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- [00:04]
Sam Sanders
This is in conversation from Apple News. I'm Sam Sanders in for Shumita Basu. Today, what the transformation of Twitter to X reveals about the future of social media. On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey, one of the creators of Twitter, sent the first tweet. Back then, the platform was just a company name and a prototype, an idea about a new way to communicate online. Over time, it grew into something much, much bigger, with hundreds of millions of users all across the globe. And while it was never perfect, many people saw Twitter as an online public square, a place to share and connect with people you'd never met. In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. He then cut the staff by about 80%, dismantled many of the platform's content moderation systems, incorporated the AI chatbot Grok into the platform, and got rid of Twitter's name.
- [01:09]
Kate Conger
Twitter was such a brand, but that brand died when Elon took over. It completely changed, and it's X now.
- [01:17]
Sam Sanders
That's Ryan Mack. He's a tech reporter for the New York Times. He wrote the book Character How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter with his colleague at the Times, Kate Conger. Kate says that while X is a fundamentally different place now, it's still an active and important part of the Internet.
- [01:34]
Kate Conger
It's transformed into a space that really aligns with Elon and his interests. And I think that he views this as a success story. And I think for that one particular user of X, the X experience is greatly improved.
- [01:49]
Sam Sanders
It's been about 20 years since Twitter was created. So I sat down with Kate and Ryan to talk about the promise of Twitter at the beginning, how it evolved over the years, and what that evolution tells us about social media and its role in society today.
- [02:06]
Ryan Mac
Let's talk for a minute about what Twitter was. Take folks back to that peak of Twitter. Twitter. What was this company and this platform like?
- [02:17]
Kate Conger
Well, I think in the early days, the founders created something that was just sort of a place for public, and nobody really knew how to use it or what to do with it yet. And so, I mean, you look at a lot of the early tweets that even the founders were putting out, and they're kind of insane. It'll be like, I just had a sandwich for lunch. And it's the kind of thing where you think if someone tweeted this now, you'd be like, wellness check. Are they okay? What are they doing? And then, you know, over time, it found its use, right? And it became a place where political movements were formed. And organized. You know, it became a source of these kind of like viral moments of humor, sort of a place to live, react to anything that was going on anywhere in the world, for better or for worse. And it just kind of became this space of immediacy for people. And I think, you know, when you talk about journalists, I mean, the overlap with our business is obvious. It was just such a great place to kind of be on top of whatever was happening in the world, find out about breaking news before your competitors potentially, and sort of find sources, find people who are on the ground in places where news was happening. And so it had a really strong utility for our industry, certainly.
- [03:34]
Sam Sanders
I love that you use the word
- [03:35]
Ryan Mac
utility because I remember for years when there were natural disasters occurring across the country or the globe, or even mass shootings, the places where survivors, responders and journalists went for the most up to date news about these things. It came from Twitter. And a lot of the terminology around Twitter and what it used to be, it used the word public. A public good and a public square.
- [04:03]
Kate Conger
Mm. There's a lot of public utility, certainly. And you know, as emergency services and government agencies realize that, they also flock to Twitter. I live in California and in San Francisco and la, and whenever there was an earthquake, you'd hop on and, you know, was that an earthquake?
- [04:19]
Sam Sanders
Exactly.
- [04:20]
Kate Conger
You know, and people would chime in and be like, yeah, that was a 4.6 epicenter Napa Valley. It's like you could find that very quickly. But as we remember it, we should also remember that it wasn't this utopia either. There were plenty of issues with Twitter and it was never this perfect place.
- [04:37]
Ryan Mac
And it wasn't profitable for many, many years.
- [04:39]
Kate Conger
It was not profitable exactly. But I think of things like Gamergate, for example, this online abuse campaign that came from Twitter and there was death threats, that kind of thing. Remember that Twitter's. One of its founding kind of goals was the free speech wing of the Free Speech Party. And its founders and its executives started to realize that, you know, actually this like free for all approach to free speech is not maybe the way we want to approach the modern Internet. And having large groups of people communicate on the open web, you need content, moderation, you need rules of the road and how to behave on a platform. They grappled with that constantly, whether that was with Gamergate or Covid or, you know, the Donald Trump. Donald Trump, the January 6th. Yeah, like these issues would constantly come up and there'd be people always yelling at them online. You know, I was banned for this reason. Or, you know, you should ban these people because they're abusive, or, you know, I just got a death threat. And that weighed heavily on the company and its founders.
