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0:02

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today.

0:18

Elon Musk had sent Twitter

0:20

employees an email with an ultimatum.

0:24

My extremely hardcore way,

0:27

or the highway. Many

0:29

Twitter employees had feared this message,

0:31

this culture, from the very beginning. And

0:34

now, they had just till the end of the

0:36

day tomorrow to decide. Do

0:38

I stay? Or do I go?

0:41

The vast majority of people were

0:43

like, what the hell is he thinking? What

0:45

is he talking about? Zoe Schiffer covers

0:47

Twitter for Platformer. If you're

0:49

trying to rally the troops, to

0:53

me this is just so not the way to

0:55

do it.

0:55

The email quickly caused chaos.

0:59

Beyond the alarming message, it contained a

1:01

link to a Google form, which gave only

1:03

one option.

1:04

Yes, I'm in.

1:07

Twitter employees wondered if the email was

1:09

even real, or if it was spam. And

1:12

then the transition team, the

1:14

people that Twitter employees called the goons,

1:16

followed up and were like, no this is legit, please

1:18

click the link if you want to stay. And so

1:21

it was kind of mayhem internally.

1:24

A lot of employees didn't

1:26

want to stay. A whole bunch of people had

1:28

not signed the email and they started trying to shut off accounts.

1:31

And they realized that like a lot of people who they

1:33

really needed at the company were

1:36

effectively

1:37

resigning. Elon

1:39

and the goons quickly realized

1:42

that they had miscalculated. His

1:44

plan had been to keep only the true believers,

1:47

to get rid of the employees who didn't want to be

1:49

a part of Elon's Twitter. But

1:51

even he knew he couldn't run Twitter

1:53

without some semblance of a workforce.

1:56

And they realized what they'd done, his

1:59

advisors. started to panic. And

2:01

so then they had to personally call those people and say,

2:03

like, hey, can you please

2:05

reevaluate your decision? Would you consider

2:07

staying?

2:09

By the time the Thursday deadline rolled around,

2:12

Elon's attempt to reset the company after

2:14

the chaos of the mass layoffs and

2:16

the disastrous Twitter blue rollout had

2:18

just turned into another mess. The

2:21

New York Times is reporting that as many as 1,200 employees

2:24

resign this week.

2:26

Now, sources tell CNBC, Twitter's headquarters

2:28

and all of its offices will be closed until

2:31

Monday. And engineers and other employees

2:33

posted goodbye messages to group

2:35

chats.

2:36

As questions mount over Twitter's future,

2:38

Elon Musk offered little reassurance he

2:40

has a permanent plan, tweeting, what

2:42

should Twitter do next?

2:45

One ally stuck with Elon through

2:47

the continued chaos, Jack

2:49

Dorsey. He tweeted out

2:51

his belief in Twitter's future under Elon.

2:55

Twitter will survive and thrive, but it'll take

2:57

some time.

2:58

When asked if Twitter's survival depended on

3:00

a change in management, Jack

3:02

was unequivocal. Yes, it

3:05

going public to private was critical, and I'm

3:07

very grateful for that.

3:11

With 1,200 more employees gone,

3:13

Twitter's workforce was about 2 thirds

3:15

smaller than it had been just a few

3:17

weeks earlier. People both

3:20

inside the company and out were

3:22

now worried that the site was going to break,

3:25

possibly even that night.

3:27

The hashtag RIP Twitter

3:30

trended, flooding timelines with

3:32

sarcastic memes, earnest eulogies

3:35

and angry shots at Elon. It's

3:37

been a pleasure tweeting with you all the past 13 years. Elon

3:41

always thinks he's the smartest person in the room.

3:43

He's about to be standing in an empty room and

3:46

it still won't be true. I just

3:48

tried sending a tweet to someone by a DM

3:50

and it sent the wrong one. Twitter's already

3:52

starting to fail,

3:54

RIP Twitter. Reports

3:56

circulated about internal chaos that

3:59

certain teams... to the site had resigned

4:01

en masse. There were unconfirmed

4:03

stories of employees getting stuck in the

4:06

parking garage after their badges had been turned

4:08

off. But it turned out,

4:11

reports of Twitter's death were

4:13

greatly exaggerated.

4:15

Everyone was like, this is it, this is the end, goodbye

4:18

everyone. And I looked at that

4:20

and was like, okay, clearly, a lot

4:22

of these people have never worked in a tech company. Like, this isn't

4:25

how tech companies work. They

4:27

do so much work over the years

4:29

to make the sites stable so that it

4:31

can operate for a really long time without that many people.

4:33

Twitter

4:35

did not die on that November night.

4:39

But with what happened next, some

4:41

people may wish it had. Because

4:44

soon after Elon lost control

4:46

of his workforce, he took his

4:48

chaotic reign directly

4:51

towards the users.

