Twitter in the Time of Elon Musk (Published 2022) (2024)

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From “The New York Times,” I’m Sabrina Tavernise and this is “The Daily.”

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At the beginning, Twitter was a place for underdogs, a public square where people could challenge those with money and power. But now, it’s owned by the world’s wealthiest man who gets to call all the shots. Today, I talked to my colleague, Kevin Roose, about Twitter’s next chapter.

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It’s Tuesday, November 1.

So, Kevin, I’m just going to say it — Elon Musk finally owns Twitter.

Surreal, isn’t it?

Completely.

Yeah. I’ve had to sort of digest it over the past few days as well because this is this thing that has been looming as a possibility for so long, but a lot of people kind of doubted that it would ever come to pass. And, now, here we are.

And, Kevin, when the deal finally went through there were these photos that emerged of Musk actually walking into the headquarters of Twitter carrying a sink. Like, what was that?

The best anyone’s guess is that it was just a prop for the ensuing joke that he made on Twitter, which was let that sink in.

Ah.

Bah-doom-ch.

Oh, boy. I literally didn’t understand that.

You guys have a sound kit? Can we get like — can we get a rim shot?

So, Kevin, this was all pretty surprising, right? Because, just a few weeks ago, the universal understanding was that Musk did not want to own Twitter and was doing everything possible never to own it. I mean, he’d made this $44 billion offer but he’d had this massive case of buyer’s remorse and tried every which way to back out of it.

Yeah. So he initially offered to buy Twitter in April at a price of $44 billion. Then the economy tanked and Twitter’s stock, along with other tech stocks, fell dramatically and it no longer looked like such a good deal to him.

And he decided that he didn’t want to buy the company anymore and spent months sort of publicly trying to get out of this deal using every method at his disposal. Twitter eventually sued him to force him to complete the deal.

And, as the case was preparing to go to trial in Delaware, he must have realized that he was probably not going to win this case. And so he, at the last minute, reversed course and said, actually, yes, I do intend to buy Twitter just as I said I would back in April.

So, Kevin, that brings me to why I wanted to talk to you because you are a long-time student of technology, of Silicon Valley, and, of course, of Musk. And the moment this deal went through articulated a theory about why it matters. Like, not just for Twitter but for all of us, right? Like, explain that for me.

I assumed you had me on because I’m a bona fide Twitter addict but —

[LAUGHS]:

— but this is, it turns out, not an intervention. So I think this deal matters a lot for two main reasons. One of which is just the practical reason. So, Twitter, it’s not the biggest social network but it is still an important platform.

I mean, it is where a lot of people, including media figures, politicians, celebrities spend their time. And it’s a big and important platform for public discourse. And so I think anything that happens to a social network at that scale, with that importance, matters. So that’s the practical reason that I think this deal is important.

And the second symbolic reason is that I think that Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter marks a kind of end of an era.

How so?

Well, I think that Twitter, part of its identity, has always been that it was this kind of disruptive, bottom-up force in society. It was how ordinary people — people who didn’t have power or influence or fancy jobs — it was how they sort of got a message out into the world. It was kind of a platform that gave power to the people.

And that was how it conceived of itself for basically the last decade. And I think that era sort of came to a natural end last week when Twitter, the power to the people platform, was acquired by the world’s richest man.

OK. So, take us through that journey, Kevin. Where does it begin?

So. Twitter is started in 2006 in San Francisco. It’s this little SMS-based, text micro-blogging thing. And it really, for the first couple of years of its life, is just seen as a novelty for nerds. People are posting, like, just had lunch, or anyone want to go to the park? You know?

Fascinating.

And it’s not really seen as a place where important dialogue is happening. In fact, one early critic calls it the Seinfeld of the internet. There are no stakes. There’s no — it’s just people being people.

People talking. Yeah.

And I joined Twitter in 2009, and it still kind of had that feeling to it. And that really changes in about 2011. So, 2011 is when activists all over the world start realizing that Twitter can actually be a good way to get a message out, and especially a message that is not getting out through more official, more formal channels.

So during what we now as the Arab Spring —

— activists and pro-democracy movements in countries like Tunisia and Egypt and Libya all of a sudden realize this tool, this microblogging service, this can allow us to circumvent our governments’ censors.

To keep in touch with fellow activists.

To kind get around the official apparatus and reach millions and millions of people all over the world.

[CHANTING]

And this was not just happening in the Middle East.

This was happening in America. This was the time of Occupy Wall Street.

It was also around the time that people on Twitter started protesting racial injustice and police violence. And in 2013 and 2014, they started organizing around the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter and led to these just massive protests and this global movement that really changed the course of history.

And I think that all of this, this sort of anti-establishment protest and political activism, really helped fuel one of the defining ideas, I would say, of the first half of the 2010s. This sort of idea that social media was this new and disruptive force in society. That it was basically built for underdogs and that it would help empower dissidents, and topple tyrants, and give ordinary people these super-powerful publishing tools that would allow them to rise up and take power for themselves.

So take us to the next chapter. What happened?

