Fresh Air - How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

Episode Date: September 11, 2024

After buying Twitter in 2022, Elon Musk instituted sweeping changes. He laid off or fired about 75% of the staff –including about half the data scientists. He also ended rules banning hate speech and misinformation. Authors Kate Conger and Ryan Mac recount the takeover in Character Limit.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. Trump has said that if he's reelected, he would appoint Elon Musk as the head of a new efficiency commission with the mission of conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms. How have Musk's drastic efficiency reforms and other major changes worked out at what was Twitter and became X after Musk's takeover. Musk laid off or fired about 75% of the staff, eliminated rules banning hate speech and

disinformation, alienated many advertisers as well as users of the platform, and lost money. Musk has made major financial contributions to Trump's re-election campaign and has endorsed him on X. My guests are two New York Times tech reporters who are the authors of the new book, Character Limit, How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. Kate Conger has covered the tech industry for over a decade and has been reporting on X and Musk. She's based in San Francisco. Ryan Mack is based in Los Angeles, and he's reported for more than a decade on wealth and power in Silicon Valley. Musk is the wealthiest man in the world. Kate Conger and Ryan Mack, welcome to Fresh Air.

So if Trump wins, he wants to appoint Musk to head this new efficiency commission. So first of all, Musk is a major contributor to a Trump super PAC. How much did he give? So it's actually not clear how much he's given thus far. There's been a lot of talk and discussion about him giving up to $180 million to the super PAC. But we're still waiting to see whether or not he will give that money. What's kind of undeniable, though, is that he's very much involved. And he is very much for the election of Donald Trump. You know, he has hosted him on X on X spaces and done interviews.

He has, you know, said he's going to run this government efficiency commission. So he is all in. Considering how much money he's donated to a Trump super PAC, this efficiency commissioner possibility has the appearance of being very transactional. Like, you gave me a lot of money. You're going to be the efficiency commissioner. Yeah, and I think there are a lot of questions as to what that would look like and what types of conflicts of interest will be there. I mean, this is a man who runs multiple companies, you know,

who are under investigation from various government agencies, whether that's SpaceX and the National Labor Relations Board, which is investigating some labor practices, to Tesla, which is being investigated by the DOJ for comments that Musk has made about its self-driving technology. There are a lot of potential conflicts of interest that I'm not sure they have even thought about. This is something that came up in their interview a month ago on Spaces where Musk was interviewing Trump. He suggested he could run something like this.

And now it's part of Trump's platform. So this efficiency commissioner thing, when Musk took over Twitter and tried to make it more efficient, he laid off or fired about 75% of the original staff at Twitter. Let's talk about how that went. What are some of the key parts of Twitter that were gutted? There's almost no part of the company that was left untouched. saw Musk make serious cuts to management, to engineering teams, to teams that worked on content moderation, advertising salespeople, security, janitorial services, every part of the company was reduced in some way. And Musk continued cutting in the first several months

of his ownership of Twitter. And, you know, we talk in the book about this moment where he got frustrated that Twitter was not saving more money and called almost everyone who was remaining on the staff at the company at that time into this hours-long conference call over the weekend to go through the company's budget line item by line item and ask people who were responsible for those items to explain why they were spending that money. And it's a scene that I keep coming back to thinking about this efficiency platform that he's running now and if he will try to hold a conference call with all of the Office of Management and Budget and run through the government's spending with them or how that's going to work.

So what impact do you think this had on the bottom line of the company? Because it looks like he saved a lot of money in salaries and related things. But in terms of income to Twitter and then X, what impact do you think it had? I think the impact was really significant. We know that Twitter prior to the takeover had had moments of profitability and Twitter now has not been able to hit that benchmark. Obviously, there was a lot of cost savings that came with these layoffs. However, there's also been this massive advertiser exodus where many of the people and companies who provided the majority of Twitter's revenue have backed away from spending on the platform because they've been alienated by some of Musk's decisions in running the company and some of the more erratic things that he's posted on the platform.