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From Wondery,

6:06

I'm David Brown, the host of Business Wars, and

6:08

this is Flipping the Bird, Elon

6:11

versus Twitter. This is episode

6:13

five. It

6:41

had been just over two weeks since

6:44

Elon Musk sent his email demanding

6:46

his employees be extremely hardcore.

6:50

His deputies had begun asking employees

6:52

to refer their friends. He

6:54

needed more people to keep key functions

6:56

going. Now Elon

6:59

was boarding his $70 million Gulfstream

7:01

jet in Oakland, heading to Washington,

7:04

D.C. Elon,

7:06

can you hear us? Awesome.

7:09

Elon, can you hear us? I

7:11

think so. It takes a while to load. Can you hear me now? Yep,

7:14

I can hear you now. There he is. I don't

7:16

miss my flight. Fantastic. Sorry guys, I think

7:18

there's like maybe some glitches in the spaces

7:21

that we need to fix.

7:22

I'll dig into it next week. Elon

7:25

had been extremely busy, barely sleeping,

7:28

but he didn't rest. He decided

7:30

to spend most of the flight chatting with users

7:32

on Twitter spaces. I do have a lot

7:35

of shit going on right now, so I've

7:37

got to make sure Twitter is stable from

7:40

a financial standpoint and it's not wasting tons of money and going bankrupt.

7:44

So there's juggling a lot of things

7:46

here, to say the least.

7:47

The connection wasn't great, but

7:49

it was Elon's own satellite internet

7:52

system Starlink that was allowing him to

7:54

participate. At

7:56

its peak, 100,000 users crowded

7:58

into the virtual room to listen and interact

8:01

directly with Elon.

8:22

Elon had spent the past couple of weeks making

8:24

Twitter his version of the free speech

8:26

haven he wanted it to be. Like

8:29

the threat it posed to his already dwindling

8:31

advertising revenue, Elon reinstated

8:34

Donald Trump's Twitter account after running

8:36

a snap poll that came out in favor

8:38

of the former president. But

8:40

Trump had declined to return to Twitter, preferring

8:43

to keep posting on the platform he owned,

8:46

Truth Social. When

8:48

Twitter had allowed Kanye West to return

8:50

to the site just before the takeover, Elon

8:53

had enthusiastically tweeted, welcome

8:55

back to Twitter, my friend. This

8:57

friend who had been suspended for posting

8:59

anti-Semitic tweets.

9:01

But just two nights before this

9:03

Twitter spaces event, Elon had

9:05

to ban him again after Kanye posted

9:08

an image of swastikas.

9:18

Turns out, these kind of content

9:20

moderation decisions weren't easy.

9:23

I think posting

9:25

swastikas is an assignment to violence. I

9:27

personally wanted to punch Kanye, so that

9:30

was definitely inciting me to violence. He

9:32

reminded his audience that running Twitter and defending

9:35

free speech

9:36

was putting him in danger. Frankly, the

9:38

risk of something bad happening to me or even literally

9:40

being shot is quite significant. I'm

9:43

definitely not going to be doing any open-air

9:45

car parades, let me put it that way. Maybe

9:49

he was referring to the fact that he was in the

9:52

midst of his biggest push yet to promote

9:54

his idea of free speech and transparency.

9:58

Elon had recently given a few hands-

9:59

and picked journalists' access to Twitter's

10:02

internal documents so they could

10:04

see how the old Twitter had made content

10:06

moderation decisions that supposedly

10:09

suppressed conservative voices and

10:11

amplified liberal ones. The

10:13

journalists claimed to reveal how Twitter

10:15

had worked inappropriately with government agencies

10:18

to ban certain content. The

10:20

expose was called

10:22

the Twitter Files. You know, none of the Twitter

10:24

Files stuff, I mean, the idea here is simply

10:26

to come clean on everything that has happened in

10:28

the past in order to build

10:30

public trust for the future. I

10:32

think that's essential. Like, why

10:34

should people believe Twitter in the future if Twitter

10:37

does not come clean about the past?

10:40

The night before, one of the journalists involved,

10:42

Matt Taibbi, had tweeted out the revelations.

10:46

Here's Taibbi talking with Maria Bartiromo

10:48

on Fox News. I think the major revelation

10:51

of the Twitter Files so far

10:52

is that we've discovered an elaborate

10:55

bureaucracy of what you might call

10:57

public-private censorship, typically

11:00

through the DHS and the FBI, but

11:02

these requests were coming from basically

11:04

every agency in the government, and in

11:06

many cases, Twitter is complying.

11:09

Taibbi had unspooled these revelations

11:11

over 41 tweets several

11:13

minutes apart. He shared

11:16

screenshots from emails and Slack messages

11:18

that showed how Twitter employees came

11:21

to the decision that the New York Post story

11:23

about Hunter Biden's laptop violated

11:25

their policy against posting hacked materials

11:28

and banned the link.

