Offline with Jon Favreau - Trump Truths vs. Trump Tweets, Chappell Roan's Non-Endorsement, and Behind the Scenes at Elon's Twitter

Episode Date: September 29, 2024

New York Times tech reporter Kate Conger joins Offline to discuss Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, a new book she coauthored with Ryan Mac. It’s the best coverage out there of Elon���s takeover and the subsequent deterioration of the platform, with behind-the-scenes reporting on how and why he bought the company, and the decisions he’s made since. But first! Jon and Max discuss whether the danger of Donald Trump has become more abstract since his forced migration to Truth Social. Then they unpack Chappell Roan’s decision to support but not endorse Kamala Harris, and John Mulaney’s hilarious takedown of Salesforce at the company’s own conference. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

In all of my time reporting on Elon, I've learned to not report things until he does them because he often says something and then changes his mind or, you know, it never comes to fruition. That being said, I mean, hearing him and Trump talk on X Spaces about this government efficiency commission just reminds me of the scene in the book where Elon calls a big staff meeting on a Saturday and has everyone come in and he starts going through Twitter's budget line by line and making anyone who's spending money account for what they're spending and why. And if people can't answer him about why they need to spend the money, he's firing them on the spot. And I think that that's something that Elon would love to do with the federal government. And, you know, I think he might at least go once to OMB and ask them to see a spreadsheet, and then maybe he'll get bored. I'm Jon Favreau.

I'm Max Fisher. And you just heard from today's guest technology reporter at The New York Times and author of the new book, Character Limit, Kate Congerate fan she's awesome and i love the book so we've done quite a few uh twitter death watch segments here on this show um kate and her times colleague ryan mack have written the book about elon's takeover and subsequent deterioration of the platform that i remain addicted to um there's a ton of great behind-the-scenes reporting about all of Twitter's problems before Musk took over, how and why he bought the company, and the decisions he's made since. We talk about all that, and Kate answers some burning questions

that addicts like me have about the future of the platform once known as Twitter.com. I'm still calling it Twitter. It still twitter i know whenever i see it referenced just as x now i'm like come on hold strong yeah exactly like why have you surrendered media person who's using x well i can't wait for this book i have been holding out and buying a twitter book because i'm waiting for this one i'm really excited to read it it's worth a read uh before we get to that we have news to cover including the discourse around chapel roan's decision to support but not endorse Kamala Harris. We're going to get into it. And John Mulaney's hilarious

takedown of Salesforce at the company's own conference. Did you rate this one too? Is this also a Jon Favreau ghostwriting job? I wish. It's hilarious. But first, longtime offline friend Charlie Warzel wrote an Atlantic piece this week titled The Trump Posts You Probably Aren't Seeing, in which he argues that Trump's truth social posts have become darker and more deranged than any of his old stuff on Twitter. And because truth

social is a piece of shit platform that no one really uses, Trump's truths don't get quite the same attention his tweets once did. And Charlie argues this is causing us to miss just how much the man who's got a 50-50 chance to become the next president has deteriorated. 55-45. Nate Silver's updated his numbers. You're a silver bulletin guy on that.

Well, I wasn't, but now I am. Now it's because it's better. That's right. That's how I read the polls. Here's a quote from Charlie's piece. It's not just that Trump seems unpresidential. It's that he seems like an unwell elderly man posting AI slop for an audience of bots on Facebook. Imagine that instead of Donald Trump's, you were looking at the feet of a relative.

What would you say or do? Whom would you call? Honestly, probably nothing. I'd be like be like i'd like tell my parents like crazy uncle whoever i would ask kamala harris to fix that too actually um have you ever taken the chance to look through trump's true social rants so i read through some of them and i have to tell you i kind of came away feeling the same way i do about his rallies where it's like it's kind of the same but just less juice and they're like a lot of them are still clearly written by Dan Scavino, who was the White House social media person who would obviously write all of Trump's tweets, but was between like

7am and 10pm. But then you could tell it switched over, went back to Trump because it got crazier again. Let me read you one of them from August. This is all caps, very important. No, we're beating her quote, like a drum end quote, like we will beat her on them from August. This is all caps. Very important. No, we're beating her, quote, like a drum, end quote. Like we will beat her on November 5th. It's all fake. It's all misinformation and disinformation. We are destroying the Democrats on social media. I don't know.

I got to tell you, it doesn't have the same magic. Doesn't hit the same way. It's really, I don't, I understand why it, I mean, he was always deranged. I understand why people would say like, wow, this is so much crazier. I don't think it is. I think that it's just not, he doesn't have the same edge and width that he used to bring to this. So now you're just seeing the derangement that has always been there. I think it's a good point.

Like, it's hard to untangle what is him being on Truth Social and not Twitter. And what is just the fact that we are all dulled to the crazy. Right. I, you know, I mean, Charlie concludes his piece saying that he's always believed the best way to understand Donald Trump was via plain text saying, quote, unlike on television, his fragmented attention, peculiar thinking and dangerous words cannot hide or be explained away. What do you think? Like, do you think, do you think the, did the danger of Donald Trump become more abstract? I don't know if it has.

Yeah. So this argument has circulated ever since 2020 when all the major platforms removed Trump and people have this concern that it's like, Hey, are we losing touch with how scary Donald Trump is because we're not seeing his tweets as much anymore. And I think it's rising again now as a way to try to answer the question of like, why do when you ask so many voters, how do you feel about Donald Trump? They used to be really scared of him and now they're kind of not anymore and people seem to have forgotten how scary he was. And I think we're looking for an explanation for that. And the reason that the threat became more abstract is he's not president anymore.

And it's four years ago and people have short memories. I will make the argument until the day i die de-platforming trump was a good thing to do was the right thing to do i think we really forget what it was like to live your entire life with trump in total control of the world's attention every day through these social media posts that would get tens of millions of views on the major platforms, sometimes hundreds of millions. And, of course, the rallies that would also get play on all the networks. But do you think it was because he was president, like you were saying, or because he was on Twitter? I mean, it was both.