- [05:44]
Ryan Mac
Yeah, Yeah. I want to go back and spend a little bit of time tracing Elon Musk's entrance into Twitter and then his purchase of it. What was Elon Musk on Twitter in the early days?
- [06:02]
Kate Conger
Like, so we did this exercise when we were writing the book where we actually went back into the archive of his tweets and tried to read all of his early tweets. And it was so funny going back in time like that because he was such a normie poster back in the day. You know, he would post about taking his kids to the ice rink or what he was doing at SpaceX. And he just came across as someone's kind of hokey dad, just a very normal kind of guy.
- [06:28]
Ryan Mac
And earnest.
- [06:29]
Kate Conger
Very earnest. Yeah. And then over time, I think something kind of clicked for him where he realized this was a really good way to circumvent PR and circumvent the media and kind of speak directly to his fans and followers, and that it was a really effective way of promoting his businesses and an effective way of growing his fan base, kind of letting people in behind the scenes of what it's like to be, you know, this rocket maker, this car maker.
- [06:56]
Yeah, he would do customer service for Tesla over it, and, you know, he just started to cultivate this, like, brand online of being very real. At one point, he announced his divorce, one of his divorces on Twitter, you know, really messy, and people are like, hell, yeah. Like, that's a real person. I want to follow that guy and, like, be like him. And I think that he was, like, one of the first, like, business executives to realize being real online can engender a lot of goodwill.
- [07:21]
Ryan Mac
Yeah. I wanna talk about a narrative that Elon Musk glommed onto that seemed to propel him forward into the version of who he is right now on X. Formerly Twitter. And that was COVID 19. COVID 19 made him a different kind of tweeter, and it seems as if it might have led him to end up being the guy who bought the site.
- [07:47]
Kate Conger
Yeah, he had a really strong reaction to the COVID pandemic and the way it was handled in California in particular. You know, we were under really severe lockdown here in the beginning of the pandemic. And one of the many, many things that was forced to close was his factories here. And he reacted really strongly to that. And, you know, we say this About Elon all the time. I think he's sort of a more extreme version of a type that you find a lot in Silicon Valley, but it's sort of a do your own research type. And there was a lot of people in tech who at that time were just spending all their time on Twitter and, you know, talking about, oh, I just found this research. And I think air particles move around this way and, you know, just kind of trying to become overnight experts in how the pandemic was gonna work. And he was certainly one of those people. You know, he tweeted at one point that Covid could not infect children. I think he tweeted at another point that the pandemic would be over by April of 2020, you know, and making these very confident and very inaccurate predictions about the way that things were going to go. But yeah, I mean, it was. It was a really politically radicalizing experience for him as it was, I think, for a lot of people.
- [08:59]
So also during COVID he becomes very anti trans.
- [09:03]
Ryan Mac
Huh? Even though he has a trans child. Correct.
- [09:05]
Kate Conger
Even though he has a trans child.
- [09:06]
In fact, I think maybe because he
- [09:08]
has a transition, maybe because of it, he starts to talk about wokeism and the woke mind virus, which is a kind of catch all phrase for the influence of progressive politics on sites like Twitter. On sites like Twitter. And he sees this woke mind virus infecting employees and decision making, leading to decisions like the banning of Donald Trump from the platform because of January 6th. And he sees this as all kind of mashed together and this kind of great influence over culture and society and politics. So much so that he needs to intervene and he needs to be this hero who saves humanity from this woke mind virus. That's kind of the mission he gave himself when buying Twitter. I mean, we talk about billionaires buying yachts or sports teams or even islands. Twitter was the thing he coveted the most. And he bought it with the intent of shaping it in his own image and making himself the center of the platform and, you know, elevating the voices he liked, I guess, de escalating the voices he didn't like, shaping it so that his views were impressed upon the world.
- [10:23]
Ryan Mac
So let's go to. Let's actually fast forward through the saga of the purchase itself. I remember Elon's purchase of Twitter being quite dramatic. I do recall that some things he said or didn't say around this purchase led to him being investigated by the sec.