11:30

Erin Wu covers Twitter for the information,

11:33

and she had watched the tweets slowly

11:35

trickle in. It's essentially a

11:37

look at how content moderation was

11:39

happening within Twitter, using a lot

11:42

of Slack messages and internal

11:44

emails and things that are really

11:46

interesting, like things that do, in a way,

11:49

offer kind of an unprecedented look into

11:51

how a major social media company

11:54

is making these decisions.

11:56

On Twitter Spaces, Elon shared

11:58

what he believed the Twitter Files... uncovered.

12:01

It's just obvious that there's been a lot of controlled

12:03

information, suppression of information, including

12:05

things that affected elections.

12:08

But to other observers, it was

12:10

something else entirely. It ended up

12:12

being something that gave some interesting

12:15

insights into the ways

12:17

that Twitter employees were making

12:20

these decisions, but I don't think that it

12:22

was something that led to the

12:25

kind of bombshell that he was hoping for.

12:28

There was like no evidence of collusion

12:30

or anything like that.

12:31

Rather than a smoking gun, observers

12:34

were divided over what the files showed

12:37

or didn't

12:38

show. Some like Elon saw collusion

12:40

between politicians and content moderators,

12:43

a pattern of suppression, while

12:45

others raised suspicions about Elon's

12:47

hand-picked selection of journalists and

12:50

wondered what the fuss was all about.

12:53

They saw a company engaging in the tough and

12:55

messy conversations about what content

12:57

moderation looked like in practice. The

13:01

rollout of the Twitter files, predictably,

13:03

included some missteps. There were

13:05

a few cases where I think we should have

13:08

excluded some email addresses. Yep.

13:12

Names and email addresses of Twitter employees

13:15

had appeared all over unredacted documents,

13:18

replacing them and putting them at risk. And

13:20

perhaps most embarrassing for Elon,

13:23

that included Jack Dorsey's private email.

13:26

Sorry, Jack. Jack

13:29

at Pizza is now,

13:30

you know, might need a different email address, but

13:34

so we'd roughly need to, you know, not to have email

13:36

addresses in there. But it wasn't

13:39

sharing his email address that had rubbed Jack

13:41

the wrong way about the project. If

13:43

the goal is transparency to build trust, why

13:46

not just release everything without filter

13:48

and let people judge for themselves, including

13:51

all discussions around current and future actions?

13:54

Make everything public now. he

14:00

railed against, cherry

14:02

picking and gatekeeping information. The

14:05

thing about the Twitter files is that the way

14:07

that they were rolled out

14:10

and the writers that he chose to

14:12

work with him on this

14:13

turned the release of the files

14:16

themselves into this really partisan

14:18

event where it was hard

14:21

to know what was being released

14:25

compared to the bigger picture

14:27

of what was going on because of kind of the selective

14:30

nature of how

14:31

that information was released. But

14:34

the crowd on spaces was appreciative of

14:36

the Twitter files and Elon.

14:39

You know, there are a lot of people in the

14:42

last decade that have lost hope

14:44

because what's happening in politics,

14:46

what's happening in the media, there's

14:49

so much frustration. And I think the most

14:51

important thing that you've done

14:53

here, Elon, with your steps that you are taking

14:56

is to give people hope again.

14:58

Well, great. I mean, I'm

15:00

really glad to hear that. And like I said, I'll

15:02

do my best here. A lot of us have been

15:04

fighting this culture war for free

15:06

speech, basically. And, you know, I think a lot

15:08

of people have lost hope because they didn't see anyone

15:11

caring about it.

15:13

Yeah. I mean, I'm like, I'm like sort of worried

15:15

about the future of civilization. You

15:18

know, just like, are we headed

15:20

in a good direction? The overarching

15:22

goal here is that

15:25

on balance, that Twitter be a force

15:27

for good for the future of civilization.

15:30

The public was sharply divided on Elon's

15:33

approach to free speech on Twitter. Like

15:36

so much in America today, it really depended

15:38

on your point of view. On Twitter

15:40

spaces, fans of Elon were praising

15:42

him for being on the front lines of the culture

15:44

wars. Inside

15:47

the Chase Center in San Francisco was a

15:49

different story.

15:52

Less than two weeks later, another frontline

15:55

combatant in today's culture wars was

15:57

on stage. Dave Chappelle.

15:59

co-headlining a show with fellow comedian

16:02

Chris Rock. 18,000 people

16:05

were packed into the arena, laughing

16:07

at edgy jokes about cancel culture,

16:09

politics, and of course, how Rock

16:12

felt about getting slapped by Will Smith at

16:14

the Oscars. As the show was

16:16

nearing the three hour mark in the middle

16:18

of his set, Chappelle brought

16:20

out a special guest. Ladies and gentlemen,

16:22

make some noise for the richest man in the world.