Yeah, one of the reasons that many advertisers, big ones, backed off advertising on Twitter and then X was Musk's approach to content moderation. That's one of the groups that he gutted, the content moderators. And in his definition of free speech, which he advocates in general and also on his platform. He thinks any type of content moderation that excludes hate speech or misinformation is a crackdown on free speech. So what impact did that have on advertisers? Elon made a lot of changes to the kinds of content that was and was not allowed on Twitter. He brought back accounts that had been banned by the previous management for spreading misinformation, for inciting harassment, for spreading lies about the outcome of the election in the United States and elections abroad. And so there's this whole swath of new content that came onto the platform as a result of his takeover that was within the bounds of the law, certainly,

but the kinds of content that advertisers did not want to see their brands standing next to. And so that resulted in a lot of advertisers pulling back their spending or pausing their spending altogether so that they could wait and see how Elon would address those issues. It became a very contentious relationship where now he has sort of told some advertisers not to spend on the platform at all and sued major advertising groups that have questioned these policies that he's put into place. Did any of those major advertisers who left come back? Some of them have, and they've come back often in smaller amounts, smaller spending amounts than they were spending previously on the platform. So they'll pause spending altogether, usually wait a little bit for the controversy to die down and then reinstate their advertising. But what we've seen them do is to spend at a lower rate than they did previously. And we've also seen like a yo-yo effect. You know, some people come back and effect, you know, some people come

back and then, you know, Musk will do something, for example, you know, engage with the great replacement theory, and then that will drive advertisers away again. And then, you know, they'll slowly come back and something else will happen. So we've seen this pattern over and over again. And I think at some point, you know, advertisers are going to realize that they're just tired of this and that there's other places they can spend their money. We were talking about how many people Musk fired or laid off after taking over. And his approach to doing that was very anxiety producing. Can you tell us about one of the more stressful ways that he laid so many people off? Oh, man. I mean, there are so

many periods where he did that. But one of the key moments was something called the fork in the road. And we detail this in the book, which is, you know, there have been already a round of layoffs at the company. This is about a couple of weeks into his ownership. And he still feels like there needs to be more cuts. And not only does there need to be more cuts, but the people who are at the company really need to, you know, stand by him and stand by what he values and what he believes in. And so he sends out this email, which includes, I think, a Google form that asked people to opt in to staying at the company and being, quote unquote, hardcore. Like, you know, you have to dedicate yourself to this company. You have to work long hours. And I think folks had, you know, less than 48 hours to opt in to this choice.

And, you know, these are this is like not a quick decision, you know, less than 48 hours to opt in to this choice. And, you know, these are, this is like not a quick decision, you know. We saw some people were on vacation or maybe they didn't see that email that day. Exactly. Some people said the email went to spam as well, so they never saw it. And this is like literally an opt-in email to keep your job. And so, you know, people that didn't click were essentially let go. And it was so chaotic that on the day of the decision that it's supposed to happen, Elon Musk and some of his executives, you know, are holding these meetings to convince people to stay, you know, they're like pitching them on, on why they should stay, you know, you're going to make a lot of money, you're going to make a huge impact. This is a generational entrepreneur.

And, you know, these meetings are going on on the literal day. And that was, you know, I think thousands of people left at that point, Kate. Yeah. And you can tell that it's something that he just decided to do sort of on a whim as he does so many things in this story.

But the option for employees who wanted to stay was to click yes, I consent to the new hardcore version of Twitter. So part of what he warned people about, like, you're going to be working very long hours, it'll be stressful. And it also sounded a little bit like a loyalty oath. Like, if you can't pledge loyalty to this new version of Twitter, you're fired. It's time for you to leave. It was totally a loyalty oath. You know, this is, you have to bear in mind, like, someone like Musk, he sells people on missions, right? At SpaceX, you're trying to get humans

to Mars. At Tesla, you're saving the environment and you are electrifying fleets of cars. But at Twitter, people didn't have a mission to be sold on. They weren't sold on this idea of free speech. They had seen him go back and forth on the actual acquisition, not want it and want it again, and really jerk them around. And now he's asking for their full and total commitment, their loyalty pledge. And I think by that point, people had just kind of had it with him.