Clearly, you can't separate the two. But I think it was, I mean, his reach on Facebook was vastly more than his reach ever was on Twitter. And it was like you could look at the numbers and see how much his reach would be exaggerated by the algorithm. Then it gets bled into all the other parts of the like Facebook ecosystem. So it would play out on all these other like Facebook groups and all sorts of other corners of Facebook where people would like follow on to his message and try to repeat what he was saying to go viral as well. Like think back to what it was like in 2020 when Trump basically ran the Internet thanks to the social media platforms. Like his posts accusing the state governments of being authoritarians for enforcing COVID rules led our mobs to show up at state capitals and public events, which led to a lot of real world violence. All this COVID misinformation, all the ivermectin bullshit got a lot of people killed. There was a

long time when you would hear stories every week about like, oh, my husband on his deathbed said that he saw viral Facebook Trump posts saying to take ivermectin. So he died from COVID exposure, like his voting misinformation, because it would go so viral and would then bleed out into so many other parts of Facebook led in part to January 6. Like, remember when the looting starts, the shooting starts a real fear that was going to provoke nationwide violence. So this idea that like, oh, it was actually good that he had that reach because it reminded people that he was crazy. I don't think that's how social platforms work. They are designed to be persuasive. And I think they were. So I'll take the other side of the argument. Yeah. And it's mostly because of my position as a political hack trying to figure out how to win elections. Few things.

I think if Trump became president tomorrow and there was some other crisis, pandemic or whatever else, and he was not tweeting it, tweeting through it, he would still be in that White House press briefing room every day that's true saying crazy shit yeah spreading misinformation disinformation all of his people would be all over the internet and all they're different now everything's more decentralized now so there'd be the the tweets the facebook posts the newsmax segments that's where people would get it. The Rumble stuff. The podcast. It's everywhere. And I do, I think that there are, I'm trying to imagine what it would be like, because there's a lot of voters like this, who the last time they really checked in on politics and Donald Trump was when he was in the White House. And since he left, they were like, I'm not paying much attention. Sure. Which speaks to why people have lost a sense of the stakes.

Yes. And I do think you've seen that in the polls. And this was the Biden campaign's theory of the case. It is still the theory of the case in a way for the Kamala Harris campaign, though, because she's a new candidate, they have to do more to define her. So they're working. So they want more attention for her. But they also still want attention for Donald Trump. Now you can talk to a lot of the pollsters will say this,

the super PAC folks will say this. Everyone says that they're like, look, the stuff about Trump, it doesn't move votes at this point because it's all baked in and everyone has made up their mind about Donald Trump. I think that may be true. But again, if you're one of these people who's tuned out, then four years ago was a long time. And like, yeah, you remember, you think about January 6th. That seemed bad. Trump was bad for that a couple of years ago. And he used to say crazy shit.

But then they have this vague notion of the economy was good. And then you see Trump on a debate stage, which they did next to Kamala Harris tens of millions of people watch that and he says they're eating the dogs they're eating the cats and you remember

and you're like oh yeah I think the Trump amnesia stuff is being solved not by reminding people what he did back then but by him being in the spotlight again and so the more trump that people are seeing i think the better and i realize it's not going to move more people at this point because of views of donald trump are pretty hardened but he also has the highest favorability he's had in any run for president right now is that true yeah i didn't realize that. Wow. Yeah. That's upsetting. He has higher favorability ratings than ever before.

And my view on that is that it is... People have lost, they're not connected with what he actually says and thinking. Is the reason for that that he's not tweeting? Eh, I don't necessarily agree with that. Right. I think it's just people are tired of the Trump show. Yeah. And they think that they've made up their minds.

Right, right, right. And we're sort of dulled to it now. I think a lot of different stuff show. Yeah. And they think that they've made up their minds. Right, right. And we're sort of dulled to it now. I think a lot of different stuff's at play. But, you know, that's why I wasn't, look, I wanted him

off Twitter. Yeah. I was like celebrating when it happened. Right. But then that was when I thought he would go away forever

and not run for fucking president again. Right, right. And now that he's almost president again, my theory is like, yes, that stuff could be persuasive but I also think

when people are trying to make a choice between two candidates he still has he's still a very unpopular political figure or at least has been historically

and has just eked out his win in 2016 and has not been popular since then and so as we're heading

towards another close election where his favorability ratings are up, yes, I think that the majority of the work to defeat him is going to be persuading people that Kamala Harris is the right alternative. But then, so how do you reconnect people with reminding them this is who Trump is and what he looks like and sound like?

Because to me, putting him, I know this is not what you're advocating, but just imagining him being back on Facebook or Twitter is the worst possible, to me would be the I know this is not what you're advocating, but just imagining him being back on Facebook or Twitter is the worst possible, to me would be the worst possible way to do that because we know that those platforms are designed in a way where they don't expose you to those posts to show you how ridiculous they are, but rather to be persuasive. Depends on the post, right? Like some of those true social stuff is, are lies that I think if they were out in the world and a lot of people saw them i would

worry that that a lot of people would believe them right some of it's just like like i don't know like if everyone in the world saw i hate taylor swift in all caps i don't know how that's helping him yeah i don't know if it's hurting him but i know it's helping him or like and there's just a lot of shit like that on the truths the the craziest truths are the re-truths like it's true he's posted like his feed like dozens and dozens he's reposted laura loomer's like really dark gross racist vile shit i think some of that would not help him um though it also it's always a balance because it would not help him politically but would it drive and incite potential violence? Yeah, maybe. So it's, well, so the irony to this whole discussion is that the platforms have allowed him back on

Twitter reinstated his account two years ago, Facebook and Instagram reinstated him last year, or I'm sorry, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube reinstated him last year. And he's just choosing not to use them, which is so funny because they were so important to him getting elected. I was going to ask you why you think he's not because he is back on Twitter and he is tweeting. I would bet anything that it's the campaign tweeting for him. Oh, absolutely. Because the tweets- It's clearly not him. The tweets are still crazy, but they're like a few clicks less crazy. Yeah, they're a few clicks and they're like in the ballpark of what the campaign wants as their message. You can always tell by the syntax and you can tell by the caps.