16:25

Yeah!

16:28

Elon strutted onto the stage in

16:30

black pants and a Twitter t-shirt. There

16:33

was a smattering of cheers and applause, but

16:36

the booze kept growing. Elon

16:41

awkwardly paced the stage, following

16:43

Dave Chappelle around with a mic held limply

16:46

in his hand. It sounds like some of

16:48

them people you fired

16:48

are in the audience. Yeah! Go,

16:50

go! Anytime

16:54

Elon tried to talk, they drowned

16:56

him out. Dave,

17:02

what should I say? Don't

17:04

say nothing. Okay. And

17:07

I'll only spoil the moment.

17:08

Do you hear that sound, Elon?

17:10

That's the sound of pimping still on

17:12

the wrist. Chappelle

17:17

tried to keep the show moving, making some

17:19

jokes about how the people booing had terrible

17:22

seeds, but the heckling wouldn't

17:24

stop. After

17:26

what felt like an eternity, Elon

17:29

thanked Chappelle for having him and headed

17:31

off stage. I'm in it,

17:33

bitch!

17:34

Yes, he shouted Chappelle's famous

17:37

line, I'm rich, bitch, on his way out.

17:40

If Elon was affected by being booed

17:42

on stage for almost 10 whole minutes, he

17:45

didn't take it as a sign to slow down the

17:47

pursuit of his vision for a quote unquote

17:50

free Twitter. His next

17:52

target, Twitter's Trust and Safety

17:54

Council. This was an outside

17:56

group of experts that had advised the company on

17:58

how to address issues

17:59

hate speech and abuse on the site. The

18:02

council worked as volunteers. Marcin

18:05

de Kaminsky was a member of that council and

18:08

is the director of security and innovation

18:10

at a human rights organization in Sweden.

18:12

The trust and safety council played an

18:15

important role for making the platform

18:18

safer because part of the conversation

18:20

that we had with Twitter was always on looking

18:24

at the most vulnerable users

18:27

that they have on their platforms. Marcin

18:29

had first-hand experience on how vital

18:32

Twitter's role was in protecting those

18:34

vulnerable users. His organization

18:36

worked with activists in some of the most repressive

18:39

countries in the world.

18:41

Twitter had been a bastion of activity among

18:44

human rights and democracy activists. Think

18:46

Arab Spring. Twitter

18:49

invited people like Marcin onto

18:51

its trust and safety council. It

18:53

sought their feedback and changed their product

18:55

to serve their needs. One

18:57

women's rights activist Marcin had worked with

18:59

in an East African country had her address

19:02

posted on Twitter. A literal

19:04

mob had formed outside her gates. A

19:08

journalist he worked with in Central Asia was

19:10

detained by the government who then took

19:12

over his account to identify and target

19:14

the journalist's network.

19:16

People like colleagues, sources, and family.

19:20

Both times, Marcin reached out to his

19:22

contacts at Twitter who had immediately

19:24

sprung into action, blocking accounts and

19:26

taking down the offending posts. They

19:29

did it urgently because they understood that

19:31

this is a matter of not only

19:33

a social media account, but actually a matter of life

19:36

and death, possibly.

19:38

Now, when Marcin reached out to his

19:40

contacts at Twitter, no one responded.

19:43

And Twitter had repeatedly pushed back the

19:45

date on the next trust and safety council

19:47

meeting. First a week, then

19:50

a month. The week before,

19:52

three key members of the council resigned

19:54

because of Musk. In a press

19:57

release, they said,

19:58

it is clear from research evidence. that, contrary

20:01

to claims by Elon Musk, the

20:03

safety and well-being of Twitter's users

20:05

are on the decline.

20:07

They pointed to reports that showed

20:09

a clear spike in hate speech since

20:12

Elon had taken over, particularly

20:14

slurs against black people and gay men, as

20:17

well as a rise in anti-Semitic posts.

20:20

So as Marchand was getting ready for the first

20:22

meeting of what was left of the Trust

20:24

and Safety Council since Elon took over,

20:28

he was anxious. Since Elon

20:30

Musk took over the leadership of

20:32

Twitter, he has been very clear on

20:34

the fact that the Trust and Safety

20:36

Council was

20:37

about to be reformed. Exactly

20:40

how, we didn't know initially.

20:43

But less than an hour before the meeting... We

20:47

got an email saying that the meeting was canceled,

20:50

Trust and Safety Council was dissolved.

20:52

We were not prepared to have this

20:54

drastic turnover in the relation

20:57

with Twitter. And it also worries

20:59

us because the activists that we work with,

21:01

they are still using Twitter as one of

21:03

their main platforms for advocacy,

21:06

for coordination and for organizing.