- [10:44]
Kate Conger
That's right. So there is an SEC investigation into his purchase and it traces back to January of 2022, when he started accumulating shares in Twitter, he was, you know, buying these kind of in secret, not announcing his position. And he was supposed to, once he hit the 5% ownership mark of the company, make a public announcement to say, you know, I've accumulated this 5% stake, and I'm here. I'm an activist in the stock, essentially. And he did not do that. You know, he just kept gaining more and more shares in Twitter, buying up more and more of the company. And so the investigation is now that he did not publicly disclose the fact that he was present as an investor, and that he potentially continued to buy up Twitter shares at a discount, because had he announced his position, the share price perhaps would have gone up. And so that he's sort of done some market manipulation in the way that he's bought up shares in the company.
- [11:41]
He also tries to back out of the deal, which we shouldn't forget about.
- [11:44]
Ryan Mac
Oh, I remember that.
- [11:45]
Kate Conger
Yeah. And then Twitter sues him to enforce the deal.
- [11:49]
Ryan Mac
So he walks into ownership of Twitter having already been sued by Twitter.
- [11:54]
Kate Conger
Yeah. And he's mad. He's angry at all the executives that made him do what he wanted to do in the first place, and comes in with this belief that everyone at Twitter is incompetent.
- [12:07]
Ryan Mac
Not just incompetent, but maybe, like, undeserving of a job. Let's flashback to those early days of his ownership. I remember he walked into Twitter headquarters with a kitchen sink, like, as a joke, making a little point. But he also, from day one, began to lay off hundreds of Twitter employees. No.
- [12:26]
Kate Conger
Yeah. I mean, I don't know if I've ever worked on a more surreal story in my life. It was just so weird, you know, because, like, Ryan was saying, there was this whole will he won't he thing that dragged out in court over the summer. And then he arrives at Twitter at Halloween, randomly. So the company is having its corporate Halloween party as he's in the other room signing the paperwork to buy it. So there's this very weird scene playing out inside the building where there's, like, people running around in Halloween costume. Some of them are sobbing. Some of them are just trying to do business as usual and eat candy.
- [13:05]
Some brought their family members. Yeah.
- [13:06]
Oh, my God, there's kids there for, like, a trick or treat situation. So just, like, truly the most bizarre vibes possible. And like Ryan mentioned, he had all of this animus built up for these executives who sort of forced him to follow through with the deal immediately orders their firing and they're, you know, some of them are trying to get out of the building before his security can come and escort them out. So they're sort of like sneaking down the stairwell. I mean, just some of the, like, most bizarre scenes that I have ever reported on in my life. And then, yeah, I mean, you know, he had this vision that the company was incredibly bloated, that it's all these kind of employees he doesn't want, doesn't need, who oppose his ownership, who don't share his politics. So very quickly sets about making these widespread layoffs. Everyone's kind of scrambling around, drawing up lists of people on their teams they think they can cut and people they think they need to save. You know, there's people who work at this company who are on visas to be working in the United States. And so there's this kind of horse trading going on around among managers, trying to get people who are on visas onto a safe list and cutting other people to make room for them. So he kind of goes through that first wave of mass cuts and then
- [14:19]
Ryan Mac
cuts that were challenged in court because I think he tried to deny the payouts that folks were guaranteed. Should they be laid off? No.
- [14:27]
Kate Conger
Yeah. I mean, there's a lawsuit basically at every twist and turn of this entire process.
- [14:32]
Ryan Mac
Oh, my goodness.
- [14:33]
Kate Conger
And then, you know, those cuts in his mind don't go far enough. And so then he enacts this very weird sort of loyalty test where he sends out this email to the remaining workers and says, if you are ready to be hardcore, you want to really get things done. Sign up to stay at the company.
- [14:54]
Fork in the road. Email is what it's called?
- [14:55]
Yes, he calls it a fork in the road. And it's like if you want to be hardcore and you want to be on Elon's program, you basically want to take this loyalty oath to him. And then, in fact, HR has this horrible puzzle where this is an opt in to stay. So now HR has the job of trying to figure out who actually wants to leave the company and how to exit them. But they don't have any feedback coming from employees saying, yes, I would like to take the severance. I'd like to get the hell out of here. So then they have to basically assemble this list from nowhere to figure out who they're actually laying off and like, whose slack account should be turned off. They're calling people who are on VAC or on maternity leave and maybe missed the email saying, did you mean to resign from your job or do you wanna stay Here.