Yeah. If it's Trump or if it's Dan Scovino. Yeah, that's true. It's clearly Scovino. Why do you think he's not tweeting? So the prevailing answer to this is because of his equity and truth social, which has lost like 300% of its market value since going public. And he's got a bunch of money potentially in there that he could get out if the stock were to come back up. I think the real answer, though,

is that he's just a curmudgeonly old guy who prefers to be on a platform that is literally designed to cater to his exact preferences and to be a cozy little place for him. And I think he wants that more than he wants to do the work of trying to reach people on Facebook and Twitter. And he's probably still mad at both of those platforms too for removing him in the first place. I also got to say to Charlie's point about text versus in person. Before Pod Save America yesterday, I sat and watched the entire press conference that Trump delivered at Trump Tower in New York. And I hadn't watched one for a while. It wasn't much of a press conference. He took like five questions at the end.

But before he took the questions, he went on for almost an hour. Did he really? And it was just like unintelligible, meandering, rage bait, crazy. Like I didn't need to read any of that in text. Just watching it was, that was more than enough. Look, this this is all why by the way the harris campaign wants another debate because they want him in front of people october 23rd yeah a couple weeks before the election one more reminder to

people that this is who donald trump is that would that would help it is very ironic that back in like 2018 all the major tv networks made the decision guys guys, we have to stop airing the Trump rallies all the time because it's poison that we're putting into the bloodstream of the American public. And he's just lying and it's hate speech and misinformation. And like now I think there's a case that it would actually be healthier for American democracy if people saw him more. Yeah. Well, also you can't, in this media environment, you can't hide this shit anymore. And if you are, if you look like you're hiding the shit, then people are going to be like,

oh, there's something I got to go check out. It's forbidden, these Trump rallies. You know, like it's, I don't think it helps in any way. But even the people who go to the rallies are bored by the rallies. They all leave early. Yeah, they do.

Oh, well, that's like two hours long. In other news, this week, rising pop superstar, Chapel Rowan, became a discourse main character thanks to a Guardian interview where she answered a question

about her political views by saying this, quote, I have so many issues with our government in every way. There are so many things that I would want to change so I don't feel pressured

to endorse someone. There's problems on both sides. I encourage people to use your critical thinking skills. Use your vote. Vote small. Vote for what's going on in your city. She went on to say her most important issue was trans rights.

The internet quickly latched on to Roan's there's problems on both sides remark and quickly attacked the singer for not recognizing the difference between the two candidates, especially on trans rights. Chappell later released a TikTok clarifying her original quote. Can we play the clip? I don't agree with a lot of what is going on with, like, policies. Like, obviously, fuck the policies of the right, but also fuck some of the policies on the left. That's why I can't endorse.

That's why I can't, like, put my entire name in my entire project behind one so in fairness to chapel uh here's what she said to rolling stone back in august she sort of references this in her uh tiktok right now it's more important than ever to use your vote and i will do whatever it takes to protect people's civil rights especially the lgbtq community my ethics and I will do whatever it takes to protect people's civil rights, especially the LGBTQ community. My ethics and values will always align with that. And that hasn't changed with a different nominee. I feel lucky to be alive during an incredibly historical time period when a woman of color is a presidential nominee. So she has a point that she earlier did make it seem like she was not going to not vote for or support Kamala Harris at all, but she just doesn't want to endorse. But stepping back, what do you make of this whole fiasco?

So I have a whole take about, not her specifically, but kind of what this speaks to about our politics to unspool. So before we kind of get into that, I'm curious what your reaction was to it. So I'm a Chapel fan. Sure. I'm a newer fan on the bandwagon because I'm old now, so I don't know what the kids are listening to. But I'd say like a couple months ago,

and I've been like obsessed with her album. It's like the top album I'm listening to on Spotify all the time. But I have a very, and I've gone through this with, you know, liking Taylor Swift too. I don't think that artists, musicians, celebrities like that you, that their politics have to align with yours in order to enjoy them. Totally. I like Ted Nugent music. And that guy has bad politics.

Yeah, bad. Very bad politics. And so like this whole discourse around artists not doing the exact political thing we want them to do drives me a little fucking batty. That's fair. Just in general. The standard that we hold them to, that they all have to be perfect politicians and avatars of.

And my take on her is she, and look, she's said this in other interviews, she is struggling with this newfound fame right she's an artist who she's been around for a while her record label dropped her at one point um after she released pink pony club i think in 2020 in the middle of the pandemic then she got dropped from her label and then she just kept working at work and came back and now suddenly she's like just blown up right right and I think she struggled with that level of fame. People who go through that, like they don't realize that once you are a like a public figure in like a mega pop star way,

suddenly there's all this pressure on you to do and say everything perfectly. And like she clearly has not done her research into politics. And that's not meant as a like, so have most voters not done their research. Right. Like she is representing a generation, a lot of people in Gen Z, a lot of people in all the generations at this point,

a lot of people who just have not tuned into politics. And it sounds like her political views have come from you know bits and pieces of social media like it sounds like your typical like leftist adjacent person on social media with her views and and and we've seen i've seen plenty of twitter accounts like this i see and it's like they both sides are terrible. The left and the right. And like, what does this choice make a difference?

