The Elon Musk-Twitter saga

It may be hard to comprehend, but Twitter has been in its death throes for a full nine months now. Ever since the platform was purchased by Elon Musk in October 2022, its slow deterioration and slide into irrelevance has delivered a few standout moments along the way. Take the evening of November 17, when news reports swept across Twitter that Musk had fired so many employees that Twitter likely no longer had the people behind it to keep its most vital services running. Or the time Musk reinstated numerous high-profile banned users, including former president Donald Trump. Or the moment he broke the platform’s verification system and then rendered it ineffective by turning it into a monetized feature.

Then there have been the constant technical hiccups: the broken links, the rate limits, the end of its collaboration with third-party developers. All of this — both the cultural and the technical changes — have contributed to the ongoing feeling that something about the platform has fundamentally changed.

Elon Musk’s grand plan for Twitter — that is, what he hopes to create beyond a “town square” for posting and messaging — is starting to take shape. And that shape is a super app called X.

On July 23, Musk announced that Twitter would lose its iconic blue bird logo — and, eventually, the name “Twitter” — as his company rebrands to “X” and attempts to fulfill Musk’s super app vision. By Monday morning, the bird was indeed gone. In its place was the new X logo, which appears to come from a user’s suggestion that Musk embedded and tweeted from his own account. The X isn’t a custom design; rather, the company that was once worth $44 billion — but may now be worth as little as $15 billion — went with a slightly altered Unicode character. (Twitter did not respond to comment on the origins of the logo).

Elon Musk said he has picked NBCUniversal advertising executive Linda Yaccarino to be the new CEO of Twitter.

Musk announced on Thursday that he had chosen his replacement as the chief executive of Twitter and its parent company, X, and that “she” (without naming who) will be starting in about six weeks. Musk confirmed his selection on Friday morning.

It didn’t take long for Elon Musk to weaponize his shiny new $44 billion toy. In less than six months since he took over Twitter, he’s laid off thousands of people, cut Twitter’s valuation in half, released cherry-picked “Twitter files” that purportedly show how pre-Musk Twitter was biased against conservatives, welcomed formerly banned accounts back into the fold, made a few changes to the product, and promised many more.

But the most controversial Twitter product update so far is what he’s done to verification. Verification used to be a way for users to know that a profile belonged to the person or organization it purported to be. It was reserved for the accounts that would need such an indicator, including those of famous people, companies, and journalists, who got blue check marks appended to their profiles to make that verification easy for everyone to see.

Elon Musk’s decision to strip certain users of their legacy verification check marks — one of the biggest changes he’s made as the new owner and CEO of Twitter — is off to a chaotic start.

Twitter’s iconic blue check marks were once status symbols of internet clout. Now, they’ve turned into a mark of shame for many celebrities.

It’s been a year since Elon Musk initiated his takeover of Twitter. The six months since he actually took charge can only be characterized as chaotic, and quietly, in early April, Musk merged Twitter with a new shell company called X Corp. In other words, Twitter Inc. no longer exists.

Musk painted a rosy picture in an April 12 interview with the BBC. He said that Twitter is thriving with “record high usage” and that, despite some “compute glitches here and there,” the “site is doing really well,” advertisers who initially fled the platform after his takeover have mostly returned, and the company is on track to make a profit by next quarter. Musk also scoffed at the idea that he had destroyed Twitter, saying that predictions that the platform would “cease to exist” have “turned out to be false.”

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, he said he wanted to protect its place as a “digital town square,” where ideas from all corners of the internet could flourish. But soon, if you want your voice to really be heard in the town square, you’ll need to pay.

Musk tweeted that, starting April 15, Twitter will only recommend content from paid accounts in the For You feed, the first screen users see when they open the app. It’s just one of several seemingly random changes Musk has been making to Twitter’s core user experience without explanation. He changed the Twitter homepage’s icon from its classic blue bird logo to “doge” — the cartoonish Shiba Inu dog meme linked to the cryptocurrency dogecoin — and for some users, the app started seemingly inserting tweets from accounts people didn’t follow into the their Following feed.

Elon Musk has only been in charge of Twitter since late October. But already, he’s turned the company and its platform upside down.

Almost immediately after he took over, Musk booted top executives, slashed rank-and-file headcount by 50 percent, issued remaining employees an ultimatum to be “hardcore” in their work ethic or quit, and fast-tracked a hodgepodge of potentially revenue-generating features, including charging users to get or keep a verification check mark. And that was all before he allowed former president Donald Trump back on the app, reversing Trump’s former ban on the platform, and then declared “amnesty” for previously suspended accounts.

It took over 40 hours, but Elon Musk has finally acknowledged the results of a public poll he ran calling for him to step down as CEO of Twitter.

“I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!” Musk tweeted on Tuesday night. “After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.”

At first, 2022 looked like it would be another celebratory year for the extremely rich. In early January, Tesla stock was trading at well over $300 per share. Its CEO, Elon Musk, had recently been named Time’s 2021 Person of the Year. He was Earth’s richest person, an exemplar of capitalism gone right, a visionary building companies that would benefit humanity and not just line his own pockets. He was so intelligent that he purportedly taught himself rocket science, so ambitious that he made the electric car sexy in an effort to stem the climate crisis.