- [15:40]
Ryan Mac
Yeah. Hearing you all describe this email frenzy around Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter Now X and his layoffs, it sounds a lot like what he did when he was working in the federal government as the head of doge.
- [15:56]
Kate Conger
It's exactly what he did.
- [15:58]
Ryan Mac
It's this.
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Kate Conger
He used the same playbook that he did with the Twitter takeover at the Department of Government Efficiency. You know, there's some tweaks, I think, with the DOGE email. I think it was. There was an opt out, you know, I am resigning as opposed to I am staying, you know, because he learned from that. But that methodology is one he learned from Twitter. And he somewhat relished that chaos that was created. You know, this kind of free for all survival to fittest kind of thing.
- [16:28]
Ryan Mac
I want to take a moment to flash forward from his crazy acquisition to what he's made it now and what it feels like now. What are the three, three biggest changes Elon Musk made to Twitter once he bought it?
- [16:43]
Kate Conger
I think one is getting rid of the content moderation policies that were in place. There's a bunch of kinds of speech and kinds of accounts that are suddenly coming back to the platform in waves. So I think that's a really big one. I think the other one is allowing people to buy verification and with that buy a boost from the algorithm. Right.
- [17:06]
Ryan Mac
And that was also a bit dangerous because you had people impersonating other people of note. Right.
- [17:13]
Kate Conger
I mean, that certainly happened in the early days. There was the Eli Lilly tweet, if you remember that.
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Ryan Mac
What was that?
- [17:18]
Kate Conger
There was a fake Eli Lilly account that bought.
- [17:20]
Ryan Mac
This is a pharmaceutical company.
- [17:21]
Kate Conger
Pharmaceutical company bought the blue check mark and said, you know, insulin is free. And it went viral. The stock, I think, dropped a couple percentage points because of that. And then Eli Lilly had to come out with the statement that was like, that's not us.
- [17:35]
Ryan Mac
Yeah.
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Kate Conger
But now those blue checks are meaningless on the platform. You know, in the past, again, the system was not perfect and you could game it, certainly, but at least there was like a reference point that that person was verified by the.
- [17:48]
Ryan Mac
We all had blue checks. A journalist, right.
- [17:50]
Kate Conger
And that really pissed off Elon because he would be like, there's some intern from Business Insider who's emailing me for comment. Why does he have a blue ch? And why does my favorite shitposter not have a blue check? You know, this is an incongruous system and I need to reform this.
- [18:06]
Ryan Mac
Yeah.
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Kate Conger
And so now everyone has a blue check. And now that everyone has a blue check, what does it even mean nothing matters?
- [18:10]
Sam Sanders
Yeah.
- [18:11]
Ryan Mac
Third thing on your list of biggest changes, it's AI.
- [18:14]
Kate Conger
It's the use of Grok on the platform which has created fake content, it's created non consensual sexual images, pornographic content, anti semitic content.
- [18:24]
Ryan Mac
There you go. It's not just AI. Grok is a version of AI that is more profane than any of the other ones out there.
- [18:35]
Kate Conger
Yeah. So Grok is the flagship chatbot of Xai Elon Musk's AI company and it has a presence like many other chatbots that you might use in an app, in a web interface. And uniquely, it also has a presence on X. So you can tweet to the Grok account on X and ask it a question and it will respond publicly. And it's that public interface where we've seen a lot of the really kind of horrific content coming out of Grok. You know, for instance, some of its anti semitic rants have been through users prompting its X account. A lot of the non consensual nude images of women and children that it's created have been through people prompting the X account.
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And he would say that that is non woke AI. So it, you know, it's the only truth telling AI there is compared to the chatgpts, Clauds and Geminis of the world.
- [19:28]
Ryan Mac
So then, if those are the three biggest changes that y' all have outlined, what is the quality of X with all those shifts right now from day to day?