And does it drive me nuts? Yeah, it drives me nuts. But I also think to myself, like, well, it's our job to persuade these people that, you know, that actually

Kamala Harris is worth supporting. And maybe they think the views that the left holds that they don't like, that's fine. But the way the system is, have to you know what i'm saying like i just think it's on us to like talk to those people so yeah can it be annoying when

you hear something like that of course but you know i don't so i think that is what is interesting about this and why i'm glad we're talking about it i like you don't love her message and i have no desire to beat up on her for it because I think that she seems to be like a good person who really holds progressive values strongly and really wants to stand up for and lift those values. She's like holding fundraisers, like she's trying to make the world a better place. At the same time, she is also extremely online and trying to be a good progressive person and being extremely online are two things that can work against each other in ways that I think we're seeing play out with her. We have talked a lot about how social media algorithms consistently pull you towards doomerism and nihilism. And that is very, it's very uncomfortably

with this election right now. This is very like a very high stakes, very close race between a progressive Democrat and a far right authoritarian. And what's going to go viral in this moment is not content that lays out those stakes clearly, but rather content that negates those stakes by saying that, like, both sides are bad, fuck both sides, like, this kind of doomerist, it doesn't matter. And so someone who is very online like Chapo Rohn, what she's going to see on her TikTok feed

is content that says, sure, Trump might be bad, but the Democrats are also evil and beyond the pale, which leads to a politics that you're hearing her expressing. You hear a lot of people of her generation express that it would both be fundamentally like dangerous for Trump to be elected, but also immoral to support Kamala Harris in any way beyond grudgingly pulling the lever for her. And even if you do tell people to pull the lever for Kamala Harris, it's important to undercut that by saying the Democrats are evil incarnate and that it's wrong to support them. And when you try to avoid like you're right to laugh at that, because when you say it out loud, it sounds self-contradictory. It sounds like out of touch

with reality. And Chapel Rowan, because she is very online and because she's feeling this pressure to be the avatar for her generation and for young progressives is repeating back the politics she has absorbed from her TikTok feed, which she does spend a lot of time on. And that is what is leading to the backlash. But I think instead of beating up on her for that, we should be examining the media environment that has led so many people like her who really want to do the right thing to believe that both sides are the same on, for example, trans rights, which they are definitely not. And everyone should realize that you may think that your political views are, you know, just really well thought out and researched. But, like, we can all be victims to this.

We are all victims to our information environment. Absolutely. Right? Like, we are products to our information environment. Absolutely. We are products of our information environment. And in order to have a more holistic, nuanced view of politics, you've really got to try

hard to go outside of your information bubble. This is not an appeal to fucking centrism. This is just like, you've got to look for well-researched, thoughtful, true,

and look, it's hard to find this shit on the internet. Right. That's the problem, you know? And it's not on the internet, but on social media,

certainly, right? Like, you know, your TikToks, your tweets, your posts, wherever they may be,

like, it's just, you're not, you're going to see the most extreme versions. And it doesn't always have to be, we've talked about this before, but not, you're going to see the most extreme versions and it doesn't always have to be, we've talked about this before, but it doesn't always have to be misinformation or disinformation. It can just be the most sort of emotionally resonant content

that is pushing you one way or the other. And it can be like actually true, but maybe just not the whole story with the whole context. Right. Well, the issue I always think of when I think about the way that TikTok specifically, but social media generally, doomerism is, I think, leading a lot of young progressives astray is climate. Because if you think about something like Gaza, like I do not agree with her read that the entire Democratic Party supports genocide. I don't think that's what's happening here. But obviously there is like a well-founded criticism to be had. But climate is an issue that ostensibly young progressives on TikTok care a lot about. And I believe that they do. But the message that you get on young

progressive TikTok is that both parties are the same. Both parties don't want to do anything for climate. They don't want to do anything for the environment. And nothing has happened. And meanwhile, back here in reality, truly amazing things are happening on climate legislation. Like we just did an episode of how we got here on the climate policies and just specifically the energy policies in the Biden administration. It's incredible. Ninety seven percent of new energy this year in the United States, renewable. They have quadrupled solar panel production just this year. Really, if you care about climate, there are so many reasons to get excited about pulling the lever for Kamala. And the fact that you get zero of that on TikTok, I think, is a good way to underscore for people this is not a good place to figure out how to advocate for the issues that you care about. The Sunrise Movement was posting this week, 40 days before an election, some of their members protesting outside of Kamala Harris' home.

Come on. Yeah. What are we doing? You know, oil leases, natural gas, fracking, which, again, you can be opposed to new oil and gas leases. You could be opposed to fracking. Fine. I don't want those energy sources, right? Fossil fuel subsidies, don't want that, right? But like you said, how much more energy we're producing that's clean energy now than we ever did before.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris passed the largest, biggest climate bill in history. The most federal investment in climate, not just in this country, but of any country on earth. By a huge margin. Does that mean you should shut up and pat them on the back and never? No, of course not. But like, it's 40 days from an election. I know, I know. And we're trying to get people out there

because guess what? Donald Trump wins. Yeah. You know what's going to happen to the climate then? It's not going to be good. It turns out there is a big difference between the parties. It's so funny you mentioned Sunrise. There were, after the debate,

because Kamala talked a lot about fracking during the debate, and there were a bunch of news stories that were like, here is why, even though Kamala talked a bunch about fracking in the debate, every major climate organization is like pulling every lever they possibly can for her and is like all in behind Kamala. But every story had a big asterisk. It was like, well, except for the Sunrise Movement

because, you know. I know, it's sad. It's sad because there's a lot of good people in that organization too. A lot of good people on both sides. All right. One last fun one. Last week at Dreamforce,

the annual conference put on by Silicon Valley giant Salesforce, comic John Mulaney, paid by Salesforce to headline the conference, roasted the conference's more than 40,000 attendees in a set that, according to the San Francisco Standard, made the audience groan. Mulaney took aim at AI, corporate buzzwords, and the incompetence of Silicon Valley types in general. Unfortunately, we don't have video, but some of the best jokes include, If AI is truly smarter than us and tells us that humans should die, then I think we should die.