21:10

By the end of the following week,

21:12

almost everyone Marchand had worked

21:14

with at Twitter was gone.

21:18

Elon was rapidly removing the guardrails

21:20

that kept users safe on Twitter. This,

21:24

to Elon, was what a free and open town

21:26

square should look like. But

21:28

suddenly, when he...

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23:48

The Twitter account ElonJet

23:50

had bothered Elon for years. ElonJet,

23:53

as the name implies, tracked the

23:55

comings and goings of Elon Musk's personal

23:58

jet. It was run by

23:59

a man named John Musk.

23:59

by a 20-year-old college student named

24:02

Jack Sweeney,

24:03

who was a big fan of Elon's. And

24:05

the account was a big hit with other fans

24:07

of Elon's. But Elon

24:09

hated it so much, he'd once even

24:12

tried to pay the kid who ran it $5,000 to

24:15

take it down.

24:16

It was sort of a high-profile account and one that had

24:18

interacted with Elon and also directly

24:22

seemed to be about him.

24:24

BuzzFeed senior tech reporter Katie

24:26

Notopoulos was at home on the morning of December

24:28

14th doing what any good internet

24:30

culture writer would, scrolling

24:33

through Twitter.

24:33

I am on Twitter all day.

24:36

I check it, you know, right

24:38

when I wake up and it's like the last thing I look

24:40

at before I go to bed, which I don't recommend anyone

24:42

does that.

24:43

She noticed a bunch of tweets claiming that Elon

24:46

Musk had suspended the account of Elon

24:48

Jett. He would prefer it not

24:50

to exist. Here's this guy who puts

24:52

himself out there as being

24:54

so pro-environment with electric cars,

24:57

but meanwhile he's flying all over the place in this

24:59

private jet, which is not good for the environment.

25:02

Elon Jett had more than a half a million

25:04

followers. People are just obsessed with

25:07

Elon Musk and what he's up to. The

25:09

flight information it shared was publicly

25:11

available. The FAA requires that

25:14

aircraft broadcast their location for safety

25:16

reasons, and that information is regularly

25:18

published by people with compatible radio

25:20

receivers. And Elon

25:23

had made a big deal when he bought Twitter

25:25

that he would not ban the account. My

25:27

commitment to free speech extends even

25:30

to not banning the account following my plane,

25:32

even though that is a direct personal safety

25:35

risk.

25:37

Now

25:37

he was doing exactly what he said he

25:40

wouldn't. Any account doxing

25:42

real-time location info of anyone

25:44

will be suspended, as it is a physical

25:46

safety violation.

25:48

This includes posting links to sites with

25:50

real-time location info. This

25:53

was kind of what's going on. This is sort of out

25:55

of nowhere. Elon was sharing a

25:57

brand new Twitter policy. who

26:00

would seem to not care very much about doxxing

26:02

or safety in the past, was now

26:04

drawing a hard line.

26:07

30 minutes later, he tweeted, why?

26:10

Last night, car carrying Lil X

26:12

in LA was followed by Crazy Stalker,

26:15

thinking it was me, who later blocked

26:17

car from moving and climbed onto hood. Lil

26:20

X was Elon's two-year-old son. Elon

26:24

followed up with a video a member of his security

26:26

team shot. It showed a young man

26:28

sitting in a white Hyundai holding up his phone.

26:31

He wore a black hoodie with the hood pulled

26:34

tight around his head and a black face mask

26:36

obscuring his identity.

26:38

Anyone recognize this person or car?

26:40

Elon was

26:43

understandably freaked out. His

26:45

family had been in danger, and

26:47

he was suggesting the stalker found out

26:49

where his son was by knowing

26:52

where his jet was. So

26:54

he responded unilaterally by

26:56

banning Elon jet from Twitter

26:58

and changing Twitter policy to justify

27:01

his ban. It was one

27:03

more thing in what

27:06

felt like a chain of things,

27:09

making it seem like the inmates were running the asylum.

27:11

He could kind of control things. He could suspend

27:13

people. He could change the rules on the fly.

27:17

Elon quickly banned other accounts

27:19

that tracked flights. And after

27:21

Elon jet popped up on Twitter rival

27:23

Mastodon, Twitter blocked all

27:26

links to that site server. Then

27:29

Twitter announced a policy banning links

27:31

to any outside social media platforms.

27:35

Reporters were asking lots of questions,

27:38

including, how exactly

27:40

was an account that shared publicly available

27:42

flight information considered to be doxxing?

27:46

The next day, Katie got a shocking

27:49

text in a tech reporter group chat. Oh

27:51

my God, my Twitter account has just been suspended.