- [19:40]
Kate Conger
I mean, I think it's a change from Twitter being a place where you go to learn what's going on, to X being a place where you go to learn what's not going on. You know, you're entering this experience where you don't know if anything you're looking at is real. You're seeing posts from blue check marks that you know are impersonators or scammers or just, you know, random accounts. You're seeing this like fake AI generated content and trying to determine is this a real nude photo of this woman or is this AI? You know, you're seeing all these AI videos and when it's really a platform, you kind of have to break out your red yarn and try to figure out what the truth is.
- [20:17]
Ryan Mac
Wow.
- [20:18]
Kate Conger
The algorithm can be pretty brutal. If you go to the for your page on there, I've seen murder videos, I've seen fight videos. Just some kind of, you know, kind of low brow content that is pushed to the fore because it's engaging. And it seems like that platform just maximizes engagement and anyone who's spent any time working or reporting on social media knows that if you're just maximizing for engagement, you're gonna get some pretty terrible stuff that pops up in that feed. And that's what it seems like they're maximizing for. And that's the kind of result that we're getting. Now.
- [20:54]
Ryan Mac
What do we know about who is still left on X? It's a different user base than what it was when it was Twitter.
- [21:01]
Kate Conger
Yeah, I think some of the communities that have been really sticky are, you know, anything to do with live events. So whether that's sports, the Oscars, fashion, things like that, live events are still really strong for X. And it's a time when a lot of sort of, I think, normie users return to the platform. You know, it's also always been really strong in the tech industry, and I think remains. So there's a lot of notable figures in tech and even just, you know, young workers who are trying to break into the industry kind of joining conversation there, you know, and it's, I think, more so than ever a really prominent platform for American conservative politicians. Right. This is a place where they felt like they were being stifled and banned, and now they kind of rule the roost. And so, you know, it's a place where Elon has gotten to really push and express a lot of his political views and also elevate other voices who agree with him. And so I think there's a very strong political conversation there, maybe kind of taking the place of what Trump hoped that Truth Social might be.
- [22:05]
Ryan Mac
Is X profitable?
- [22:07]
Kate Conger
You know, that's a great question.
- [22:09]
Yeah, it's no longer public, so it doesn't have to reveal its numbers anymore. But the kind of breadcrumbs that we do get from reporting inside the company show that advertising has cratered.
- [22:19]
Yeah, it's a more hostile environment for advertisers than it was before. And so, you know, especially after the acquisition, a lot of big advertisers were taking a pause and not running ads, and some of them have started to return. I think, especially as Elon got into government and sort of tethered himself to Trump, there was a little bit of perceived political pressure there where advertisers felt like, maybe we're not gonna spend the amount we used to on Twitter, but we do need to be spending something. We don't want to be seen as boycotting. And so I think they have been able to rebuild that business a little bit. I don't know that it has risen to the levels that it was at in the former Twitter.
- [23:03]
Ryan Mac
What surprised the two of you most in all the ways that this platform has changed by moving from Twitter to
- [23:13]
Kate Conger
X. I think one of the things that was surprising to me, and maybe it shouldn't have been, but one of the things that was surprising to me was how comfortable Elon was with making decisions that were just divorced from financial reality. You know, And I think I had just watched this company for so long kind of struggle towards profitability, and then to get there and, you know, have that kind of in the back of its corporate mind to think like we would make this decision, but we would piss off the advertisers, and we can't do that. So we're gonna do the thing that is gonna make us money. And I expected that almost more so from someone like Elon, who, you know is the richest man in the world. It's like, okay, like we're gonna see decisions driving towards the bottom line. And you could even argue that some of the layoffs were about that, that, you know, he wanted the company to be more profitable and was gonna cut people in order to accomplish it. But I think it was really surprising to see him just kind of fling any and all content moderation out the window and not worry about the fact that it was gonna damage revenue. Right. And, you know, to see him now kind of laughing off things that Grok does, like it's anti semitic rants, like it's nudification of children, and, you know, he's cracked jokes about that stuff. And it obviously, obviously impacts the company's profitability and he just doesn't care. I guess he's rich enough that he doesn't have to. But I think that was really surprising to me to see that he really does not mind losing money.
