The Vergecast - Twitter is now an Elon Musk company

Episode Date: October 28, 2022

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Liz Lopatto, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss Elon Musk officially becoming the owner of Twitter, and what that means for the future of the company. Further reading: Twitter is now an Elon Musk company How weak leadership cratered Twitter’s morale The Twitter deal is all downside risk for Elon Musk Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. We are conducting a short audience survey to help plan for our future and hear from you. To participate, head to vox.com/podsurvey, and thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's a real thing that happened on the show. We'll talk about it later. I'm just going to be honest. I'm your friend, I, hi. I'm just going to be honest with you. We thought we had today to prepare for this emergency Elon buys Twitter podcast. We thought it was going to happen at like 4.20 p.m. today. Nice.

Right? It's Elon. like if if he could have bought Twitter at 69 o'clock he would have bought Twitter at 69 o'clock so we thought we had like a day to prep and but we didn't because in classic Elon fashion he appears to have bought it at like 10 p.m. last night and then he fired all the executives and then he just like wandered the halls like I don't know I don't know man Elon so we're doing this it's early we're just going to get through it I just got an email saying My recent article sucks.

That article is entitled, Welcome to Hell, Elon. I forgot to turn off my notifications. This is how unprepared we are. My notifications are still on. Anyway, I'm here. I'm here. Hi.

Alex is here. Hey, I'm your friend who also impulse bought something this week. But it was a fruit bowl, so it's fine. And Liz Lapato is here, who has been writing this week in Elon, and she just very happily said, my part of this story is over. Welcome, Liz. Hey, thanks for having me.

I got about three hours of sleep. last night, so let's see how coherent I am. It's a lot. I mean, we really did think that he was going to do it at like 4.20 p.m. today. Like, the amount of confidence I had in that outcome was very high. The thing that this process has made me realize, like, I've realized this 100 different times, but even this, like, last bit has made me realize is that there's just no rules to anything. Like, you would think there's, like, a thing that's supposed to happen where, like, a, like, a person

with authority says, like, you now own Twitter. It's like the, like, Michael Scott. I declare bankruptcy, right? And it's just like, but instead, instead it just like happened. There was just a minute where like Elon Musk had a sink and then it was it. That part is ridiculous. So I am pretty sure. I don't know if you've, if you've ever bought anything large, right?

You actually show up to a ceremony. Like even if you buy, like you buy a house, you're to like go to a lawyer's office and then there's like lots of randos there and then you have to sign 9,000 documents. And you get keys. For some reason, their entire lawyers, they're like, have an entire business just having these meetings where you close a house. And you leave and you're holding the keys of the house. And you're like, crap, I hope I bought the right house.

Right. Like, yeah, that's a thing. When you buy a car, there's like lots of stuff. There's a bank involved. I'm pretty sure Elon had that moment yesterday. He just did it with a sink that he had brought to the meeting, like a physical bathroom sink that he had walked into Twitter with to post a meme where he got to say, let that sink in, which is very funny.

Like, oh, I loved it. So he did that. He brought the sink in on Wednesday. He went, okay. But I do have a question. Did he bring that sink in, go straight into Prague's office, drop it on the table and say, tomorrow you're fired. So the sink was on Wednesday.

I think he left the sink at Twitter. I don't think he took the sink back out. So I think the sink just ominously sat in the executive boarder in Twitter. And then he had his closing meeting where he and his lawyers showed up yesterday. Twitter's executives and board were there because. they have to sign the documents turning all the stuff over to Elon. And then when that was done, he just looked at them all and said, most of you are fired.

Because the first report, if you recall, the first report, I think it was David Faber at CNBC, said Twitter, CEO and CFO have left the building, and they are not expected to return, which is an incredible, like, if you just think about what that, he fired them right after they signed the deal. He's like, you're gone. And then he fired the Jagade, who's their head of policy, which is a big decision that we should talk about. And I think he fired the general counsel. General counsel, by the way, who led the legal team that defeated Elon Musk that made Elon by Twitter, which he desperately tried to get out of.

Liz, that's the part I want to start with. The general counsel was escorted out by security. Like, there were a couple of people where it was, they weren't just, like, fired. They were fired in humiliating fashion. So, Sean Edgeett is the general counsel. And Bloomberg says security escorted him out. Parag Agrawal, the former CEO, and Neg Siegel, who was the chief financial officer, were also escorted out by security, according to Reuters. Like, can you imagine, like, you've just done a deal with Elon Musk, you've signed the thing, and then two burly security guards, like, strong arm you out of the building. Oh, I mean, I can absolutely imagine that in this context. I'm guessing if I'm Parag Agarwal, that's, like, the least bad thing I thought might happen to me

when all of this went down. Like, that dude has got to have spent the last six months wondering what horrible thing Elon was going to do to him when this deal closed. Well, he is getting a nice payout. Well, he's going to pay him $30 million. Well, there's that. Right. So some of these executives got huge payouts.