27:55

The text was from reporter Ryan

27:57

Mack, who had been covering Elon's Twitter

27:59

takeover. for The New York Times. And

28:02

so, you know, we went and looked at his and

28:04

we were like, oh, my God, it's gone. And

28:06

it wasn't just him. Names of other

28:09

journalists who had also been permanently suspended

28:11

from Twitter started popping up. And

28:14

presumably,

28:15

most of these people weren't, you know,

28:18

doing the kinds of things that normally would

28:20

get you, like, a permanent suspension,

28:22

like harassing someone, posting

28:26

extreme, horrible

28:28

content of some kind.

28:29

These were well-credential journalists,

28:33

with one thing in common. And

28:35

the fact that these people all had

28:37

been covering Elon Musk and

28:40

Twitter somewhat critically, somewhat adversarially,

28:44

certainly was eyebrow-raising.

28:46

I mean, it seemed like essentially

28:48

he was doing something that he had criticized

28:51

the previous Twitter administration for doing.

28:53

It was alarming and wildly absurd.

28:57

My friends and I and Ryan were all

28:59

sort of joking around. I

29:02

said, oh, we should do a Twitter

29:04

space and, you know, treat us

29:06

as sort of memorial for Ryan because

29:08

RIP, his account is dead.

29:11

Word spread about poor Ryan's

29:13

digital Viking funeral. Ryan

29:16

Mack has deserved to be

29:18

banned for years now.

29:20

And frankly, you know, I think we all

29:23

appreciate that it's finally caught up with him. Ryan

29:26

is, you know, he's funny and, you know,

29:28

and he's a great reporter too. So we

29:30

wanted to sort of like a little bit make fun of him.

29:33

You know, he tweets about his car, leave Ryan

29:35

alone. About soccer, you

29:37

know, and no one wants that.

29:39

He does that thing that they do where he'll

29:41

tweet like, blind me at like seven in the morning.

29:44

I think at this point, you know, 30,000 people

29:47

were tuning in. And then all

29:49

of a sudden, there was a surprise

29:51

guest. One of my friends said, oh my God,

29:53

Elon Musk just joined. I

29:56

clicked on his little profile and, you know, invited

29:58

him to speak.

29:59

Just an hour earlier, Elon

30:02

had made his position clear with a tweet. Same

30:05

doxxing rules apply to journalists

30:07

as to everyone else. They

30:09

posted my exact real-time location,

30:12

basically assassination coordinates,

30:15

in obvious direct violation of Twitter

30:18

terms of service information. Now,

30:21

Katie and her fellow journalists would be able

30:23

to ask Elon about his position directly.

30:26

In that moment, I was a little bit like, uh-oh,

30:30

how do I navigate this? Just real

30:32

quick, Elon, thank you for joining.

30:35

I am hoping that you can

30:38

give a little more context

30:40

about what has happened. I

30:43

wasn't sure if he would accept or not. And

30:45

lo and behold, all of a sudden, his little icon

30:48

bubble came up to the speaker's list.

30:50

Yeah, as

30:53

I'm sure everyone who's been doxxing

30:56

would agree, you know, showing

30:59

real-time information about

31:01

somebody's location is inappropriate.

31:04

Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell,

31:07

one of the suspended journalists who still

31:09

managed to log on, pushed back.

31:11

I mean, you're suggesting that we're

31:14

sharing your address, which is

31:17

not true. And you're suggesting

31:19

that we're posting...

31:22

We never, I never

31:24

posted your address. You posted a link

31:26

to the address? We posted

31:28

a link. In the course

31:31

of reporting about Elon Jet, we posted

31:33

links to Elon Jet, which are now not

31:36

online and now banned on Twitter.

31:39

And using, you know, we have to acknowledge

31:42

using the same exact link

31:44

blocking technique that you have criticized

31:47

as part of the Hunter Biden

31:49

New York Post story in 2020. So what

31:51

is different here and there?

31:54

It's no more acceptable for me, for

31:57

you than it is for me. Same thing.

31:59

So anyway. So it's unacceptable

32:02

what you're doing? No. What,

32:05

your docs, you get suspended, end

32:07

of story, that's it. As

32:10

Katie tried to get out a question about Elon

32:12

making these decisions himself, she

32:15

noticed that he had gone quiet.

32:17

I think Elon

32:19

has a laugh.

32:22

The reporters continued chatting for about 30 minutes,

32:25

but then the space went dark. All

32:27

of a sudden, abruptly on my phone,

32:30

the screen went black

32:32

and the space cut out completely.

32:34

I saw all these people tweeting at me,

32:37

what happened? My space just cut out. Someone

32:39

at Twitter had shut spaces down. Most

32:43

people had a guess who had ordered that.

32:45

So it really just felt like, okay, this really

32:47

is just a platform being ruled by a dictator

32:50

who does things on his own whim.

32:53

Twitter had always had its challenges of

32:55

deciding where the lines should be drawn between

32:58

free speech and hate speech, between transparency

33:01

and privacy. But it had

33:03

never been run by decree.