- [24:40]
This acquisition, as disastrous as it was for him, doesn't hurt him at all. In fact, it made him stronger. And you think about where he was when he bought the company. He was worth, call it 300, $400 billion. His net worth now is approaching 800 billion. He's probably going to become the first trillionaire. It's this kind of realization, a surprise for me, that once you're that rich, once you have that much power and wealth, you can have this enormous screw up and, you know, come off for the better. You know, he spun out Xai from it. He's used it to influence an election and put someone in the White House. Not saying that that was the original goal, but that's certainly what happened. And he has come off way More wealthy and way more powerful than I could have imagined when we started writing this book.
- [25:27]
Ryan Mac
Yeah. What does the journey of Twitter and Elon Musk and X say about the possibility of an online public square just to exist? In the heyday of Twitter, people said, this platform is a part of democracy. It is a part of movements for justice. The Arab Spring, in large part, was galvanized on Twitter, as was the Black Lives Matter movement. There are many people who have said for years, a platform like that should be always, more than anything else, a public square for all. What does the journey of this company under Elon Musk say about the very idea?
- [26:20]
Kate Conger
I think that proves the idea is a myth. I just go back to the idea of Elon Musk putting his purchase in this box of like, you know, I'm protecting free speech. This is now the free speech platform. And how he's operated the platform has just been so contradictory to that. You know, he is banned journalists, he has banned speech he doesn't like. So the way he's acted has not by any means comported with this idea of free speech. You know, we've had this kind of ideal for a long time. Jack Dorsey and Ev Williams had this ideal. But it's a myth when you're in a capitalistic society where one individual, or, I don't know, a group of shareholders can buy a company and control it. When you have Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and Elon Musk at X, you know, billionaires that control these things and billionaires now who just bought TikTok, right, they control these platforms. They can control what flows on them. It's a myth of this idea of, you know, we have this one public square where every voice is equal and we can all share our opinions. But you have Elon Musk out there using his platform to deny that he's in the Epstein files. Or, you know, it's, you know, he can shape truth and just outwardly push back on things that are true. And it's demoralizing in some ways, but it just shows that this ideal we have is just an ideal.
- [27:42]
Sam Sanders
What do you say to the people
- [27:43]
Ryan Mac
hearing this part of our conversation who are, in fact, demoralized by hearing these two established journalists make that claim? I imagine it does feel demoralizing to a lot of people to hear that. What do you say to them in that emotion?
- [27:57]
Kate Conger
You know, I think that it's an interesting moment or an opportunity for us to really think about the way we build and participate in these online spaces and trying to be A little bit savvier about where we spend our time. And I think that for people of Ryan and I's age who sort of came of age with social media, it was just sort of a default of like, oh, of course we're gonna be on social media. We have to be on social media. And this is.
- [28:29]
Sam Sanders
And there was an idealism about it.
- [28:31]
Kate Conger
There's a huge idealism about it. And yeah, you know, we kind of, I think, took for granted that this would be like a democratizing thing for speech. But there's such an amount of editorial control that goes on with these companies. I think towards the end of Twitter's existence, right, they were kind of testing and experimenting about this idea of a public square. And they were finding that a lot of people didn't feel comfortable posting on Twitter because they were afraid they would be harassed. And it was kind of something that prompted them to step up and enforce a lot of content moderation to make it safer so that more voices could rise to the platform. Right. You know, Elon has talked about that his kind of ideal vision of a public square is a player versus player video game. So a game where you are fighting against the other person and trying to shout them down and trying to win this battle of wills, you know, and those are both visions of a public square. They're just very different ones. And so I think it kind of is an invitation for us as users to think about, you know, what kind of public squares do we want? What does that even mean to us? And, yeah, I mean, I think that's an interesting thing to be thinking about, especially as we're moving into this big wave of artificial intelligence and people are essentially talking to a chatbot stranger all the time. I think it's good a time to look at the lessons of Twitter and think about what was good about our conversations with strangers, what was bad about them, what kind did we do to the world?
- [30:00]
Ryan Mac
Well, hey, thank you both so much for your reporting.
- [30:03]
Kate Conger
Thank you. And thanks so much for having us.
- [30:05]
Thanks, Kim.
- [30:10]
Sam Sanders
Kate and Ryan's book is called Character How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. We'll share a link to it on our Show Notes page. And every weekend, you can find new episodes of Apple News in conversation in the Apple News app. Just tap on the audio tab app, those little headphones at the bottom, to find.