So, like, if you want to give me $30 million and escort me out of a building, you pick the building. To not run Twitter. I'm down there tomorrow. Like, you just tell him a building to show up at. I'll be escorted in the building out of the building. As long as there's a check, you just. just let me know.

You hear that, Elon? Yeah. So, Liz, I wanted to start there, right? This has been a long and winding M&A journey. And I think that he escorted the general counsel of Twitter out of the building by security as revenge because he got owned in this process. Like, he bought it for the number he said he was going to buy it to the dime. He didn't even get a discount after all this.

No, I actually would have kept that lawyer because he is a nightmare. I like full respect to all of the legal teams. But Twitter's legal team in particular was quite good. And you may remember that they were, the outside team was brought on. And they were like the inventors of the poison pill, which is a deal provision that prevents hostile takeovers that Twitter implemented before the agreement to buy Twitter happened. And then Elon canceled the deal. They canceled the deal some more. And then we all were like, oh, I guess we're going to court. And then we didn't go to court. So. this was a really, really good agreement that was negotiated. Like, this was a really strong agreement. And, like, I think we've talked about this before, but I was of the opinion that Elon Musk was going to lose a trial. And it looks like Elon Musk was also of the opinion that Elon Musk was going to lose a trial. And so here we all are on Elon Musk's Twitter.com or quitting Elon Musk's Twitter. com, specifically because of all of these shenanigans. Yeah. I mean, that's the- No one's going to quit. So here's what I've, okay, first of all, I quit smoking. Cold turkey. We'll

studying for the LSAT. My faith that I can quit anything is very high. It wasn't easy. And I blew bubbles. I like took like kids bubbles and I blew them outside of the law school in between class breaks because I need to do something on my hands. But I'm willing to do it. You can if you find the bubbles equivalent of Twitter, I'll quit Twitter. It's still there. I think we should see what happens to it. I just think a lot of people are going to stop using it. I think a lot of people are going to stop using it the way they had been using it. There is that report in Reuters. last week that Twitter is already seeing a massive decline in, quote, heavy tweeters. And they kind of don't know why.

But the answers are obvious. It's that Twitter is an inhospitable place. Yeah, I mean, like the thing about that report is that the decline started well before Elon Musk, right? Like, it starts during the pandemic. And I think Ryan Broderick had the best explanation. He writes a newsletter called Carpidge Day, and I've just been thinking about this over and over. Where, like, Twitter is a place where the users all hate each other and also the product itself. Yeah.

And like, that's Twitter. It's just like, we're all here at hell. And like, if you turn up the heat a little more on hell, more people leave. Yeah. And this is, I think, the fundamental problem for Elon. This is what I promised I would write this piece, welcome to hell Elon. It was supposed to be something else. And then I was just, I just read it.

But the problem for him is that to make any money at all, he actually can't do the things that he's promised his ardent fans that he would do. So if you want to make it. money and you don't just want to have ads for supplements and like racist pillows, you have to promise advertisers brand safety, right? You have to say your ads are going to go in a place that is that won't make your brand look bad Taco Bell. Like it's just the, it's the basic. If you just read about internet advertising, they are always constantly talking about brand safety. It is the thing. And so Twitter is a real problem with that as in general. It has,

somewhat managed to find ways to overcome it, but it is the smallest of the social networks because it is inhospitable. It does not make you feel good to use it. If you're a new Twitter user, your desire to tweet is pretty low because the things that will happen to you after you tweet are mostly negative, right? Like bots will try to sell you crypto or some rando will pop up and talk shit to you. Like those are the, or no one or nothing will happen. which is actually the worst outcome for a social network. Like, if you're trying to incentivize content creation, because a social network without lots of people working for free is a bad idea.

So you're trying to get people to work for free. And if the thing that happens most often is nothing, no one pays attention to you, that's bad. If it's bots try to sell you crypto, that's bad. Maybe Elon can solve that problem. I know he's focused on it. Or it's, you get harassed. All this is bad.

Like, none of these are, this is why the only people who tweet are like hopelessly addicted online people. Well, and this is why you see Elon, like, talking out of both sides of his mouth throughout this whole process. On the one hand, he's talking to people about, you know, scaling down content moderation and bringing back Donald Trump and open sourcing the algorithm, whatever the hell that means. And this idea that, like, it should be a freer place that follows the laws. And then he's sitting with advertisers saying, no, no, no, no, it's still going to be fine.