So, as these protest movements are rising on Twitter, the platform just gets noticed by everyone, including powerful people. So authoritarian governments are interested in using Twitter to repress dissent and protest. Celebrities get interested in Twitter as a way to build their brands and reach a bigger audience. And the secret is sort out about this platform.

OK. So powerful people begin to notice it and use it, too. But when does Musk come into the picture?

Yeah. So, Elon Musk, like me, joined Twitter in 2009. And he was not a particularly active user at the time. Tesla, this electric car company that he ran, was small and struggling, and most people didn’t know who Elon Musk or Tesla were.

And I was going back the other day and reading some of his early tweets, and it’s just incredibly banal stuff. He tweets in 2012, “Just returned from a trip to London and Oxford where I met with many interesting people. I really like Britain.”

Oh, boy. That does not sound like the Elon Musk of today on Twitter.

Yeah. In 2014 he tweets, “Was going to work out this morning. Went to IHOP instead.”

[LAUGHS]: OK.

Just dear-diary stuff. Like, nothing of consequence.

Right.

When he was a minor figure, Twitter was this sort of minor social network. But then, sort of toward the middle of that decade, things start to change. So Twitter is growing and has the attention of many, many people now. Elon Musk’s profile is growing. And the way that he uses Twitter starts to change as well.

He does these sort of weird, attention-grabbing stunts. Like he sells this $500 flamethrower as sort of a fundraising stunt, and it really starts to pay off for him. He gets this following that is very into Tesla, that is very into SpaceX, that is very into him, and it really lifts his businesses to new heights.

OK. So, this is the second phase of Twitter, right? That’s this platform that had been for regular people is now for people who already have power, people like Elon Musk.

Yeah. And I think the tenor of what’s happening on Twitter also starts to change. Twitter, in this middle of the decade, really starts to feel like a place where people are learning to weaponize the platform, not just activists and grassroots organizers, but authoritarians, bullies, trolls, political extremists, and culture warriors.

They’re all sort of learning this formula where you act crazy, you break the rules, you behave in outrageous ways, and you get attention. And you can convert that attention into power. And the most obvious example of that is what happens with Donald Trump in 2016.

Exactly. So, when Musk buys Twitter last week, the transformation that you’re describing must have, to you, Kevin, felt pretty complete.

It did. It really felt like this decade that began with the Arab Spring in 2011 kind of reached its natural conclusion. And I’m not saying that Twitter will all of a sudden change entirely. Twitter will still have political protests and social movements and acts of rebellion, but I think Twitter has always been sort of an odd social media platform.

For a long time, users really felt like they had a sense of ownership. Even if they didn’t literally own shares in Twitter the company, they were inventing features. They came up with a lot of the kind of weird customs and inside jokes that really define Twitter for the last decade. And so even though it was a company that was controlled by executives and shareholders the whole time, it felt kind of a class project sometimes.

Mm-hmm.

Just this organic, kind of weird thing. And now that’s all changing, right? So this company that was publicly traded for many years has been taken private. Elon Musk is the owner. There is no board. Employees of Twitter will have their stock bought from them so they will not have a meaningful ownership stake in the company either.

And it really does look like it’s going to be Elon Musk and his friends who are running Twitter. And that is just a very, very different thing than Twitter felt like for most of its history.

So it goes from this public-spirited college project to the private domain of one man.

And not just any man, but the world’s richest man who is, I think it’s fair to say, extremely unpredictable.

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We’ll be right back.

So, Kevin, what does happen to the people’s town square when it’s bought by a billionaire?

Well, I think we should just pause and back up for a second because thinking about what’s coming next for Twitter really relies on understanding why Elon Musk bought it in the first place. And a lot of that has to do with this period in the middle of the last decade when Twitter was sort of becoming this wild and unruly place with harassment campaigns, and threats, and conspiracy theories running amok. And a lot of that is happening as social media as a whole is sort of reassessing its own role and responsibilities in the world.

And so Twitter, like other social platforms, decides, wait a minute — we can’t just be this kind of wild free for all. We have to actually put some rules in place to prevent bad actors from weaponizing and ultimately wrecking our platform.

And it starts coming up with all of these rules and procedures to kind of stop the platform from being weaponized in this way.

And it implements new rules against harassment and hate speech.

It bans a number of high-profile repeat offenders who had violated their rules over and over again.

And some people really like these changes, really like the fact that Twitter is less of a wild free-for-all than it once was. But, of course, these actions that Twitter takes also open it up to accusations that Twitter itself is acting with too much authority and power. That it’s targeting certain forms of speech. That it’s too willing to block people permanently. That it’s overstepping its authority.

Right. And the most memorable example of this is when Trump got banned from Twitter after January 6.

That became a global news story and a huge flashpoint for the political right in saying that Twitter and other social media companies were acting, essentially, as left-wing speech censors. And that message resonates with a lot of people, including Elon Musk whose own politics have been shifting quite a bit during this period. He’s become more and more sympathetic to right-wing views, and he’s become very suspicious that Twitter is acting in a way that is politically motivated.

And one sort of strange waypoint in this journey comes earlier this year when Twitter suspends the account of “The Babylon Bee.”

What’s that?