So many of you feel imminently replaceable. Can AI sit there in a fleece vest? Can AI not go to events and spend all day at a bar? He then thanked Salesforce employees, quote, for the world you're creating for my son, where he will never talk to an actual human again. He also compared their work to him playing baseball with his three-year-old saying, we're just two guys hitting wiffle balls badly and yelling good job at each other. It's sort of the same energy here at dream force he got he really went he good for john good for him i say this as praise that he he crossed the line between like fun roasting because i was reading some jokes from prior versions of these

and it's like it's kind of tradition for like the comic comes on and gently roast them but it's in a like we're all in on the joke way. This is one of his favorite jokes. You look like a group who looked at the self-checkout counter at CVS and thought this is the future. Wow. That's not one that everybody, that is one where John Mulaney can laugh at that one. So it's very funny and good for him for taking their money

and then roasting them. I do feel like this is symbolic of how much big tech has fallen in the culture that it is now considered kind of laudable for just a mainstream comedian. Not even a super edgy whatever. A mainstream comedian to go on and to be like, fuck you guys. Well, does everyone not see Silicon Valley, the HBO show? We've been doing this. Kat's been out of the bag for a while on see Silicon Valley, the HBO show? We've been doing this.

Kat's been out of the bag for a while on roasting Silicon Valley. I think people in Silicon Valley view that show as making fun of them in a loving way. I do. I think that is how. That was pretty harsh at times. It was. I've got to go back and watch that again. It's a fun show. It really does.

They deserve it. They deserve it i i'm also just off reading uh kate's book kate ryan's book character limit and it's like oh my god i know elon i don't want to get into a whole elon musk thing but like that fucking guy and and the and the fanboys and the whole they just it is kind of ironic that he delivered it at salesforce which is like i know i was is like far from the worst. Like you could have gone to OpenAI. Yes, right.

I wish that Meta had hosted him, but Meta knows not to host people like this for exactly that reason. So Salesforce, we thank you for your service and being the vanguard to take the jokes on behalf of all of Silicon Valley and Big Tech. All right. Before we jump to the break, some quick housekeeping. Join Pod Save America next Sunday, October 6th, at our last show of the year in our biggest venue yet, the Met Philadelphia. It's your last chance to come to a show before the election,

so don't miss the opportunity to see us at our most anxious. Thanks for reminding me. We'll be joined by our guest host, a friend of the show, Simone Sanders Townsend of MSNBC, and our incredible guest, the delightful Senator Bob Casey. Get your tickets now at cricket.com slash events. And for a limited time, we're giving 15% off all non-VIP tickets with code PODSAVE15. Also, can everyone just make sure you're registered to vote?

Yeah, please vote. Whether you've moved, turned 18, or just need to update your info, making sure you're registered to vote is the first step to winning in November. Your voice matters, and the election will be decided by people just like you and your friends and family turning out. Head to Vote Save America's website to register, check your status, or request a mail-in ballot. Quick, easy, makes all the difference. Visit votesaveamerica.com slash vote to get started today. This message is paid for by Vote Save America and has not been authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. When we come back, my conversation with Kate Conger about Elon Musk's quest to destroy Twitter. Kate Conger, welcome to Offline.

Thank you so much. Just to get this out of the way, of all the books that have been written on Twitter and Elon Musk, you guys have the best title by far. Thank you. I love character limit. I'm really excited about it. That's great. It's also just a fantastic read.

I actually want to start with the subtitle, which is how Elon Musk destroyed Twitter. I'm a Twitter addict, uh, who thinks the platform is, is much worse than it was before Elon bought it. But we've done like a half dozen Twitter death watch segments on this pod. Somehow it's still here. Um, when you guys say Elon destroyed Twitter, what are some of the big metrics and changes, uh, you're thinking about? Sure.

So the subtitle obviously is meant to be provocative. You know, when we're saying it's destroyed, we're not saying that it's dead. But I think, you know, from a financial perspective, I think that's the most obvious destruction that's happened, right? This was a $44 billion deal. Internally, Musk has valued the company now around $19 billion. And its investors are valuing it even lower, around $12 billion. So it's just an enormous, enormous destruction of value. The name itself is also gone.

All of the birds that we knew and loved have gone. And the platform has shifted quite a bit. It's no longer a place for really open discussion across the board. It's shifted increasingly to the right and become sort of a mirror for Musk in his own views in politics. What do we know about the users now, the user numbers? So, usership, according to the company, is increasing. According to external metrics, it's decreased, I think, according to the company, is increasing. According to external metrics, it's decreased, I think, between 20 and 30 percent. So, it depends on whose numbers you want to go with there. I don't know if I'll believe the company. So, you start the book

with Elon's takeover, but then go back to the pre-Elon days. One thing you made clear is that Elon didn't just waltz into a well-functioning company and then ruin it. Can you talk a little bit about what that narrative gets wrong and what was happening before? Yeah, it was something that I think really bothered me as a beat reporter who had covered the company for a long time. As soon as the deal started, the narrative kind of flattened into good Twitter versus evil Elon. And there were a lot of things going on at the company prior to Elon ever showing up that were making it really dysfunctional.

Jack Dorsey had been the CEO for a long time and gotten really disillusioned with the platform, with its business with advertisers. He'd had an activist investor come in previously and try to force him out, and he felt like people didn't stick up for him as much as they should have. And so he really stepped back and kind of threw up his hands about leading the company. And it got into a lot of problems from there. And he seemed quite detached. But that was my main takeaway. Like he spent most of the pandemic like in like a French Polynesian resort.