I won't, like, free for all hellscape is the phrase that he used that I think is going to haunt him for a long time because it is now very stuck in my brain. and like and and so he's he's trying to do a thing that everyone has proved over and over is impossible which is to let chaos rain in an advertising friendly way and like you just can't do that right and so the problem like Elon does not like being told what to do Liz I feel like that's a Liz is shaking right okay I feel like that's a safe statement Elon Moss does not like being told what to do yeah when you own a social network all kinds of people get to tell you what to do so the advertisers say brand safety. You need to moderate away the racism, the sexism, the transfer of you, all the bad

stuff so that we can sell more shoes. That's just the basics of the thing. They want their ads and your stuff that's nice. Then you got to incentivize people to make nice things, which is hard. Just like flatly hard. Like YouTube can't do it. YouTube is maybe the most successful of these companies, right? We don't think of it as a social network in that way, but YouTube gets like most kids in America want to be YouTubers when they grow up. Like YouTube has created the incentive structure where people want to show up and make nice things for other people on YouTube and advertisers want to pour money into that and that's fine. Great.

YouTube has moderation problems every single day at the scale that you could not possibly imagine. That's just the basics. Like you need people to show up. You need to get money from advertisers. Advertisers that want nice things. Now you have to listen to the advertisers, which is why Elon Musk wrote an open letter on Twitter promising advertisers it was going to be fine because he can't kill his. revenue right away. Then there are governments around the world which love passing speech regulations.

Love it. Can't get enough of it. It seems like if you become a politician, the first thing you want to do is tell people what they can say. This is true in our country. So in Texas and Florida, there's social media laws that are effectively impossible to comply with because they ban any moderation that is, quote, based on viewpoint without really defining it. That's going to the Supreme Court. Elon is out here. you're saying, I'm going to support DeSantis for president. And he's massively invested in Texas. And he's got to fight those governments, those governors, those are their laws. He's got to go tell the Supreme Court these laws are unconstitutional.

That's just like, that's a tight rope he has to watch. Does he have to tell them that? Like, I think we are assuming that he is going to run this company like every other social media network. And that he is going to incentivize advertisers. like every other social media network. And I just don't think that's true. We can make the advertiser assumption because he just told... And then he fired the person who does advertising at Twitter.

Like, I genuinely do not... I think we are in a whole new space with him because he is the richest man in the world, and he has shown again and again and again, he can do what he wants. And... I... So...

Yeah. Yes. I agree with you, Alex. 100%. I think we were in for, like, a big reign of chaos. You all know how I feel about chaos. about chaos. I love it very much. But I'm just thinking about like all of the moderation problems that every larger company has had. Right. And like I'm not even like, like leave aside like the

most nasty part of it. Like politics like live streamed shootings, all of those things. Like leave aside the nastiest parts of moderation. Like if you think about Google, for instance, their text snippets have at times told users that Snoopy assassinated Abraham Lincoln. And, At Facebook, they actually lost a piece of their moderation policy for three years. So in addition to like the big stuff, there are all these little things that can also go wrong, but on top of that. This is the cherry on top for me. Working with people is not like engineering. Because building a community is really different from building a rocket because rockets don't talk back.

Yeah. I mean, this, well, they tend to explode. In that way, they're a lot like Twitter. no i mean i agree with you i mean this is to me that we see this repeated over and over again right people approach these community problems like engineering problems and they say things i'll give i'll give it a totally unrelated example but it's the same example because it's the same approach you talk to self-driving car CEOs you know how are you going to build the cars who's going to write the rules and they're like the rules are already written down it's just the rules of the road

And it's like, so you think you can just like ingest the state DMV into your robot car and then it's going to be fine. And it turns out like cars are totally unpredictable. Like this is not how it works. Like other people in cars tend to make decisions that have nothing to do with what the DMV thinks you should do. And they're stuck because they thought there was a list of rules they could just follow. And you can apply that exact same thinking to Elon has tweeted this. If people want the speech to be legal, if people want a ban speech they can write a law. He has said this.

So we're just going to take the First Amendment and glue it into some AI, and then that will run moderation for us against the principles of the First Amendment. The problem is the thing the First Amendment actually does is it prevents the people of America from making a law that bans some speech, right? It prevents government speech regulation. It allows for private speech regulation. It allows for private companies, for private citizens, to speak however they want. to publish however they want, and it keeps the government out of it. That's how it should work.

So you, like, just from like a systems engineering perspective, you're saying, okay, we're going to grab the First Amendment, which prevents our system from doing much of anything. And if people want to change it, they want to change how Twitter works, they can somehow overrule the First Amendment, which is the main thing. And it's like, you are trapped in a doom loop.