And another thing was so many people basically got fired because they didn't sign this kind of loyalty oath. They couldn't keep track at Twitter who quit and who remained. Right. So this was an issue with the way it was set up. You know, he asked people to say, yes, I want to stay, but he didn't ask for people to click another option if they wanted to leave. And so it set off this real scramble within the remaining people employed on Twitter's human resources team to figure out who had actually resigned from the company and whose access they needed to cut off from internal systems. was a cleaning company that cleaned Twitter offices in San Francisco, L.A., and New York. And no one was immediately hired to replace that company. So there was a period when you described like overflowing trash cans, like sweat, smells like sweat and decaying food, toilets not clean.

Some people were going to like nearby cafes to use the bathroom there. How did that happen? Yeah, that was just one of the sillier scoops we got when we were reporting at the New York Times, you know, before we wrote this book. And we were just hearing from sources that, you know, that we don't even have toilet paper in the office, you know, we have to bring it from home. And I remember writing that story. And, you know, that we don't even have toilet paper in the office, you know, we have to bring it from home. And I remember writing that story. And, you know, later on, we got a photos from the New York office, and their toilet paper is kept in kind of like a lockbox in each stall. And I think a janitor has to open it to like release more toilet paper. So someone brought toilet paper from home and also had to jerry rig kind of a metal hanger and attach it to like the railing as like a spool so that people had toilet paper to use.

And, you know, just underline the absurdity of the whole thing and just the amount that Musk was willing to cut and the amount of pain he was willing to put people through in this bizarre takeover. You know, after gutting the staff of Twitter, after Musk took over, he made demands on parts of the company to get things done in a record amount of time when there were a few people left to accomplish the tasks. One of those things was starting a subscription model because Twitter was losing money and he needed ways of boosting income. So describe what he was asking for and how unreasonably quickly he wanted it. So one of the things that Twitter had prior to the takeover was a very small subscription service where you pay a couple bucks a month and you could do things like edit your tweets or change the appearance of the icon of the app on your phone. And when Musk came in, he immediately wanted to revolutionize this subscription product and bring it from sort of a niche user base into the mainstream.

What he decided to do was to use that subscription service as a way to sell verification check marks on Twitter. So you could pay a couple dollars a month and get your account verified. To prove that you're really you. Yes. So you could pay a couple dollars a month and get your account verified. To prove that you're really you. Yes. You're Kate Conger, not somebody impersonating Kate Conger to plant false information on Twitter. Exactly. So you would get the little blue and white verification checkmark on your profile, and it would show that your account really belonged to you.

But, you know, these checkmarks have kind of been doled out randomly by social media companies and they've become a little bit of a status symbol, something that indicates importance or celebrity. So Musk thought people would want to buy them and to spend money every month to keep maintaining their access to that verification badge. So that was one of his first projects right in the door at Twitter. And he wanted this to be rolled out within the first two weeks of his ownership of the company. Why did that strike people in the company as an unreasonably short amount of time? It was a major change to the app. I mean, you know, there were a lot of criticisms of these verification badges, but they also had a lot of utility. I mean in 2022, as you know, this very crucial

voting period. And that struck a lot of people in the company as irresponsible, you know, rolling out this significant change to the platform. You know, it worried folks like the FBI, who reached out to Twitter at the time and asked them what was going on and what their plans were heading into, you know, the midterms. Because there wasn't a way that Twitter was checking to make sure that even though you could pay the subscription amount, that you were in fact really who you claimed to be. There wasn't fact checking on Twitter's part. They were verifying you without checking that you're actually you. That's right. Yeah. So they were, instead of checking someone's identity and making sure they were the person that they said they were, all you had to do was sign up and provide your

credit card information and you could become verified. And there were a lot of people working at Twitter at the time who were rightly concerned that this would lead to widespread impersonation and abuse on the platform. And he wanted to do this like one day before the midterm elections. So it could have created identification chaos on election day. It could have. And I guess to his credit, he did delay it to the day after the election. But even so, the rollout was immensely chaotic. I mean, those impersonations that people thought would happen very much did happen. And, you know, there were parody accounts or imitations of things like Eli Lilly, for example, the drug company saying things like insulin is now free. There were kind of mocking tweets about

