot of the people who were formerly very, very comfortable on Twitter have now fled to other places. And that, has had a very significant impact on the dialogue and discussion that comes from those people from a partisan perspective. Same thing from an ideas perspective. Now you see a whole bunch of ideas

that could be considered to be very problematic by those on the left being very normalized on Twitter, whereas the inverse didn't happen when the left controlled Twitter. So they're very, ideas spreading is a very powerful thing. Yeah. I mean, I think of an idea like the dogs and cats thing in Springfield, you know, that has spread on Twitter or an X, you know, and TikTok. At the behest, and TikTok, but, you know, almost at the behest of Elon Musk who has pushed it himself. You know, I think that can't be ignored either. And that's, I don't know, I just think those, you know, there's a stickiness to Twitter or X. It's built up years of this karma where people think of it as this kind of place you go for breaking news. And it still is, you know,

whether that's the Gaza protests on campuses or, you know, the Olivia and Nitzie stuff or, you know, but, you know, as more, I guess, misinformation or these kinds of, like, one-off events that cause people to lose trust on the platform, I think of, like, you know, the Springfield stuff. You know, I think people will migrate away and they'll start to lose that belief that Twitter or X is the place for them. So I have some more questions. We're going through a difficult transition, right? where, you know, if you go back 50 years, news was largely controlled by local print monopolies

who basically controlled what was true in their geographic distribution areas. And federally mandated broadcasters who basically had to maintain their broadcasting license by fitting into a very narrow, basically, spectrum of information that they distributed. And basically, that largely was controlled by a consensus setting amongst a relative small number of people within basically the management of those news organizations. And so you had a largely agreed upon set of facts that were distributed and effectively the average American watch is more than 40 hours of television a week. So brainwashed into the American population.

And so you had this normalization of a truth that everyone in this country believed and everyone sort of agreed with that. Now we've gone to a world where anything can be potentially true and everyone believes whatever the hell that they want to believe. and confirmation bias leads them to crazy, crazy out-of-the-world outcomes that are not necessarily correlated to any sort of measure of truth. And we have this incredible world now where, like, truth has become widely skewed and the fighting over that truth is very, very difficult. So it's a weird transition state for us to go through over the last 30 years. Yes. Okay, I have some questions. We have to take a

break, but I want to know when we come back, how Twitter's managed to stay running despite cutting 80% of its infrastructure engineers. And we've talked a little bit about how much of a shit show the company was before Elon took over. And there's plenty of detail in the book about that. So let's cover that and more when we're back right after this. Hey, everyone. Let me tell you about The Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than 2 million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news. Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show, where their team of

writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less, and explain why you should care about them. So, search for The Hustle Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one you're using right now. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Zach Collius from Coelius Capital. And we also have Ryan Mack and Kek, Kong. you can get their new book, Character Limit, How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. It's out in all bookshops today. It's been out for a week, so definitely Zach and I have both read it. Ryan and Kate wrote it.

Recommend it. It's very interesting. Okay. So like we've talked a little bit about the Jack Dorsey era of Twitter. And I think one of the things that comes out in the book is just how much of a disaster that was. I mean, I'm someone who also, like, covered Jack Dorsey as a beat reporter at BuzzFeed covering Twitter. And I think that the guy, we always knew Twitter was a disaster, but it was even worse than it sort of appeared to be. I mean, Jack comes out with all these, like, weird statements like, you know, Twitter shouldn't be a company, despite the fact that he found it as a company, became a billionaire because it was a company.

He also, like, talked about how Elon should be, like, the singular solution that Twitter, that takes Twitter ahead, but then started to boost a competing network and Noster. He also, like, handpicked Parag Agarwal to be his successor and then just repeatedly threw him under the bus, like, through the entire process. And basically, like, Elon talked about how much he hated Parag and Jack's like, well, I guess you now know that you can't work together. Okay, next. So let's just talk about Jack Dorsey. What's going on with that guy? Ryan? Oh, man.

Oh, man. Where do we start? I remember we, Alex, we report on a story where he went to Myanmar. I think in December of 2016 or 17 or 18. And just like disappeared for two weeks and decided to do like a meditation retreat as like Trump was a and like he just you know he went off the grid no no contact and you know I just feel like there are so many moments like that with him where you're just like why are you still running companies like why are you still why do you want to be the CEO of Twitter why do you want to

lead square it's just such um I don't know maybe it's refreshing and like sure he's like a unique character but he clearly doesn't seem cut out for this and I think through our book we show that he just gets fed up with running this company. He doesn't like, you know, making these decisions to ban Donald Trump, for example. He's actually in French Polynesia, kind of dodging COVID in the COVID restrictions while that decision's coming down during January 6th. And I think he realizes, like, you know, this company that he built is no longer one he wants to be a part of.