Yeah. So he was in French Polynesia during the Trump ban on the Brando, which is a private island resort known for hosting Kim Kardashian's birthday. He also spent time in Costa Rica and in Hawaii. And a lot of Twitter employees would know where he was because they would hear roosters crowing in the background of his Zoom calls, or they would see a paparazzi photo pop up of him on the beach. And that's how they would locate him during that time. It does seem like the company's fundamental problem from the beginning has been how to monetize and financial. And it's interesting because it seems like Jack didn't love the ad-based model at some point, says that he's always wanted it to be more

of a public platform and not a company at all. And so, you know, even with all that Elon's done and all the advertisers fleeing, it seems like it was always a huge problem for Twitter to figure out how to make money, right? Right. Well, and I think it harkens back to that famous Mark Zuckerberg quote where he says that Twitter is a clown car that fell into a gold mine, right? It's something that, you know, despite the ownership being kind of chaotic and messy, it's managed to hold an outsized importance. But I think Jack is being a little revisionist when he says that. If you look at the early, early history of the company, you know, he was very interested in lining up investors, lining up allies on the board, becoming a businessman, you know, going into these meetings and seeing how much the company would be valued at. And

now I think he does regret that. But to say that from the get-go, he didn't want it to make money is just kind of silly. You talk about two big projects at Twitter in the pre-Elon era that made me wonder about the path not taken for the company. The first is Blue Sky, which was a brainchild of Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal. What were the problems they wanted to solve with Blue Sky, and what was the grand vision there? So Blue Sky originally was a really interesting concept, and it comes back to, I think, the era of the internet that Jack and Parag grew up in, you know, a sort of web 1.0. everything is a protocol and information is interchanged freely across websites. And with social media, we saw the rise of walled gardens online, where you post to

Instagram, it stays on Instagram. You post to Twitter, it stays on Twitter. And what they wanted to do with Blue Sky was open that up and create more interchangeability between platforms. So you could post and it would be almost like sending an email. It could go to a Gmail account or a Yahoo account or an Instagram, Facebook, whatever. And you could also be able to sort of migrate your presence online. And if you wanted to leave a site like Twitter, you could take your friends and your following with you and you wouldn't have to rebuild from scratch somewhere else. So that was kind of the original intent with Blue Sky. It feels like a lot of the companies, like that wouldn't have been

financially advantageous for a lot of these companies to agree to that. Right. Yeah, it's a big change in the way that the advertising model works. I think Parag in particular was trying to figure out ways to allow advertisers to work in that environment and to make sure that their presences were being shown across different platforms. But it is a really deep and fundamental rethink of the way that social media works today. Elon's initial vision of what Twitter should be, what he initially talked about with Jack, which was like more decentralized, less sort of algorithmically driven in where it sends you for content or the tweets it gives you. And it was supposed to solve this whole like, you know, freedom of speech, not freedom of reach issue. Why do you think Elon didn't pursue that when he took over? It's so funny because there are several moments in the book where Elon, when Elon first comes into the company, Twitter

employees are pitching him on these projects that they've been working on that would theoretically support his goals. Things like Blue Sky, for example, things that would allow content to flow more freely on the platform and to get Twitter away from its only metric of enforcement being to ban someone, take their account down, or to leave them up. And he kind of just breezed past all of that. And I think it really shows just some of the lack of commitment that I think he holds to those ideals that he professes to have. You know, it's not really about making an open platform for free speech. It's about making a platform that endorses the kind of speech that he likes to see. Yeah, that has become quite clear.

Blue Sky, of course, became its own independent project organization. It is now like a Twitter alternative. We've wondered this. We've talked about this here a few times. Like, why do you think none of the Twitter alternatives have taken off or sort of supplanted Twitter as sort of the place to be? I think that there are a couple of things. I think one is that Twitter really had that critical mass of people on the platform so that the conversation always feels really lively and

current. A lot of these other companies are still starting up and they haven't really reached that critical mass where they have enough users to keep that conversation flowing all the time. Another thing that I think Twitter always did right and a lot of other companies have avoided doing is sticking to a pure chronological feed and always maintaining that as an option, which is so critical when you're talking about a platform that is used for breaking news and current discussion. You know, if you log into Twitter

and you go to your chronological timeline during a sports event, you know, I live in the Bay Area, so every time the Warriors play, if I log on during Warriors hours, I'm seeing every single post about that game and people's reactions just saying, whoa, and I know that they're talking about the game. There's no context needed. But, you know, Threads in particular really is an algorithmically curated space. And so you don't see those posts until two, three days later when they've gotten enough engagement to bubble up to the top of your timeline. And so I think it really doesn't serve current conversation

in the way that that medium needs to. Yeah. This is why I decided to stop using threads too, because I was just like, well, I'm looking for a platform that's going to tell me the news as the news happens. That's all I want. Not three days later. Right. I don't want all the bullshit from Elon's Twitter. I don't want the threads just showing me random posts. I just want a place to go see the news as it unfolds.

It seems like no one has been able to do that just yet. The other big initiative that Prague started was called Project Saturn. You write about, which was an attempt at creating a content moderation system that begins with this sort of grand vision, gets whittled down into something much smaller, and then is eventually just dismissed by Elon. Can you talk a little bit about Project Saturn? Yeah. So this was a really fascinating initiative that Parag started to push as soon as he came in and took over as CEO. I think he and Jack were both really frustrated, like I mentioned earlier, with Twitter's only method of enforcement being the ban hammer, right? Like either you're on the platform or you're off

and that's it. And so what Parag wanted to do was sort of create a system like Saturn's rings, basically, where prime good Twitter content would be at the center of the platform. It would be algorithmically promoted, and you would see that first. And then content that was a little bit more offensive maybe would be in that second or third ring out, and it wouldn't get the full advantage of promotion. And then really kind of nastier stuff that people didn't want to see would be out in those furthest rings. It would have no promotion and you would never see it unless you sought it out. So, you know, if you wanted to engage perhaps with like an Alex Jones type figure,

you would have to go and look at his account and see what he was posting there. And it wouldn't be able to spread as widely and you know rage bait to get to the top of the timeline even that though it was the the problem with all this content moderation is it's it's hard not to it's hard to take it out of the hands of humans making judgments that are ultimately subjective even if you follow a certain set of principles or whatever else. I wonder, was there ever any discussion about just not algorithmically promoting content? And if you really want to solve the reach problem and you don't want to be accused of bias, you would just not promote any tweets, right?