Nintendo and the famous Mario character flipping the bird from what looked like a verified Nintendo account. So this was kind of Twitter employees' worst fears were playing out in real time as this thing was being launched. How did Musk retract the policy? You know, at first, when he was seeing these impersonation accounts pop up, he thought they were kind of funny and he was sort of enjoying the chaos of it. But as time wore on, more and more advertisers were being impersonated. And, you know, they were calling up the company kind of in a panic and saying, you know, this is unacceptable. We're not going to continue to spend money on the platform if you don't do something about this. And as those threats kind of started to roll in, Musk, I think, realized that he had made a mistake and he put the program on pause to sort out some of those impersonation issues. You know, and obviously Twitter, now X,

ended up moving forward with selling verification. And it's still, I think, an issue to this day. But that initial onslaught of impersonation was just so severe that they had to temporarily shut it down. So did the subscription plan actually make money? that we've seen, it's in the tens of millions of dollars now. I don't think they disclose that. But when Musk was raising investment for his takeover, we saw some documents that were presented to investors. And he was pitching hundreds of millions of users signing up for this and paying for it, and it becoming a major revenue stream for the company. And that just hasn't happened. Well, let me introduce you both. If you're just joining us, my guests are the authors of the new book, Character Limit, How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. Kate Conger and Ryan Mack are tech reporters at the New York Times. We'll be back to continue the conversation after

a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. When voters talk during an election season, we listen. We ask questions, we follow up, and we bring you along to hear what we learned. Get closer to the issues, the people, and your vote at the NPR Elections Hub.

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Anxious? This October, Shortwave is helping wrangle that fear, and the trick may have to do with horror movies. I feel more alive when I am in situations like this. Learn the surprising science to conquering fear when you subscribe now to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. As you point out in the book, content moderation and how to deal with misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech have been very thorny issues for all of social media. So tell us more about how Musk's view of free speech affected his approach to content moderation. What Musk wanted to do was to allow many more types of content back onto the platform. He believed that Twitter had gone too far in taking down content, you know, particularly around misinformation related to COVID, misinformation related to the elections. And he objected to those things and wanted to put a stop to it.

What he said he would do was allow any kind of content on the platform so long as it followed the local laws of the regions in which Twitter operates. What we've seen now, though, is that hasn't exactly been what Musk has put into practice at X. You know, very recently, the company was kicked out of Brazil because Musk was refusing to follow content moderation orders from the government there. He's also in trouble with the European Union, right? That's right. For? So in the EU, there are requirements for large social media platforms to report back about the kinds of content removal that they're doing and to follow certain restrictions,

take down misinformation. And Musk and the EU have kind of been tussling back and forth about him not wanting to take down certain kinds of content and not filing those reports in a timely manner. He relized, you know, he gutted the department that dealt with content moderation. Musk also brought back a lot of people from the right whose accounts had been suspended. You know, Trump's account had been suspended after January 6, when he was considered to have helped incite the attack on the Capitol and then do nothing to stop it, while still insisting that he won the election. And also a lot of people on the right, the far right, had their accounts suspended. But Musk brought a lot of them back,

including Trump. Who else did he bring back? People who are considered extremists. Off the top of my head, I mean, there's quite a few. Someone like Andrew Tate, for example, who, you know, has a lot of anti-women content, who was banned from the platform, was welcomed back and is often kind of recommended on the For You page for a lot of folks these days. Someone like Nick Fuentes, who has met with Trump in the past and is a known white nationalist who leads a group called the Grapers. You know, that is someone who has come back under Musk. You have Alex Jones, the head of Infowars, who spread, you know, conspiracy theories about Sandy Hook, who was brought back out on the platform and has, you know, you know, gone back and forth with Elon on the platform. You know, He was someone that came back. More recently, we've seen someone like Tommy Robinson in the UK, who is someone who's pushed a lot of the rhetoric

around civil unrest in the UK, also coming back to the platform. So just these types of characters have found X to be a welcoming place. Some of Elon Musk's own tweets would have violated previous content moderation policies. And I want you to each choose an example of a tweet by Musk or now a posting on X, I should say, that would have violated the content moderation rules that existed before Musk took over. So one of the really interesting ones that comes to mind is one that actually still seems to violate X's policies today. One of the few policies that Musk held on to was a policy against manipulated media. So deep fakes, things where you're using AI to trick people into believing something that isn't true. And now that X is rolling out its own