As 2022 comes to a close, the awe Musk enjoyed has turned into shock and jeers. Fans have defected. Tesla investors are growing mutinous (at publication time, Tesla stock was languishing around $150). Musk was even recently booed by the audience at Dave Chappelle’s comedy show. In a Twitter poll he posted over the weekend, Musk asked whether he should step down as head of Twitter, saying he would “abide by the results of this poll.” Nearly 60 percent of respondents answered yes.

It has taken several weeks longer than planned, but it appears that Elon Musk’s paid verification system has started to roll out for real this time. Some users can go to their settings and pay either $8 or $11 a month to sign up for Twitter Blue, which gives them a blue check mark, the ability to edit posts, and a few other perks, most of which are still in the “coming soon” phase: fewer ads, the ability to post longer videos, and your tweets will be amplified over those from the unwashed, checkless masses.

The change has been controversial, mostly because it renders meaningless the original purpose of the blue checks and verification. Those blue checks were doled out to users Twitter deemed notable in some way or who ran the risk of being impersonated, like celebrities, brands, and (much to the consternation of many on the right) journalists. Twitter is now describing those check marks as ambiguously notable and says they’ll be going away soon. In a few months, the only thing blue check marks will tell you is that someone paid for one.

Twitter suspended the accounts of several high-profile journalists on Thursday night, many of whom have been reporting on Elon Musk’s controversial takeover of the company. After facing backlash, Musk decided to reinstate most — but not all — of the suspended accounts by the following day.

While the journalists were given no initial explanation for their suspension, Musk argued soon after that journalists he suspended were “doxxing” him — or revealing his personal information online — by linking to a website called ElonJet that tracked the whereabouts of Musk’s plane using publicly available flight data.

There are so many questions today after a wild night on Twitter, which saw Elon Musk suspend multiple journalists’ accounts, citing violation of his company’s anti-doxxing policies. Twitter also shut down its Spaces audio chat feature, which journalists — including at least one who Musk had suspended — and Musk used last night to have a live discussion about the suspensions.

We can’t list all the mysteries. But here’s a sampling:

Justin Halpern has more reason to love Twitter than most of us. The 28-year-old had trouble finding a writing job in Hollywood, so he moved back in with his parents in 2009 and started @shitmydadsays, where he posted all the shit his dad said. The account quickly went viral. By 2010, he had a book and a TV series based on it. He’s now an executive producer on Harley Quinn and Abbott Elementary.

“Twitter basically jump-started my entire career,” Halpern told Recode.

About a week and a half after buying Twitter and assuming the role of CEO, Elon Musk rolled out a new service letting users pay $8 a month for a verification check mark without actually verifying their identity.

Musk had portrayed the old verification model as a system of “lords & peasants,” tweeting, “Power to the people!” New check-mark-wielding accounts wasted no time in impersonating brands, such as Musk’s own car company, Tesla, and pharmaceuticals company Eli Lilly, even announcing that the insulin manufacturer would now offer insulin for free, sending the actual Eli Lilly’s stock prices into a free fall. A fake LeBron James requested a trade to another NBA team. An account impersonating former president George W. Bush tweeted, “I miss killing Iraqis.”

In 1984 — the book, not the year — the means by which the evil totalitarian regime “Big Brother” retains its power is through something called “doublethink.” It’s the practice of holding contradictory beliefs in tandem: “war is peace,” “freedom is slavery,” “ignorance is strength,” “2 + 2 = 5,” to use the book’s examples. It worked because when our minds — our sense of logic, our morality — become compromised, they’re easier to control.

Considering the events of the last several months, you could also interpret doublethink to mean things like “the metaverse is the future,” “people will pay millions of dollars for shitty art,” or “this crypto billionaire definitely has my best interests in mind.” It’s a trite reference, but it’s sort of the only one that makes sense. Somehow, somewhere along the way, the American public was duped into believing that these things could be true despite being, well, not.

Since Elon Musk first offered to buy Twitter this spring, it appears that the billionaire has had a very hard time deciding just what to do with it. It seems as though every time he makes a grand pronouncement about the social media platform, he ends up walking it back. He’s changed his mind on everything from buying Twitter in the first place to what color its signature check marks should be, and he’s done so in a spectacularly public way. Some workers at the social media platform — those left after massive layoffs — are reportedly pulling 20-hour days to follow Musk’s ever-changing whims. He’s flip-flopped on so many things, it’s tough to keep track. Here’s a running list. Stay tuned for more.

Flip-flop: Buying Twitter

How long before he changed his mind: Three months (from bid to officially trying to get out of the bid)

What happened: After months of buying up Twitter stock, Musk put in an unsolicited bid to buy Twitter in April for $43 billion or $54.20 a share, which the company accepted later that month. However, right away, Musk began hemming and hawing about the deal. He officially tried to get out of it in July by saying the company misrepresented the number of bots on the platform. But faced with a potentially grueling trial, which would have exposed a lot of his personal communication and which he wasn’t guaranteed to win, Musk agreed to go through with the deal in October, three months after he tried to rescind it and six months after he sought to buy it in the first place.