And he just becomes a lot of. becomes more and more alienated by it. I also don't think we can underestimate how much he loved Elon Musk. Like, he brought Elon to this one-team event, which is this kind of global gathering of Twitter employees and has said, you know, he's my favorite tweeter. You know, we have a lot to learn from him. But by the end of the book, he's a very kind of sad character. He's alone.

He is on some days in favor of Elon's leadership. On other days, he is, you know, posting about how Elon has made. a terrible decision by banning whatever account or making whatever rule up. You know, and he's tweeting conspiracy theories. He's sharing a 9-11 truther conspiracy on Noster. He's also posting links to a blog that is openly pushing the Q&N conspiracies and, you know, great replacement theory stuff. You know, it's just kind of bat-shit stuff that you're wondering, how did he get here?

and yeah that's that's jack dorsey in a nutshell i just don't know i mean i'd love to know what he's thinking because you know he didn't talk to us for this book and he has such you know it's just gone gone off the deep end in some ways yeah let's go to zach and then kate i mean zach you mentioned you had friends that had worked for dorsey's era of twitter i think we might all agree on this one by the way yeah no let's do let's do at least one thing of common grounds I think we have a lot in common For instance, I think they wrote a great book So probably have that in common

Thank you, thank you No, no, we have a lot in common here I think, yeah, I've only met Jack a couple times I don't know him that well And so I can't really opine on Jack's thinking whatsoever He does not appear to be a particularly good manager And my friends who still work for him Basically corroborate that

And that shows like that companies are about their leadership and Twitter during his leadership was a unmitigated disaster. Kate, any thoughts on Jack? Jack is such a fascinating character. And I think, you know, when the Elon takeover began, there was like this narrative flattening that occurred where all of a sudden it was, you know, good, perfect Twitter versus bad, evil Elon.

And I think it was really frustrating to me as a beat reporter who had covered the company for so long. I was like, are we talking about the same company here? This company is not doing well. And a lot of that is to do with Jack. I think that, you know, I spoke earlier about how Elon seems to be just sort of missing innovation in the way that he leads X. He seems to kind of be missing any ideas beyond just making it a platform for himself and his politics. And it doesn't seem very interested in creating a user experience that's attractive to people who are looking for some, you know, excitement from social media. And I think that's the one thing you can say for Jack is he was really thinking about how to build the platform, how to change the platform, how to evolve

the platform into something new. But he really lacked the execution for that. You know, like others have said, it's not a strong manager, not someone who was very good at making change in the company. I think one of the biggest changes under his leadership was going from 140 characters to 280, which, you know. He also introduced the algorithm. So he was like very early to 4U in feeds. Right, right, right, right. Which was actually a Paragaggarol project.

And one of the reasons why Jack liked him as a CEO candidate. But yeah, I mean, he just, you know, really struggled, I think, to execute on some of his grand ideas. And, you know, he seems to me sort of like a messy artist type that has a lot. lot of this genius and a lot of this brilliance that has led him to found these really important companies, but not much of the follow-through to make it happen. But this is the thing that I was talking about in terms of Twitter product, and maybe to put a finer point on it. I mean, Twitter today looks just like Twitter did in 2016.

It's that feed. Now there's an algorithm before it was just following, but effectively the product is the same. It's the network that matters. And so, you know, I feel like we've been having this discussion of like, what could Twitter's product do to get better for like decades or you know decade plus and it's just like actually maybe like the core limitation of it's just not different is is actually the future. I used to do this like light exercise and trolling every year where every like the beginning of every year on this beat I would write

a story about like Twitter's product innovations and like their product roadmap for the year and then I would come back a year later and it would be a brand new story a whole new list of product innovations and things that were on the red map. And I don't know. I mean, they were serious pieces of reporting, but I was definitely trolling a little bit in doing those and just seeing, you know, all these lists of products and grand ideas that weren't coming to fruition.