AI generation service called Grok, we've seen Musk generate images depicting Kamala Harris in this sort of communist type uniform and post those on the platform. And there's been this argument of like, well, you know, he's posting something that violates the manipulated media policy that's still in place today. But he's also, you know, doing it to push a political narrative that he aligns with and to promote his own AI products. And so it seems like when it comes to Musk, there are exceptions to every rule. Ryan, you want to choose an example too? exes policies today. But I think the thing about Musk's posts is that they are often in a kind of gray area where, you know, there is an interpretation of them where, you know, he's not violating a rule or he's not, you know, saying the worst possible thing. You know, I think of his attempt to walk back his engagement with a tweet that suggested, you know, the great replacement theory is real. This theory that Jewish people are helping to bring minorities

into the U.S. to, you know, replace white populations, you know, just a horrible conspiracy theory that he engaged with, which got him a lot of, you know, flack at the time. But, you know, he was just replying to it, and he wasn't necessarily saying it himself. And I think that's what you see with him a lot of the time. He'll post something like interesting as a reply to a race baiting tweet, or he'll put like exclamation points in reply to, you know, some hateful content. He knows what he's doing. You know, he is he is engaging with them, he's boosting them to his hundreds of millions of followers, you know, he's now the most followed account. And whenever he does something like that, people will then see the original post and they'll engage with it

themselves. And I think that is kind of, in some ways, the most dangerous thing about what he's doing is that he is, you know, effectively endorsing some of the most hateful content by simply replying to it. My guests are New York Times tech reporters, Ryan Mack and Kate Conger. They're the authors of the new book, Character Limit, How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. We'll be right back. This is Fresh Air. Election seasons are tough on everyone. So Pop Culture Happy Hour is there to serve you recommendations and commentary on everything in the pop cultural universe while helping you snap out of that doom-scrolling mindset. It's important to stay informed, but you also need to take care of yourself.

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way money shapes our lives. Inflation, recessions, the price of gas, we've got you. Listen now to the Planet Money podcast from NPR. Elon Musk in recent years has really drifted further to the right. And you trace it back to the lockdown period of COVID. What happened then that you think moved him further to the right? Yeah, it's really interesting to trace his Twitter usage and what it revealed about his politics. I mean, he joined Twitter 2009, 2010, and was just kind of posting a lot of normal people content. You know, I went to the ice rink today, I saw Kanye West at the SpaceX factory, and there's very little politics. You know, and over time, he starts to use the platform more. And he's not

really so much engaged with politics. But I would say 2020 is a shift for him. He gets very upset with, you know, how California is handling COVID. And a large part of that is because Tesla, which is largely based in California and has manufacturing operations, can't manufacture its cars. And so he lashes out at the state of California, at its policies during the time as we're, you know, trying to stop the spread. And he, you know, he downplays the seriousness of COVID. You know, he makes some pretty awful projections about, you know, the virus itself. And he just seems to go more and more to the right on that issue. There's other things that are happening in his life at the time that we go into in the book. He has a trans daughter who seems to change his view on liberals and the progressive left and this hatred of wokeness, essentially, which is kind of an indefinable term.

But he makes this kind of bogeyman that he believes Democrats are supporting and that the Republican Party is the party for him, that this is the party that's going to push back on all those things. And it creates this kind of cocktail for him to kind of link up with Trump in 2024. How did Elon Musk meet Donald Trump? What brought them together? It was this very strange dance, because as of last year,

he was saying that Trump should sail into the sunset and that he shouldn't run again. You know, the Republican Party has moved past him. And he even held an event on X for Ron DeSantis. You know, Ron DeSantis launched his campaign for president, the Florida governor, on X with an interview from Elon. You know, and Elon was very much supporting him at the time. Trump did not appreciate that and actually called him a BS artist and, you know, really kind of railed against him. And so, you know, that was this foundation, I guess,

for this relationship now. But they had a meeting most recently in March at a home in Florida with a bunch of other donors. You know, Musk has, through that period, warmed to the idea that Trump is the only way to push back against, you know, the progressive left and, you know, Biden's what he would call ineptitude. And, you know, we talked about that hero kind of centering of himself earlier. He saw himself as the way to push this through. And it kind of culminated with the assassination attempt back in July. And, you know, Musk going out in the immediate aftermath and saying, you know, I'm a Trump supporter now. I'm backing his campaign. Are there similarities that you see between the way Trump and Musk lead?