It’s sort of like the conservative version of “The Onion.” It’s a satire site run by conservative Christians, and they publish basically satirical articles, mostly about Democrats and people on the left.

Got it.

So it gets suspended from Twitter after making what was widely regarded as a transphobic joke about a transgender Biden administration official. And that really riles up Elon Musk because he likes “The Babylon Bee.” He thinks of it as a sort of necessary corrective to kind of left-wing comedy sites, and he gets really mad about it. And that’s when he starts tweeting and talking about, maybe I should by Twitter and change the rules.

Hmm. So it was all about this “Babylon Bee” thing?

I think that’s a little simplistic, but I do think that there is sort of a strange kind of butterfly effect here where Elon Musk’s favorite comedy site gets censored, gets suspended by Twitter, and that’s sort of his breaking point where he says, OK, I’m not just going to complain about this on Twitter, I’m actually going to buy the company and liberate it.

Mm-hmm. So, when Musk says he wants to liberate it, it kind of sounds like he’s saying that he wants to return it to its roots as the champion of the underdog. Is that right?

Yeah, I think that’s what he would say. I think he’s really nostalgic for this period before Twitter and other social networks really took a heavier hand in moderating their platforms. He kind of liked the spicy, Wild West free-for-all that Twitter was. And I think that’s what he’s been aiming for with his version of Twitter is to sort of, in some ways, bring it back to that earlier, less-moderated, less-policed version of itself.

But, at the end of the day, Twitter is a business, right? I mean, and he needs to grow the profits of that business, to take it seriously as a business. So how do you see him balancing these competing demands?

It’s going to be very tricky for him. I mean, not only does he have strong beliefs about social media and Twitter and what kinds of content it should and shouldn’t moderate, but now he has a whole group of fans and supporters, including many on the political right, who are expecting him to, as he put it, free the bird.

But he also — you’re right — has these real business pressures now. He spent $44 billion to buy the company. He’s taken on debt, which he’s going to need to start paying back. And he needs to make this company a much better business very quickly if this deal is going to work out for him.

And so I think Elon Musk is really rapidly running into this central tension that I expect is going to be the biggest question and source of uncertainty with his governance of Twitter is are the steps that he’s going to take to open Twitter back up and make it a more free place also going to make it a less profitable business?

And, Kevin, is there any sign of which direction he is going to go? I mean, is this going to be old-school Musk who wants to free the bird, or new Musk who wants to grow his business and make sure his investment doesn’t evaporate?

I think in a confusing way it’s going to be both. So, what we’ve seen from Elon Musk since this deal closed last week is sort of this veering between these approaches. So, right away he tweets, “The bird is freed.” He tweets, “Comedy is now legal on Twitter.” Essentially saying, like, “The Babylon Bee” and other sort of edgy, comedic voices can exist on the platform. We’re not going to ban them anymore.

Mm-hmm.

But then he has also made some edgy tweets since this deal closed over the weekend. He tweeted a story making baseless allegations about Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s husband who was recently attacked in his home. And so he posted a very specious story about this attack and some of the reasons behind it as a reply to Hillary Clinton, weirdly. And then deleted that after he was accused of spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories.

So, old Musk?

Right. But then we’ve also seen glimpses of this sort of more moderate Musk. He released a statement last week after the deal closed which was basically a plea to advertisers, the people who account for about 90 percent of the company’s revenue at this point. Basically saying, Twitter is not going to become what he called a free-for-all hellscape.

Whoa. Interesting.

He said, basically, Twitter is not going back to the way it was before we took all these steps to make it safer, not just for users but for advertisers. So, advertisers, please don’t get scared and leave Twitter because we are not going to throw open the gates and let anything go like we once might have.

So this is kind of a chastened new Musk.

Well, it’s a Musk who realizes that in order to have this deal work, Twitter can’t lose all of its advertisers and a big chunk of its users overnight.

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He has a lot of his net worth now wrapped up in the fate of Twitter as a business, and he understands that, until Twitter stops being dependent on advertising, it’s going to need to be a more tightly moderated place. You know, I’ve stopped making predictions about Elon Musk a long time ago, but I think we can expect to see some lurching between these two approaches. And, ultimately, I think he’s going to really resist giving either of them up, and he’s going to want to have his cake and eat it, too.

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Kevin, thank you.

Thank you.

Kevin will be following what Elon Musk does with Twitter and other tech stories on his new weekly podcast, “Hard Fork.” We’ll be right back.

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Here’s what else you should know today. On Monday, federal prosecutors filed charges against the man accused of attacking Nancy Pelosi’s husband in their San Francisco home. David DePape had broken in and attacked Mr. Pelosi with a hammer while he was sleeping in their bedroom. DePape later told police that he wanted to hold Ms. Pelosi hostage and, quote, “break her kneecaps.”

Prosecutors charged DePape with attempted kidnapping and with assaulting the relative of a federal official. The San Francisco District Attorney’s office was expected to file charges, too.

Today’s episode was produced by Mooj Zadie, Diana Nguyen, and Rachelle Bonja. It was edited by Patricia Willens, contains original music by Dan Powell and Brad Fisher, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

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That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. We’ll see you tomorrow.

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