You know, it's, I think, quite frustrating for the people who love and are really addicted to the platform. You know, want to see something move forward and grow, and it just hasn't been able to deliver on that. Zach, you had a big smile with this whole Twitter product thing. I mean, it's basically a feed and DMs. It's the famous saying of the cloud car that drove into a gold mine. It continues to be true. Remainsly seen if Elon can fix that. I think a lot of people bet on him expecting that he could

fix that, but it's a very, very hard thing to pull off. I mean, not to mention, I mean, look at TikTok, right? Like, TikTok was right in the spotlight and, like, Twitter could have done and been TikTok and sailed miserably. Maybe it becomes TikTok in the end because it does have that for you algorithm and TikTok is about to be banned and you get into that Twitter video tab and you just keep scrolling. Oh my God, that tab is, I've been getting horrible stuff and I mean, it's like murder videos, people getting hit by buses. Like, I don't know what is going on in there. Ryan, it's all based off your previous viewing habits. So you're telling on yourself here.

Yeah. It's like that faces of death website. But lines all SF politics and just like all the things that I like want to hate on, I'm just like, ah, yeah. Anger. It's an anger machine. Yeah, it really is. I mean, social media does just generate rage. But sorry, go ahead, Ryan. No, I was going to say, you know, Elon came in with this idea of the everything app, right? He was going to add all these features, encrypted DMs. You can watch TV and movies. You can, you know, order your taxi through Twitter. And like, that just hasn't happened. Even something like, where he, you know, he brought a team together. There was someone inside the company who was really all in on it and supposedly had the resources. That has completely fallen by the wayside. You think of something like Vine, he promised he'd bring that back.

That is, that's dead in the water. And so even though Elon has said, like, I'm going to be the product innovator. I'm going to have all these features. I'm going to really add the kind of pizzazz that this company needs. Like, none of that has happened. And I don't know. I don't know if that's a Twitter issue. I don't know if it's because he's laid off everyone.

But, you know, even the great product mine who's, you know, electrified vehicles and launch things in his face hasn't figured out this problem. And I, you know, I don't know if he'll ever get around to doing that stuff that he promised. Right. Okay. I want to talk about the layoffs before we leave. There was this moment where Twitter, where Elon laid off, like, what, 80% of the company? And I remember it happened at the time of the World Cup. I read in the book. Man, I like went on CNBC and they were like talking about. what was going on with Elon. I'm like, this thing is not going to survive the World Cup. They don't have any infra engineers anymore. This thing's going down. It's not coming back. I mean,

there's even scenes in your book and Walter Isaacson's book about him where Elon basically packs up a server room or his big database warehouse, data warehouse and puts it in a truck himself with like his cousins or something. But, you know, just all that being said, the site's still running. And, you know, it's, I think, fairly reliable. Yes, there have been some outages, but it's been nothing close to what you would imagine if you laid off 80% of your infra engineers. So how did Twitter continue to stay up? Well, I think that's not by accident, right? There was a number of employees when Elon flew up to the data center in Sacramento and started unplugging things, who then had to come in after the fact and try to work very hard to

keep that system online, you know, and we're working for months to pack up that data center, tie things off there, ship everything out to Atlanta, set it back up, get everything reestablish. You know, there's a lot of work behind the scenes that went into making sure that the site did stay online. And a lot of things that were sort of built with resilience under Twitter 1.0. But I also think, you know, the core things are still there, right? The timeline works when you want to go to it. You're seeing the news feed as intended. But things like search are often broken. If you try to scroll back more than like 20 or 30 tweets in someone's timeline. Often you can't get further back than that because

you know, whatever's supposed to be loading that isn't working. Spaces has been a huge flop, you know, and when Elon Musk had DeSantis on to launch his campaign, there was a ton of glitches with that. He just had this big, important interview with Trump that was delayed by almost 45 minutes because they couldn't get the technology to work. Like, these are not the kinds of performances that we would expect from a top-tier social network. You know, if you're going to to have the former president of the United States doing a live appearance on your platform, he better appear. And that didn't happen here. So I think there are quite a few infrastructure problems at this point that, you know, it's not really noticeable if you're just scrolling

through the feed a couple times a day. But if you really want to use this platform as a power user, you're going to run into those problems. Right. Yeah. I mean, in fairness, I guess that spaces wasn't all that great even before he took over and this is the company that also popularized the fail will so there's that and fleets we're not even we haven't talked about fleets yet remember r ap oh my god fleets yeah they had uh instagram story type things up there but they don't anymore so yeah like i said really the timeline and dms uh do you need more maybe spaces i don't know Zach, what do you think? I mean, so Ryan and Kate in their book report that Paragacharwal was going to go through a massive layoff on his, in his own right, like 25% of employees.