No, he's not. The first thing that's going to happen, no, because the first thing that's going to happen to him is he's like every other social network that promises the same thing. He's going to start banning people that do horrible things. This happened to parlor, it happened to get her, it happened to truth social. You know, truth social has like the most restrictive moderation. But I wonder, like, is he actually going to do that? That's the thing. It's like, we keep assuming that he's going to be like, oh, this person said something horrible online.

They go. But he is repeatedly said he wants every. viewpoint on Twitter. He wants to make this a big open ecosystem. He wants to minimize moderation. So I like, I don't think he knows what that means. No, I agree. But that's why I think like, here's some like reasonable debates you could have. Yeah. That's every viewpoint on Twitter. You can have a reasonable debate about the Fed setting interest rates and people will scream at each other and want to murder each other over half a percentage point of the fed setting interest rate. You can have a reasonable debate about whether the government should provide health care, right? I think it should.

A lot of people don't. That's a reasonable debate, right? There are numbers on both sides of argument. You can have a reasonable debate on education policy. You can. You really can. Lots of ways to educate your kids. You can't have a reasonable debate on like whether brown people are inferior to British people. That's not a choice. And that is the action. And that is the actually the aperture that everybody wants to open. Yep. Right? The thing that everybody wants to open is Kanye Westing Jewish people control the media.

And the reason that the Twitter doesn't allow it is, well, one, that's like dangerous. Yeah. It causes actual political violence in the world that Twitter does not want to be associated with. And two, it makes people fucking leave the platform. Like the most cynical motivation that anyone could have is, oh, this retards user growth. Like this makes people go away. It makes the number go down. And like all of that is the people who want to open the aperture of free speech on the margin are not people with more conservative economic policy.

It's basically people who want to like reintroduce racism. Right. Reintroduce sexism. Right. And what they are complaining about is not even that they can't do it because have you been on Twitter? No, no. I'm very aware. They can do it.

What they're complaining about is they don't get the reach. Right. They're like their shadow band. right? And like, is Elon going to increase their reach? Is he going to solve that problem? Like, I just don't, I don't think that that problem is tractable. Yeah, I just don't think that Elon cares. Like, I think he is going to go after whatever gets him the biggest numbers. And I think if he sees, oh, I brought trunk back, I'm going to get bigger numbers.

Oh, if I bring Kanye back, I'm going to get bigger numbers. He's going to focus on the numbers, not necessarily on the shit show those numbers bring because he cares about the numbers. He's like a reality TV producer. And he likes shit shows. Let's be real. I mean, like, think about Tesla. Remember, like, the robots that were going to build the cars? And he was like, I'm reengineering from first principles, how to build cars. And everybody was like, Toyota knows how to build cars.

Like, just do that. And he was like, no, no. It's going to be an alien dreadnought. And then that didn't work out. And he put an extra card building tent in the parking lot of the Fremont factory. I mean, like, I don't know that he necessarily is thinking about any of this stuff. because as we've discovered from his text messages where he quits the Twitter board two minutes after Parag Agrawal, asks him not to say mean things about Twitter, like, this man has no impulse control.

Yeah. Well, and I think part of this is also, like, a lot of the stuff that we're talking about assumes on some base level that Elon Musk intends to keep Twitter at like a very fundamental level the same. And I'm not sure there's actually like a lot of evidence that that's the case. I think like you look at what Elon Musk has wanted to do and he talks to. about he talks about TikTok and he talks about payments and he talks about we chat and it's like this idea of like I want to make this sort of beautiful network where people can talk to each other that like Jack Dorsey used to talk about. I don't know that Elon Musk has any particular interest in that. So like this idea that like he's just going to sort of shunt that off to the side and like

let it burn down while he tries to build a payment network on top of it and also tries to retain his own audience where he can use it to sell Teslas. That seems perfectly plausible to me that He's like, oh, no, is Twitter.com a moderation nightmare and everybody's going to stop using it? That's really not a problem. I'm going to go, like, try to do something else on top of this network and make money when people, like, buy subscriptions. Well, I also think about airlines here because we're talking about a hellscape, right? And one of the things that Elon Musk has promised to do is he wants to increase subscription revenue. Most of Twitter's revenue is advertising.

But if you can make a subscriptions, you know, service really work for you, then it doesn't matter if you're brand safe. because that's not where the bulk of your money is coming from. It's coming from your users. And so, like, one possible thing that you can do if you're evil is, like, you can be like, yeah, you can have the hellscape or you can pay, I don't know, $10 a month and not have a hellscape. So this is the most interesting idea to me for the Spirit Airlines version of Twitter. Yeah. I just watched an incredible TikTok with the CEO of Ryanair where he admitted that for a while he wanted to create a standing room only part of the plane. They tested it with, like, seats that were you just, like, stood up and kind of leaned.