You just, whoever you follow, you follow. And if you don't, you don't. Yeah. And I think that that was sort of what Twitter was doing in the very early days before they introduced algorithmic promotion. And there's a couple of things that led them to do that. One was a pressure to grow, right? Their investors wanted to see more growth. And in order to do that, you have to get users hooked. You have to be showing them stuff that they like. And you don't want them scrolling for 20 minutes through their feed until they're finding that content that they're looking for. And so that was one of the things that really drove Twitter to pursue that. I think the other problem that we've seen with that kind of stuff, especially on Twitter, is people do, like I said, rage bait.

They post things that are outrageous, false, emotionally charged to try to juice their engagement and get a lot of reach for their account. And, you know, I think companies have kind of tried to use content moderation as a way to push back on some of our negative urges when we're online and say, you know, even though this is getting a lot of retweets, it's not good content. It's not going to make people feel like it was a good use of their time by the time they've logged off. Yeah. Let's talk about Elon. So my crude and exact, not exactly groundbreaking theory on him has always been that he was a smart guy whose brain was broken by the platform he ultimately bought, um, where he got red pilled based on what was in his feed, especially during the pandemic.

Um, you guys have some smart reporting in the book on what initially got Elon interested in using Twitter. You write his craving for narrative control led him to Twitter. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Yeah. So in writing the book, my writing partner and I, Ryan, went back to the beginning of Elon's Twitter feed and read all of his tweets. And it was shocking how normal his early tweets were. Like, they're very sweet and endearing.

And like, I'm taking my kids to the ice rink today. You know, it was very nice stuff. And then you see that in contrast to where he's come today and it's just bizarre. But yeah, so Elon is really interesting. He has always been someone who wants to read everything about himself, read every email he gets, read every at reply. And he really wanted to push back early in his career on people who were critical of Tesla. And, you know, he would find some random blog in the Netherlands that had said something bad about Tesla and forward it to his comms team in the middle of the night. And he's like, we need to get this guy and we need to push back on this. And, you know, and they'd be kind of flabbergasted because they would think, you know,

no one's even reading this. Why do you care? But he really wanted to push back and control his own narrative. And I think he found that Twitter was a really effective way to do that and to take his message directly to his fans. It's so funny reading that part about Tesla because like 10 years ago when I was briefly a consultant after I left the White House, I got set up on a meeting with Elon, my business partner and I, and we sat down and he needed comms help. He needed outside comms help. So we sit and talk with him. And first thing, first of all, he didn't turn around from his computer to look at us for like 10 minutes, which is very fucking bizarre. We met him at SpaceX.

And finally, he's like, I need a comms help. You know what I need? I need someone that's going to stop the press from writing about these cars catching on fire. I feel like we need better stories about the car. And my business partner's like, well, I don't think we can do that. I think the best way to have them stop writing about the cars catching on fire is to have the cars stop catching on fire. And we were not hired. Yeah, that makes sense.

But he's, like, obsessed with that. And it's interesting because a lot of CEOs are like this, right? They think that, like, and it's fascinating to me that he saw early on, I mean, now it's like a mouthpiece for his like radical right-wing views, but early on, he saw it as a way to like, I don't, I can go around the press

and I can just like fight my battles. I don't need my comms team or my PR team or to like, you know, talk to reporters or deal with the press. I can just do it myself because I have a bigger reach.

Exactly. Yeah. So it's one thing to fight with the press. It's another to adopt a pretty extreme set of right-wing views. What's your take on what happened there? So I think that that's always been a little bit of Musk's political inclination. He's painted himself as someone who's gone through a radical political transformation and has gone from being sort of a centrist Democrat to a Trump supporter. But I think there were a couple of moments that we saw in reporting on him that were

pretty radicalizing and I think drove him to shift to the right. One was the COVID pandemic and the lockdowns that we had here in California. He was very opposed to those because they affected manufacturing in his Tesla facilities here. And he pushed back a lot against the state government about that. Another thing that he was going through around that time was one of his children was going through a gender transition and that really upset him. It really bothered him. And his statements about this has been that he felt she was brainwashed to kind of go in that direction. And he's said that he feels like she's dead at this point,

which is, I think, a really tragic thing to say about your child. So those both were things that drove him to the right. And, you know, the other thing is you have to always keep in mind with him that he is quite thin skinned and he had a little snub from Biden in 2021. He was not invited to a White House summit on electric vehicles. And he was really upset by that. And he had never posted anything online about Biden before. And then from there on out, you see him start to criticize Biden on the platform and call him a union puppet and all these things. And, you know, I think he just got really angry about that. And that drove him to make some of those political decisions as well. No, I remember that.