As Elon Musk carries out his chaotic early days as Twitter’s new CEO — slashing staff, trolling employees and users alike, and freaking out advertisers — you might wonder, who is this guy getting his advice from?

In his first two weeks running Twitter, Musk has assembled a tight-knit group of his “war-room” advisers. Many members of the group are longtime confidants of Musk, and some of them have very little background in social media. Since Musk is the ultimate decision-maker, it’s unclear exactly how much power they hold at Twitter, but these figures have gained overnight influence over one of the world’s most powerful platforms for online communication.

Elon Musk held a giant conference call for advertisers and more than 100,000 other people Wednesday. He sounded thoughtful about his plans for Twitter, unsure about how it was all going to work out, but solicitous of feedback. “I only got the keys to the building last Friday,” he said, adding later: “I’m open to ideas.”

The problem for Musk is the advertisers he has spooked since buying Twitter for $44 billion are unlikely to be swayed by any of this. They tell me they don’t mind what Musk says in outreach calls like this. They’re concerned about what he does and what he tweets.

Over the past two weeks, users of a certain social media platform have had to ask ourselves what a world without Twitter might look like. This is, of course, due to the purchase of the company by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, an event that seemingly no one wanted, least of all Musk himself. Since being handed the proverbial keys, the self-described “free speech absolutist” has laid off roughly half of Twitter’s staff, announced that those who wish to be “verified” must pay $20 per month to add a blue check next to their name (then backtracked to $8 after Stephen King bullied him about it), declared that “comedy is now legal on Twitter,” then proceeded to ban multiple parody accounts making fun of him, and endorsed the Republican Party in the US midterm elections under the guise of “independent thinking.”

People who spend a great deal of time on Twitter now have what may seem like a binary choice: Stay or go. Some of those people view this decision as one of meaningful political resistance, tweeting melodramatic statements like “We need to stop ceding ground. Stay,” or worse, “Hold your ground like a Ukrainian.” Others are quietly bowing out, having presumably decided that the idea of Twitter becoming even worse than it already is is too much to bear. They may flee to greener pastures like the decentralized (read: confusing) platform Mastodon or the walled gardens of the newsletter market. But the thing about having a uniquely chaotic boy-king in charge of Twitter is that nobody really knows what’s going to happen to it.

Elon Musk’s Twitter buyout is a done deal. For just $44 billion, he owns what he once referred to as a “de facto town square.” He also, it seems, owns all of Twitter users’ data.

If you care about digital privacy and you’re a Twitter user, this may not be great news. Over the years, Twitter has been dogged by privacy and security issues, while also dragging its feet on implementing possible solutions. The result is that conceivably everything you’ve ever done or said on Twitter, public or private — including your direct messages — now belongs to one of the richest people in the world, a man known for being unpredictable, childish, and even vengeful. It’s also owned by a man who reportedly plans to get rid of 75 percent of its staff, which could compromise Twitter’s security even more. Oops!

After more than six months of one of the most chaotic, high-profile business negotiations in recent memory, it’s finally real: Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, is in charge of Twitter.

Musk has reportedly fired CEO Parag Agrawal and two other top executives, CFO Ned Segal and head of legal policy, trust, and safety Vijaya Gadde, according to reports from CNBC the Washington Post, and the New York Times. The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal have reported that the deal closed Thursday night, although there is no official confirmation from Twitter or Musk at time of publication.

Elon Musk wanted to buy Twitter. Then he didn’t. Now, according to a letter he sent to Twitter earlier this week, he does. Yes, again.

The news in this months-long saga came the very week he was expected to be deposed in in a lawsuit Twitter filed against Musk for breach of contract. The exact reasons for his 180 are unknown, but experts told Vox that it shows the Delaware Court of Chancery’s muscle in potentially reining in the richest person in the world’s disregard for convention in his business dealings.

We still have lots of questions and theories about Elon Musk’s on-off-on-again deal to buy Twitter. But there’s one thing that everyone opining about Twitter seems to agree on: Regardless of who owns it, Twitter is one of the world’s most important social networks — “the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” as Musk put it last April.

Are we sure about that?

A trove of Elon Musk’s text messages was released this week as part of a lawsuit Twitter has filed against the billionaire, and it’s proving to be an illuminating look inside conversations between Musk and a who’s who of celebrities, journalists, Silicon Valley elites, and even politicians.

Among the very rich and very famous who have a direct line to the Tesla CEO are Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, podcaster Joe Rogan, and broadcast journalist Gayle King. In texts, ultrawealthy investors casually offer billions of dollars to assist in Musk’s effort. Their sheer enthusiasm for Musk’s bid to take over Twitter also confirms what many have long suspected about billionaires’ interest in owning media companies: They’re keenly aware that controlling a company like Twitter means being able to shape narratives and wield influence.