Yeah, yeah. And he was like, here's the thing. Here's what I know. We would have filled that part of the plane first. But, like, it's morally outrageous so we didn't do it. I'm fine with this. But the reason I'm, I mean, I don't, I refuse to fly Spirit Airlines. I'm the sucker.

He's like, no, I need comfort plus at least. Come on. But the thing that is super interesting about this is there isn't a market for moderation. Like, the thing the airlines have proven is, that there's actually a market for fair classes. Right? You can segment the plane all the way to at the back you are standing up and at the front you are lying down and people will pay various amounts of money to be in all those tiers

to the plane. That's weird. You know, like maybe that's a little too capitalistic, but they've proven that there's an effective functional market for all those different kinds of service to get from point A to Point B. We have never seen any social network really try to experiment with. is there a market for levels of moderation? Even between the social networks,

because of all of the external pressures they all face, from advertisers, from governments, from their own users and service of growth, they all kind of land at the same places with moderation, which I think is deeply frustrating to a lot of people. We've never seen any social networks, say, with a single user base, okay, you can pick all the way,

moderation, happy place, Disney World, or Hellscape. And this is like one of those academic ideas that we like hear about all the time, like Addy and Casey and I just like heard this idea a million times that maybe moderation should be outsourced and you should be able to bring your own moderation provider and your own algorithm to your social graph and you should buy the one you want. That sounds great. Except when you play it out, it's like, no people don't want to think that hard about any software in their lives.

They just want the one that comes in the box. And so we'll just see if the default. Twitter algorithm is the one that's safest for advertisers and the one that will create more growth. That's the one people are going to use. And if your choice is, I can turn it down and see more racism, no one's going to turn it down. Or we are all going to be very surprised at the market dynamics of what turning it down looks like. I also, while we're talking money, one thing that I'm really curious about is not Twitter directly, but Twitter's effects on Elon's other companies. So like Twitter, for instance, you know, if you have a strong free speech stance on Twitter

and you're trying to sell cars in China, you have a very large attack surface whenever anything happens on Twitter that the Chinese government doesn't like. And one of the things that's true about Tesla is that it's not in India yet, but India is a really big market. And Twitter is extremely controversial in India.

And you can imagine if you're taking a strong free speech stance where you don't remove Nazis, well, you have a Tesla factory in Germany where a Nazi speech is banned. So there are, there's like one of the things that I think is really interesting here, is that Elon Musk has a much larger attack surface than anybody like Mark Zuckerberg or, you know, anybody running any of these other companies.

Like, you can actually punish him through the other things that he does. And so I think that's going to be really fascinating to see how that plays out, both for Twitter and for everything else. Like, what happens to SpaceX? Like, if, you know, he does something that the government doesn't like, does SpaceX suffer? Yeah, I mean, that one is like deeply contentious, right? Because SpaceX is in Texas. If he fights Abbott, that's just a big problem. But the government needs SpaceX. Like it doesn't have the capability to launch anything by itself. So that's a good spot. I think Tesla is the scariest one. Right. If you're Elon, you've now, you've got a big business in Germany, like you said, which has very stringent speech laws. You have a huge. huge business in China where you can't even operate Twitter. Like, the game you are now playing with Tesla and China is if there's a lot of anti-China

stuff on Twitter, they can, the Chinese government has no compunction about just destroying companies. Left and right, it destroys companies. Especially the companies seem too powerful or the executives of those companies seem too powerful. Elon is now in a place where the pressure he will feel to make Twitter more China-friendly is actually real because Tesla needs to expand in China because that is the market for those cars. Yeah. Well, and I think even more sort of abstractly, like Liz, you've been, you've written about this

a bunch in the last six months. There's like this force of personality that Elon Musk has that has gotten him a lot of what he has gotten over time. And it has like been his bet that just by virtue of the fact that I am Elon Musk, I can do whatever I want at any time and it'll probably work out because I'm Elon Musk and the rules don't apply to me. And historically, Frankly speaking, that is true. But it also seems like that, like, with this trial that didn't end up happening in Delaware, there was this real tide turning against him. And you could feel that like the sort of cult of Elon Musk in which like the richest man in the world can do no wrong by virtue of who he is seems to be going away.