And he wasn't invited because Tesla, you know, wasn't unionized or he didn't want, you know, union workers. And so, yeah, that made him really pissed off. Also, you write about the late night tweeting on Ambien. Yeah. I'd heard a lot about the various drug use. Ambien tweeting is probably, that seems like a bad idea. Yeah, Ambien tweeting is not ideal. And I think he knows that now. Although I don't know if it stopped him from doing it. But yeah, I mean, he, it's so funny. a shoulder injury because one of his birthday parties, his partner at the time hired sumo wrestlers as entertainment, and he tried to wrestle one of the sumo wrestlers and he hurt

his shoulder. And so now he has a really hard time sleeping because he's in pain a lot. And so, yeah, he'll take Ambien at night to try to sleep and then sometimes end up posting instead. Oh, boy. Why do you think that his first words after the deal was officially closed were fuck Zuck? What's the Zuckerberg thing? So yes, that one is really funny. And I mean, there's so many moments in reporting this book where we'd be hearing from sources and they would tell us something like that. And we would just look at each other and think, we have to fact check this. There's no way this could be true. And sure enough. You know, and sure enough. So Musk has a really interesting feud with Zuckerberg.

And it dates back to some of Musk's early work on AI. He had taken meetings with Zuckerberg around that time and felt like AI was going to destroy humanity. Zuckerberg is more on the pro-AI end of the spectrum and felt like it had a lot of very critical benefits for humanity. And so they sort of feuded over that. And then there was a point where there was a Facebook satellite that was supposed to be taken into space by a SpaceX rocket. The rocket exploded on the launch pad and Zuckerberg was really upset about that and criticized Musk publicly. And that is something with him that you just can't do. So he was really upset with Zuckerberg at that point. And at one point was investigating whether a competing launch company would have been able to shoot at the SpaceX rocket and sabotage it. And so that was a theory that he looked into.

But so you sort of see him develop some animosity for Zuckerberg over the years. And then, yeah, I mean, just have this random outburst at Zuckerberg upon signing the deal. And then, you know, goes on once Zuckerberg launches threads to challenge him to a cage match. I mean, one thought I kept having reading the book is that there are so many similarities between Elon and Donald Trump, even putting their politics aside, right? Like the narcissism, impulsive behavior, they're always aggrieved, vindictive, chaos agents. The other similarity though, is that despite all this, they are still surrounded by these, like this legion of fans and yes men, some yes women, but mostly men. And like, I know smart, usually level-headed people who still defend Elon that have worked with him. I just, I don't get it. Like you've undoubtedly talked to a lot of these people.

What is their deal? What drives them? So a lot of the people who stay and survive in his inner circle really believe in his sense of mission, whether that's electrifying vehicles, sending rockets into space and reusing them, which is something no one thought was possible before he came along and did it, or creating an environment of freer speech online. A lot of these people are really committed to the causes that Elon espouses and think that it's worth supporting him even when he's in these moments of sort of erratic behavior in furtherance of those causes. And I think, I mean, also you mentioned meeting him and how he can be very keyed back in person,

very quiet, kind of not confrontational. And so I think some people who are close to him managed to convince themselves that there's an online Elon and an offline Elon, and that offline they're getting the real version. What about Linda Iaccarino? Is she a true believer or is she just a masochist? Why did she take this job? I actually, I think Linda is a true believer. And I've seen so much stuff online about her that I think is just way off base where people, you know, always supported Republican politics, supported Trump and felt very worried there about her politics being known and it being something that wouldn't sit well with her colleagues. And so I think with coming to Twitter, working with Elon, she feels more free to be herself and really supports him, like, you know, we're talking about in this sort

of mission-driven thinking of he's, you know, freeing speech online. I think she really believes in that and, yeah, wants to go all the way. A Trump campaign advisor told Bloomberg this week that Musk's lenient approach to content moderation has helped return the social media environment to where it was in 2016 when Trump dominated the online discourse. Do you believe that? That's a good question. I don't know if we're fully back to the 2016 environment. I think most notably Trump isn't really on the platform. He's gotten his account back and he sometimes is posting campaign videos, but he's not using it to drive

daily news cycles in the way that he did in 2016. That being said, though, I think that Elon has really shifted the platform to a more right tenor. Those are the people who he's promoting on the platform. He's now the biggest account on the platform. And yeah, it's interesting to see the shift because I think previously the only social media platforms that have had that very explicit political slant have been more fringe platforms like Truth Social. Yeah. Having reported on him so much, do you think he would leave or go join this government efficiency force that Trump wants him to run if Trump wins? Like, what is... You know, I think in all of my time reporting on Elon, I've learned to not report things until he does them because he often says something and then changes his mind or, you know, it never comes to fruition. That being said, I mean, hearing him and Trump

talk on X Spaces about this government efficiency commission just reminds me of this scene in the book where Elon calls a big staff meeting on a Saturday and has everyone come in and he starts going through Twitter's budget line by line and making anyone who's spending money account for what they're spending and why. And if people can't answer him about why they need to spend the money, he's firing them on the spot. And I think that that's something that Elon would love to do with the federal government. And, you know, I think he might at least go once to OMB and ask them to see a spreadsheet and then maybe he'll get bored. I don't know. Unbelievable. So what do you think happens to Twitter?

Like, does it financially, is it, you know, if it continues to lose money, users, does it not matter? Because Elon's just, you know, he's fine with losing money, but he has all those loans that are, you know, that he took out with his Tesla stock, his collateral. What happens financially? Can this thing just continue on forever like this? Right. So the loans that you mentioned, he has to pay a billion, a little bit over a billion in interest every year just to keep those going,

which is a lot of money for most of us, but not necessarily when you're the richest man in the world. So I think he can continue to prop this up for some time. And I think he's happy with not the financial performance, certainly, but with the ideological direction that he's been able to take the site. If he does need to keep propping this up with his own money, he's not that liquid. And so eventually he will have to sell Tesla stock in order to keep it going. And that will be a big upset for Tesla investors and also loosen his control on Tesla, which is something that he doesn't want to do. So eventually he may work himself into a position where he's not willing to keep it afloat

financially, but he's certainly capable of doing it if he wants to. For some time, yeah. Kate Conger, thank you so much for joining Offline. The book is Character Limit, How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. Fantastic book. Everyone check it out. And thanks again for joining. Yeah, thank you so much.

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