It was called Project Prism, which is like the, I don't know. I mean, I guess you can't have like a good layoff code name, but that just seems like particularly devious. But, Zach, I'm curious. It's like a Bond movie. Right, yes. We will evaporate 25% through Project Prism. But then Elon ended up, he cut like 80% of the employees. So I'm curious, like, what you make of that, you know, from a couple of, I think we might have spoken this about this in the past, but from like a couple of angles.

First of all, has that been successful for him? Second, what do you think about the site staying up? And third, has it been, you know, an inspiration to leaders in Silicon Valley to be able to do their own type of cuts? Working backwards. I mean, I think, you know, my friends who worked at Twitter told me over and over again that there was literally nothing to happen there. It was like it was about basically politics and about trying to get as many reports as possible and about literally the engineers would say that if you submitted code because no one submitted code that they would depend on you to basically remain an IC and so the goal would be to submit no

code so that you could become a manager so that you get paid more versus if you actually did submit code. And I think like that that org literally shipped very little and was largely ineffectual. And so I think, you know, cutting the number of people that they did and the site remaining to operate the way that it operates, I think is a testament to how bloated that company had gotten. And I think a lot of people considered that a lot of companies during the period where money was free and companies were growing like crazy all became a little or a lot overstaffed. And so trying to figure out how to bring them down to a level that's more comparable to where they are has been definitely a Silicon Valley wide phenomenon, not just at Twitter. but yeah i think you know i think ryan and kate's point about like where is this thing going and what is it going to do and like the future and you know is is right on like the it's not about

basically just keeping the timeline running they should be able to do that it's like what are you doing to take this to the next level how do you basically grow this business and that that remains to be seen okay so linda akarino is currently the CEO of twitter uh but it does seem that Elon is calling the shots. So let's just end with this. How many more years does Elon own Twitter for? Everybody should just guess the number. I feel like that's a fun way to end it. I mean, I think there's like a possibility that he can just run it indefinitely, right? Any, this is the thing about this deal is that it defies any logic of any other merger acquisition in history. Elon is the richest man on earth. And if he wants to keep this thing afloat, he can

continue to do so. He might really infuriate his Tesla investors along the way. He might lose a ton of money, but he can keep it chugging if he wants to. And I think the question is, you know, will he get bored of it? Will he decide he doesn't want to run it anymore? And I think, you know, if his political play does not work out for him, if Trump does not win the election, and he hasn't been able to use this as a tool of political influence in the way that he intended. Maybe he gets bored after that. But, I mean, he seems quite happy with the purchase, so I don't know. Okay, but give me a number.

Best, like, if you, we won't hold you to it. How many years? When do you think he's actually going to go to Mars? Let's say, like, 20 years. Maybe when he goes to Mars, he gets bored. He has other things to do. Okay. Ryan?

Is it owning it or running it? Owning it. 10 okay not just complete shot on the dark yeah yeah we won't hold you to it um won't bring you back here and make you apologize if he holds it for nine you can you should 10 years yeah and zach i'm with kate forever forever this is yeah this is a toy this is what billionaires do they buy toys and they like to keep playing with their toys forever this is this is the most powerful literally the most powerful uh tool for public influence in the world there's There's no newspaper. There's no media organization. There is nothing more powerful than this.

There's no way that he's ever going to give this up. You can find Zach at Zach Kolias, Z-A-C-H-C-O-E-L-I-U-S on X, not Twitter. Has Twitter been destroyed? I don't know. It's X now. And you can find the book, Character Limit, how Elon Musk destroyed Twitter in your bookstore of choice. Thank you, Zach. Thank you, Ryan and Kate, for joining. Look, we had a discussion about whether Elon's doing a good job or out of Twitter. We had differing viewpoints. And no one yelled. So I think that's a, that's pretty good. It's positive. Thanks for coming on, everyone. Thank you so much for having us. It's really fun. Zach, thanks for doing it. Oh, my pleasure. This is super fun. I enjoyed this conversation. It was really good. Yeah, me too. All right, everybody. We will be back on Friday

breaking down the week's news. Thank you for listening. And we'll see you then on Big Technology Podcast.