And now he's like tied this incredible anvil around his neck called Twitter that feels like, like if anything is going to make everyone sour on the whole idea of Elon. Elon Musk, it's, it, boy, it seems like it would be Twitter. And it does feel like it's going to have all kinds of ramifications across these other companies. Like, the Tesla investors have been worried about this crazy distraction that is Twitter that is not going to get less distracting now that he owns the place. And it just, yeah, it seems like if I'm interested in any of his other companies, Twitter feels like it's going to just drag everything around him down into the muck forever and ever. David, I wouldn't say Anvil. I would say Albatross. Sure.

Good at it from Liz. All right, let's take a break. I think we've made it abundantly clear what we think is going to happen to Twitter. Let's take a break, though. Come back. Let's do a little bit on what the upside might be. It's going to be a short segment, but we'll right back.

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but let's do the thought exercise of what might go well here, what might work. And we should stipulate, like I will happily concede. Twitter is not a well-run company. It has not had good executives running it or even like executives who are paying attention or use the service. Like, it's just not, it's, it probably has too many people. It has thousands of people doing nothing.

In Prague, Agarwal, the outgoing CEO, like his greatest accomplishment was forcing Elon to buy the company. The only person who has ever stood up to Elon Musk is Prague-A-Gar-Wall. Congratulations. You shipped no software, but you executed this. You had the stones to stand up to Elon. Great. Incredible, man.

Incredible deal, by the way. like incredible moves. Like this is like CEO Hall of Fame shit. And he wasn't even CEO for a year. So like hats off, man. Good for you. I think that who's the Salesforce guy? Benioff?

No, the other guy who's on the board. Brett Taylor. I think Brett Taylor, who's the chairman of Twitter's board and the co-CEO Salesforce, might have helped. I just want to put that out there. But congrats to Prague.

It's not like Twitter is well run. Right? So Elon's showing up. Maybe he's going to run it well. What are the good things that could happen? The first thing that jumps out to me is that by virtue of being private and also by being owned by someone like Elon Musk, Twitter can in theory start to do some of these things that don't obviously scale,

which we've never really seen in social before. Like this idea that, you know, you could start charging money for Facebook and some percentage of people would sign up for Facebook. Like Facebook was never going to invest in that because you have quarterly results and you can't make a dent in your business in order for like there just is no such thing as like a long-term vision for something like that for these. like big public companies because everything has to look like growth and everything has to look like scale.

And Elon has even talked about this, that like the only way to reset Twitter is to basically go through some really, really, really, really like messy times on the platform. And if he actually has the patience to do that, we can like get this incubator of interesting social ideas that I think could in theory be very cool. And some of the stuff he's talked about like trying to experiment with subscriptions and trying to like build new ways of thinking about algorithms and like will any of that work? I don't know, but at least there's like an interesting test bed with a lot of people inside of it that could actually lead to some interesting stuff.

I am going to say one thing that's close to reality and one thing that I think is pretty far-fetched, but I think is also interesting. The thing that's close to reality is I personally would love to see encrypted DMs. And I understand that there are probably downsides to doing that kind of encryption, specifically around like reporting spam and your DMs and so on. But the upside is that you have secure DMs now, which has been a long time problem for Twitter and for anybody using Twitter. And that seems like it could be a really good thing. And it's something that we've heard Musk talking about. So like I certainly hope that he executes on that at least. But the other thing that I think about

that's really like more far-fetched is we know he has an interest in AI and we know he has an interest in Neurrelink, which is a brain machine interface that's like, Musk's ambitions for it are well beyond what brain machine interfaces probably can do. But he wants to have it be like, you know, your way to communicate with a computer. You can be a cyborg if you want. So like there's like this wild idea that has been circulating that like I know have of us an intrusive thought where it's like, oh, he's going to use all of our language inputs to train like an AI of some kind.

And it's going to be like the meanest, nastiest AI you've ever seen. But, you know, it's going to be trained with all of this real world inputs. from all of these real people who are really all on Twitter. And like as a database set, if you're a person who likes AI, that's potentially interesting. I'm just sorry. I'm just imagining these AIs that are just doing Twitter memes all day, like this. Just dolly pictures. Boom.

It's going to be great. You say like, hello. it just responds with the thread icon. The most sophisticated AI in the world is all like, I did a thing. All I'm saying is he brought in a sink. You never know. All right.