I think that there are a lot of similarities between these two men. I mean, the demand for loyalty above all else, wanting people around them who are deeply, deeply loyal and committed to the mission. We've seen similarities as well in the way that they run their businesses and some of the legal challenges that they've run into their willingness to come up against the boundaries of the law. They've both had people on their legal team who have quit and protest. Yes. I think going through lawyers is a common trait for both of them. As well as their addiction to social media. They are very much very online individuals.

Trump likes to publicly feud with people, and Musk has some of that in his character too. Can you talk about Musk challenging Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook and the head of Facebook, to, or I should say meta now, challenging him to a fight and even offering or threatening to come to Zuckerberg's home and have a fight there? Like fist fight or MMA fight. Yeah, well, it's An MMA fight, right. I think this is one of the fun threads throughout the book is the obsession that Elon Musk has with Mark Zuckerberg. It comes from, you know, almost a decade ago when they were discussing AI and there were disagreements over, you know, the direction of AI. And then in, I believe it was, I think 2016, there was a failed rocket launch where Facebook was trying to put a satellite into space to bring internet to sub-Saharan Africa. And it was on a SpaceX rocket, which, you know, exploded on the launch pad, which kind of solidified, you know,

their kind of mutual disrespect for each other. It was a kind of contentious thing that happened. And so Musk has always viewed Zuckerberg as a tech entrepreneur who can't do the hard stuff. You know, he built a social network. He didn't, you know, electrify cars or build rockets. And one of the first things that he did when he signed the deal to buy the company in October 2022 was yell, FZUCK, you know, kind of this underlining of, I guess, this one-sided feud. And that continued into his ownership of the company when Meadow was exploring launching a competing platform. He then challenged Zuckerberg to a UFC fight. You know, both men have kind of an obsession with UFC. And he wanted to do a cage match with Zuckerberg that ultimately didn't end up happening.

It just was a lot of bluster. Well, let me reintroduce you both. If you're just joining us, my guests are New York Times tech reporters Ryan Mack and Kate Conger. They're the authors of the new book Character Limit, How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. We'll be right back. This is Fresh Air. You care about what's happening in the world. Let State of the World from NPR keep you informed. destroyed Twitter. We'll be right back. This is Fresh Air. Make this journey while you're doing the dishes or driving your car. State of the World podcast from NPR. Vital international stories every day.

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Listen to the Bullseye podcast only from NPR and Maximum Fun. So one of the reasons why Musk did things like slash the number of employees, he terminated like 75% of the employees at Twitter when he took over. So one of the reasons behind that is he really needed to save money. Twitter was already, I think, only occasionally profitable before Musk took over. But Musk literally spent a fortune acquiring it. I mean, he owns it. It's a private company now, not a publicly owned company. Is part of the reason why he needed to save money in such an extreme way that he spent too much acquiring Twitter and put Twitter in such debt? I think he would be the first person to admit that he overspent on Twitter. I mean, it became a central point for him to try and get out of the deal. And, you know, there were attempts to renegotiate the price, this price of $44 billion or $54.20 a share that he committed to long before buying the company, you know, he tried to get out, you know. And, you know, in that acquisition itself,

you know, he did have investors, but he also raised a lot of debt. And that debt came with pretty onerous terms. You know, he's paying, I think, more than a billion dollars on interest alone a year. And that didn't exist on Twitter's books before. And so he's not only having to operate a business that was mostly, you know, sometimes in the red, sometimes in the black, but now he's

layered this debt on top of it. And he, you know, he's also depressed the revenue from advertising by scaring a lot of the advertisers away. So it made this kind of maelstrom of issues for him that the only kind of reasonable tactic was to cut and to cut severely to kind of head off some of these costs. And it's still, you know, not going very well for him. You know, the company has lost more than half its valuation. I think internally it's worth, I think, $19 billion now, and some investors have even marked that down further. So it's been a bit of a disaster from that standpoint. What was it before it was $19 billion? Well, he bought it at $44 billion, and so it's now down to $19 billion. Fidelity has it, you know, one of the major investors. I think it's, you know, in the

below $15 billion now in some calculations. Are there any indications that Musk regrets having bought Twitter? He has definitely gone through periods since the acquisition where I think he has quite deeply regretted the decision to buy it. I think one of the most notable periods was the winter after the acquisition, so winter of 2022. He made a number of decisions that people found questionable, even people who have typically been fans and supporters of him. You know, he had banned this account called Elon Musk Jet, which is a tracker of his private jet.