33:05

One single individual making snap decisions,

33:08

turning on and off features, personally

33:10

banning journalists when he didn't like

33:12

what they had to say. Even

33:15

some of his longtime allies were now questioning

33:18

the lines he was crossing.

33:19

I think it was a bad decision. And I think that

33:22

it represented,

33:27

the least generous statement would be that it represents

33:30

deep hypocrisy.

33:31

Elon was a frequent topic of discussion

33:34

and adoration on the All In podcast

33:36

with Chamath Palahippatea, Jason

33:39

Calacanis, David Sacks and David Friedberg.

33:42

And Friedberg and Palahippatea

33:44

had a lot to say. And

33:46

then he came in and did exactly what the old regime did, which

33:49

is that he took the rules and he took the quote

33:51

moderation policies and he found a way to use

33:54

them to make some editorialized decisions

33:56

that he thought was appropriate.

33:59

world that can figure out Twitter. It's

34:02

probably Elon. But man

34:05

has he taken on just a gargantuan

34:07

battle. And increasingly

34:10

I am NOT a fan of this battle and

34:12

I'll tell you why. This is a man

34:15

who has essentially proven

34:17

that he can bend the laws of physics on

34:19

behalf of humanity. He's done it twice. Once

34:22

in electric cars and once in rocketry.

34:25

The problem is that the realm of decision making

34:28

at Twitter has nothing to do with the laws

34:29

of physics and is governed by emotions

34:33

and psychology. In which there is

34:36

no canonically right answer. And so

34:38

he's quickly finding out that half the population

34:40

will always find fault with him no

34:43

matter what he does. Just

34:45

six weeks earlier the all-in crew had

34:47

almost messianic visions for what

34:49

Elon was going to do with Twitter. Now

34:53

even they were ready for an end to this chaos.

34:56

And so I think that hopefully

34:59

he

34:59

gets all this shit under control over there.

35:02

He finds a good executive team. I

35:05

would like to see him

35:06

get back to landing rockets on

35:08

barges, getting to Mars. Let's

35:11

get it. I mean, look, you got a point.

35:15

I mean, look, you got a point. Elon backtracked.

35:18

He un-banned the journalists' accounts. He

35:21

tweaked the policy banning links to Mastodon,

35:23

the rival social media platform, so

35:25

it only applied to bots. He

35:28

restored Twitter spaces and he

35:30

more or less promised that any time

35:32

there was a tough decision on Twitter, he

35:35

would post a Twitter poll and let the people

35:37

decide. And then

35:40

he did just that. From

35:42

Qatar, where he'd spent the day watching

35:45

the thrilling World Cup final in a skybox

35:47

with Jared Kushner, he

35:49

posted a new poll. Should

35:52

I step down as head of Twitter?

35:54

I will abide by the results of this poll. Yes?

35:58

No. It

36:00

was the wee hours of the morning in Qatar. Elon

36:03

probably should have been asleep, but here

36:06

he was watching the yeses take

36:08

the lead. As the saying

36:10

goes, be careful what you wish

36:13

as you might get it. The

36:15

question is not finding a CEO. The

36:18

question is finding a CEO who can

36:20

keep Twitter alive.

36:23

When a user volunteered to take over

36:25

as CEO for no salary,

36:27

Elon tweeted back,

36:29

you must like pain a lot. One

36:32

catch, you have to invest your life savings

36:34

in Twitter. And it has been in the fast

36:36

lane to bankruptcy since May. Still

36:39

want the job?

36:42

Maybe it was the late hour, the jet

36:44

lag, or the accumulation of self-inflicted

36:46

wounds, but Elon seemed

36:49

like he had possibly reached a breaking

36:51

point. When the poll closed, 58%

36:54

of voters were

36:56

asking Elon to step down. But

37:00

Elon didn't respond. He was

37:02

uncharacteristically quiet.

37:06

Two days later, he joined another Twitter

37:08

spaces. He sounded tired

37:11

and frustrated. Well, bear in

37:13

mind, like, you know, the acquisition

37:15

only closed like six weeks ago, ish.

37:18

So this is probably like the biggest amount

37:20

of change that has happened in

37:22

an acquisition, possibly in history.

37:25

He admitted that some of his actions, like

37:28

banning links to rival sites, had

37:30

been a mistake. Can people post

37:33

Mastodon now? Yeah, fucking

37:35

post Mastodon will goddamn be long. I don't

37:37

care. And when a user asked

37:39

him about free speech directly, he

37:41

didn't launch into his usual ideological

37:44

talking points. Well, I mean, free

37:46

speech, let me tell you that if somebody's

37:48

got to pay the servers, okay? So

37:51

the speech is going to cost at least $8. Because

37:55

otherwise, how do we pay the frigging

37:57

server bill?