So David's on interesting test bed. Let's experiment on the population of celebrities and world leaders to see what happens. And journalists. Liz is I want to brains and vats. Basically brains and vats. Alex, what do you go? I think like this guy is going to. try to use AI to solve the moderation problem, right? And he is going to put a ton, he's already

putting resources towards it. He was like, all right, I'll use Tesla self-driving car engineers, get on over to Twitter and figure this out. And so I think we're pretty rapidly going to have a very conclusive answer to can AI solve moderation? I think the answer is going to be no, but I think we're going to see so many resources put towards it in a way that we just, at a level we just have never seen before that like we're going to be able to say he did everything and still couldn't do it and we'll finally be able to put that like put that baby to bed that's it we have the here you go dumb baby you're asleep now we've seen it we know we can't do it move on yeah so the one thing i'll say about that i agree i again i think a lot of what we're going to see here is ideas that are

abstract and academic getting run to ground yep right market place of moderation systems, that idea is going to get run to ground. Can we scale AI to do it? That idea is going to get run to ground because if he wants to fire as many people as he has said he wants to fire, Twitter itself said it wanted to fire 25% of its employees this year before Elon showed up with a sink. So if he wants to get rid of all the people he wants to get rid of, you have to automate some of it. Yeah. Right? Or you realize like you just have a bunch of engineers for drinking coffee all day and not doing anything. Toon this. But to me, the thing that the thing that he's because he's the king of Twitter, every moderation decision is going to be a, it's his

reputation. And the thing that is true of every automated system anywhere in the world doing anything is that they false a lot, right? They just like, they have an error rate. It's inherent to everything. So I'll give you another benign example. Content ID on YouTube is theoretically a benign system. I don't think it's a benign system.

But theoretically, it's a benign system. right, where the music industry doesn't, wants to get paid for its music, which is also theoretically a benign motivation. And so they can take stuff down if it matches the copyrights of songs. This thing falses so much all the time. I think most people have a better sense of the copyright policy of YouTube than like the speed limit two miles away from their house. Right?

Because you are just confronted. with this automated system fucking with people all the time. And all the YouTubers are constantly talking about it. And that's like an inherently benign system, right? That's a system that's designed that has the motivations. Like basically everybody can agree on, which is artists should get paid for their music. And yet it's like in practice, a maligned force.

Right? It like makes the experience worse for lots of people. You expand that to like semantic analysis of whether is this joke racist or is it in context, Justine Sacco, like, who knows, right? When that system starts falsing, whatever error raid, all of it gets blamed on Elon, and that is like a disaster zone. I think you might be vastly underestimating Elon Musk's ability to not give one single shit about whether people are mad at him about moderation decisions.

Like, this is all made me think about Mark Zuckerberg a lot, because there was this like, this like Joker origin story from Mark Zuckerberg where he like, I think genuinely felt bad about some of the mistakes that Facebook was making. and sort of, you know, apologize over and over and over in public. And then you could just see over the course of the last few years went to a point where he's just like, I'm not going to talk about this anymore. Like, I'm just not interested in this. I'm going to talk about the Metaverse.

And if you want to be mad about moderation problems, go be mad at somebody else. This is no longer my problem. I pay Nick Clegg a lot of money to be the one who apologizes for all the dumb stuff that happens on Facebook. I'm so excited for the first Elon congressional hearing. Yeah, Elon is like a 40 out of 10 on that scale of just like. he's like oh you're mad congratulations enjoy being mad on nelan musk goodbye a 69 out of 10 he's a 420.69 all right so what do i the one good thing that i think will happen out of all of this is it this is such a

backwards compliment or here's my backwards compliment i think people are tired of twitter i think they're tired of social networks like this. I feel tired of them. And I think that all this noise is just like a shock to the system that will make people reconsider how they spend their time. And we talked about

on the Vurchase earlier today. We are surrounded by tech giants that are pretty complacent. And their products are getting weird and bad. Like Google search is bad. Like whatever is going on with the iPad is not the force of focused competition.

It's just the stuff is happening and they're trying to extract more money from everything. Twitter is in this unique position where everyone's just sort of, it's the default for a bunch of journalists and politicians. It's where we're all mean to each other. It's like we issue dunks. And if this just creates a moment for some people to reconsider their relationship with that product because they don't want to work for Elon for free, right? And if you are creating content for Twitter, you are now working for Elon Musk for free.

I don't think you should work for the richest man in the world for free. That's just my take on it. That might actually shake a bunch of competition loose. And I think that is just a huge benefit for everybody right now. Because they're so, in the sort of core internet services, there's such vanishingly little competition. And like everyone's afraid of TikTok. That's it.