He banned the account from Twitter and said it was basically posting assassination coordinates, making it easier for people to threaten him because they would know where his plane was. A bunch of reporters ended up writing about the fact that he'd banned this account, including Ryan, and he then banned those reporters from Twitter. So there was a period where Ryan was banned. And a lot of Musk supporters kind of pushed back on him at that point and said, hey, like you're, you know, going a little bit overboard here. And you promised free speech, and this doesn't look like free speech. And that was coinciding with a lot of pressure from Tesla investors who were thinking that he was taking too much time away from, you know, his primary company. And he went into this period of kind of deep self-doubt at that point. And that was when he said he would step down as the CEO of Twitter and find a replacement. Ryan, what was it like for you to be banned from Twitter?

Because you cover that and you cover Silicon Valley. You know, freeing in some ways. I was a Twitter addict. So in some ways, I was out of the matrix. But yeah, I mean, it made my job. But you were trying to get back on. I was trying to get back on. I did have a few alternative accounts. Ryan made like a fake account. And he could still get into the spaces, which was the audio part of Twitter. So there was a point where his account

was banned, but he was like speaking in a Twitter space, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was, it made my job a lot difficult. And I mean, I don't love being the center of a story. So I didn't love that part. But it was just, it was just bizarre, because we had watched Musk talk about free speech. And, you know, when he did that ban, it was kind of like policymaking on the fly. You know, policymaking to take out, you know, reporters that were, you know, just doing their jobs and reporting on what was going on. And it just kind of underscored how much Twitter could be jerked around by his own whims. This was no longer like kind of a principled decision-making place. You know, I think Musk had a much better reputation running Tesla and SpaceX, which have both been so successful.

But he's had such trouble with Twitter and X and his own reputation in running that social media company. Where is the disconnect between how he was seen at SpaceX and Tesla versus X? It's the same person. Right. And I think, you know, Musk's achievements in engineering are pretty undeniable. The things that he's been able to build at Tesla and SpaceX, you know, really bolstered that reputation as a best in class engineer. a technical problem. It's a people problem, right? It's a communication problem. You have to figure out how to bring the world together into the same place and allow constructive conversation. And it's not something that Musk has a lot of experience with, nor has he excelled at in his own personal life. He's often talked about his struggles to communicate and to find common ground with people. And so I think in Twitter, he's really come up against a unique challenge that he was not equipped to take on. And one of the ways he has been able to succeed at Tesla and

SpaceX is to just really bang his head against the wall, force himself to work these really long hours and kind of just force his way through these technical issues. And he's tried the same approach with Twitter, with less positive effect, you know, trying to just kind of force the platform along, force these sort of rogue policy decisions where he's deciding to ban people he doesn't like. And it hasn't worked out as well. And it has been quite damaging to his reputation. Ryan Mack, Kate Conger, thank you so much. Thank you. This is really wonderful.

Kate Conger and Ryan Mack are tech reporters at the New York Times and authors of the new book, Character Limit, How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, the fights you can expect over who won the presidential election and how Democrats and Republicans are gearing up for the fight. Our guest will be Nick Coriciniti, a New York Times national politics reporter who focuses on voting and elections. He also just wrote a book about the Stone Pony, the club in Asbury Park that launched the careers of Southside Johnny, Steve Van Zandt, and Bruce Springsteen. I hope you'll join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get

highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering today from Al Banks. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Boldenato, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producers are Molly C.V. Nesper and Sabrina Siewert. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co-host is Tanya Mosley.

I'm Terry Gross. Who's claiming power this election? What's happening in battleground states? And why do we still have the Electoral College? All this month, the ThruLine podcast is asking big questions about our democracy and going back in time to answer them. Listen now to the ThruLine podcast from NPR. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Walton Family Foundation, working to create access to opportunity for people and communities by tackling tough social and environmental problems.

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