37:58

You know, there's

38:01

like a billion and a half-ish,

38:04

you know, of all in server-related

38:07

costs. The job

38:09

was hard. Running Twitter

38:11

cost money, and the stakes

38:13

were high. In the past,

38:16

pushing companies to the edge of disaster had

38:18

been the fuel that drove him. It

38:20

had worked when Tesla flirted with bankruptcy

38:22

and SpaceX launched rockets that exploded

38:25

after takeoff. But running

38:27

Twitter seemed to have gotten

38:29

the best of him. This company

38:31

is like basically you're

38:34

in a plane that is headed

38:36

towards the ground at high speed

38:38

with the engines on fire

38:41

and the controls don't work. Never

38:43

mind that Elon was the one who'd set

38:45

the plane on fire. He

38:47

didn't seem to be able to stop pouring gasoline

38:50

on it. Two days after

38:52

users voted for him to resign in his poll,

38:55

Elon finally wrote a reply. I

38:58

will resign as CEO as

39:00

soon as I find someone foolish enough to

39:02

take the job. But

39:06

who would he choose? Or perhaps

39:08

the better

39:08

question was, would

39:10

he even choose anyone at all? People

39:13

were like, my man is paying $44 billion

39:17

just to like get his tweets boosted. My

39:19

dog is the CEO. OK. He's a

39:21

great dog. That's on

39:23

the next and final episode

39:26

of Flipping the Bird.

39:34

Hey, Prime members, you can listen to episodes of

39:36

Flipping the Bird, Elon versus Twitter

39:39

ad free on Amazon Music. Download

39:41

the Amazon Music app today. Or

39:43

you can listen ad free with Wondery Plus

39:45

in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell

39:48

us about yourself by completing a short survey at

39:50

Wondery.com slash survey.

39:55

From Wondery, this is episode five

39:57

of six of Flipping the Bird.

40:00

versus Twitter. I'm your host

40:02

David Brown. Austin Rackless wrote this

40:04

story. Our producers are Nika

40:06

Singh and Dave Schilling. Julia

40:09

Lowry Henderson and Karen Lowe are our

40:11

senior producers. Reporting by Emily

40:13

Corwin. Production assistance by Emily

40:16

Locke and Mariah Dennis. Fact-checking

40:18

by Nawal Anjani. Consultant

40:21

is Kurt Wagner, Bloomberg journalist and author

40:23

of an upcoming book about Twitter and Elon

40:25

Musk. Sound design by Kyle

40:27

Randall. Music supervisor is

40:29

Scott Velasquez for Freesound Sync.

40:32

Senior managing producer is Latha Pandya.

40:35

Managing producer is Olivia Weber. Coordinating

40:38

producer is Heather Beloga. Executive

40:40

producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman,

40:43

George Lavender, Marshall Louie and

40:45

Jen Sargent for Wondering.

41:06

You're

41:06

about to hear a preview of Business Movers

41:08

Becoming Nike. Follow Business Movers

41:10

Becoming Nike on Amazon Music or wherever

41:13

you get your podcasts. You can listen early

41:15

and ad-free by subscribing to Wondery Plus in

41:17

Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app.

41:34

For decades, Nike has been the world's

41:36

biggest sports apparel business. Its famous

41:38

swoosh logo has been worn by many of sports

41:41

greatest names including Tiger Woods, Cristiano

41:43

Ronaldo, Serena Williams and Michael

41:46

Jordan.

41:46

But it wasn't always so. The now

41:49

world-famous brand began in 1964 as

41:52

a small importer out of Portland, Oregon called

41:54

Blue Ribbon Sports. Blue Ribbon

41:56

was set up by Phil Knight, an accountant with

41:58

one great passion in life.

41:59

Running.

42:01

Phil wanted athletes like him to have the best

42:03

running shoes, built for comfort and speed

42:05

with the durability to last hundreds of miles.

42:08

And Phil wanted to be the man to supply them. But

42:10

he did not have a background in business. Still,

42:13

he knew a thing or two about running. So

42:15

he approached blue ribbon sports the same way

42:17

he did a race. When he lined up on the

42:19

starting line, Phil started out with a plan.

42:22

In some races, he would take his time and

42:24

pace himself. In other races, he

42:26

would try to gain an early lead. But

42:28

often, as the race progressed, he would have

42:30

to react to what the other runners around him did

42:33

and change his plan on the fly. Sometimes

42:35

he made the right choice and won.

42:37

Sometimes he did not.

42:39

The same was true with Phil's early professional

42:42

career.

42:42

He began blue ribbon sports with a plan to

42:45

sell Onitsuka shoes in the US until

42:47

blue ribbon and Onitsuka dominated the market.

42:50

But Phil was forced to change course in response

42:52

to the other athletes in the race. This

42:54

is the first in our four-part series on Phil

42:56

Knight and Nike. The crazy idea.