That's what you got. That's the evidence of competition on the internet today is TikTok. And they're all competing with it by just slavishly copying it. I'm just hopeful that this is, you can't just tell. people to be different. You have to like provide some shock to the system. And this is like the biggest possible shock to the system. Tumblr is going to come back. That's my prediction. That might be real. But I've been thinking, I've been thinking a lot about this because I think like one of

the big questions coming out of this is like, okay, if you want to leave Twitter, like, where do you go? Because there just isn't something else like Twitter. But then I think the question is morphing into something much more interesting, which is like, and this is what's happening to a lot of people with social in general. It's like, is this a thing that I want? Like, like, is, Is the premise of Twitter a good idea is a thing that, like, I have not. I've spent a lot of time wondering why Twitter is such a bad platform. But like, is Twitter a bad idea is like not a question I think a lot of people have thought about. And I think a lot of people are going through this now with like what Facebook has become and what Instagram has become.

And now what Twitter has become is going to spark that in a lot of people. So I think you're right. And it's like, for me at least it has become this like weirdly philosophical thing where it's like I'm not trying to like replace Twitter with mass. on. I'm like, maybe I should just be done with this thing that I do and consume all day in general. Yeah. I mean, I quit Instagram this year. Like, I still have an Instagram account. I just don't open the app anymore. And I've been thinking seriously about like my relationship with Twitter and much like the people in that Reuters report, unless I'm live tweeting a trial or something, I have seriously decreased my Twitter use, partially because it's like I open it up and it's like a

lot of bad feelings and people being mean to each other. And like, I don't know about you guys, but like, I felt bad enough during the pandemic. Like, I didn't, I didn't need the bad feelings app. That said, I do think there is a very funny outcome where, like, some also ran social network like Tumblr or LinkedIn gets an influx of, like, weird garbage users who, like, go full Twitter on the platform. Oh, God. That would be amazing. No, Tumblr's already seen it. Tumblr's seen like between TikTok and Twitter, Tumblr's seen like this influx of users and they're young users. That's the thing is like, everybody in this room is like, I've grown tired of social media. And that's because everybody in this room remembers a time before social media. And we have a whole

generation of people who don't remember that, who social media is just a part of their lives. They assume that it's that it's like universal. Everybody has it. And that's the group that I don't necessarily think is going to have these big moments of is social media for me? I think that's just a question that never enters their head. And they are going, if they choose to migrate, they're going to migrate. They're not just going to, like, delete the app and touch grass. Well, I mean, Tumblr is, there's a PhD thesis. And why Tumblr persists.

Despite the best efforts of everyone around Tumblr. Including the users of Tumblr. Right. Like, everyone has tried to destroy it. Here are some things that have tried to kill Tumblr. Apple, you just straight up tried to murder Tumblr. Verizon, the user base of Tumblr. Okay.

Yahoo. Through the years, like a new challenger emerges and Tumbra's like, I stand bestride you. So we'll save Tumblr. If you're in the Tumblr meeting this morning where they're like, fucking it's on. It's on. Just leak that shit to us.

We will write about it without even checking the sources on it. All 12 people that work there. They're like, oh man, it's our time. All right, that's the best outcome. Tumblr resurgence. Thank you, Elon. It's back. We have carried on for too long about this.

Who knows what happens next? The deal is closed. He's taking it over. We'll see what happens next is like the only logical thing to end on because honestly, none of us know. There's no prediction here. How many people are going to quit Twitter today? Right?

It's just a, who knows? So. The leadership question seems like. the most immediate one, right? Like, who is going to... He said he's going to be the CEO. That was a report in Bloomberg yesterday. Right, but, like, forever?

Like, at some point, there are going to have to be people who, like, run this company professionally. So he's previously said he's an interim CEO and he will be bringing somebody in. And if you remember from the text messages, Jason Kalakanaus, the VC and entrepreneur

has said that Twitter CEO is his dream job, so, like, maybe we have that to look forward to. Everything is hustling. The only good outcome is if it's Jack Dorsey. Just that's just full chaos mode. Bring Jack back. Let's just do this all again. All right.

Well, that's our last prediction. Jack Dorsey. He's not even looked like he came out of the woods. He's looked like he came out of the woods for like five years now. Just one more twig in his beer. I mean, what's Ev Williams doing now? Bring him back. He's out of medium.

Yeah, Bistone. Just start Twitter at the beginning again. Yeah. Oh, man. All right. That's it. That's the Verchast. We've done enough.

Thanks to Liz for joining us. It's super. It's the West Coast. She's on the West Coast. It's very early for her. Thank you so much, Liz. We are going to have a weekend. Everybody have it.

Don't tweet. Just have a weekend. Take your foot off the gas. It's going to be great. We'll see you next week. Back in all. And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Thanks for listening.

If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast app of your choice, or tell a friend. You can send us feedback at Vergecast at theverge.com. This show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. This episode was edited and mixed by Amanda Rose Smith.

Our editorial director is Brooke Minter's, and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Verge cast is a production of The Verge and Box Media Podcast Network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.