0:00

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0:02

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0:05

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0:19

Jim Redman's job at Twitter

0:22

included incident management. He

0:24

helped the site handle things when a big moment

0:26

happened. Now, in the

0:28

days following Elon Musk's acquisition,

0:31

Twitter itself was the incident, and

0:34

Jim had no way to manage it. It

0:37

does kind of remind me of just seeing storm clouds

0:39

on the horizon, knowing that something's coming.

0:41

We just don't know how bad it's going to be yet. Jim

0:45

and his more than 7,000 fellow employees

0:48

were staring up at the sky, waiting

0:50

for the storm to roll in. The

0:52

rumor mill was pretty strong. People understood

0:54

pretty well that, yeah, this is going to happen probably today.

0:57

He went into the cave, the windowless

1:00

room where he and his colleagues kept the site

1:02

going. But it was hard to focus.

1:05

There were a lot of people who were kind of wandering around, checking

1:07

in on the friends they had made, the people they had worked with,

1:10

and exchanging contact information.

1:11

By the afternoon,

1:14

Twitter employees started gathering in a

1:16

space called The Lodge. It

1:18

was an actual 200-year-old homesteader

1:21

cabin from Montana that Twitter's

1:23

architects had found on Craigslist and

1:25

integrated into the fifth floor. It

1:27

was one of the most popular spaces in HQ. Employees

1:31

could gather in booths to work on projects together,

1:33

or when they got bored, could take a break and

1:35

watch sports on the large screen mounted on

1:37

the wall. But today...

1:41

People are sitting around,

1:41

having a snack, maybe having

1:44

something to drink, just kind of being

1:46

as social as possible. And

1:53

then, Jim

1:55

and the other Twitter employees who were gathered

1:57

in The Lodge started getting the

1:59

E-mail. email. The

2:22

email read, In an effort to place

2:24

Twitter on a healthy path, we will

2:26

go through the difficult process of reducing

2:29

our global workforce. By

2:31

9am PST on

2:33

Friday, November 4th, everyone will

2:35

receive an individual email with the subject

2:37

line, Your role at Twitter.

2:41

It was signed simply, Twitter.

2:45

That email was terrifying. Before

2:48

long, security guards swept through Twitter

2:50

headquarters, demanding everyone clear

2:53

the building immediately. Elon

2:56

and his advisors were worried that a laid off employee

2:58

might try some kind of sabotage against

3:00

the company. Jim and the others

3:03

in the lodge gathered their belongings and

3:05

headed downstairs, looking around the lobby,

3:08

knowing it might be for the last time.

3:13

Everyone had to spend one more night

3:14

awaiting their fate. I

3:19

literally woke up to the email. The

3:21

sound went off on my phone. Nia

3:24

was in South Carolina at her mom's

3:26

house that morning. A lot of us that

3:28

worked in sales, we were afraid

3:30

of losing our jobs because

3:32

we knew that he wasn't the

3:34

biggest fan of the ads model

3:37

and just of ads in general. You

3:39

know who she means by he. 90% of

3:43

Twitter's revenue was from ads, and

3:46

Nia was a good seller, making her targets

3:48

quarter after quarter. I brought in

3:50

a million dollars in revenue. A

3:53

million dollars just in the last

3:55

year.

3:57

enough.

4:01

I woke up to the email and it was like your

4:03

role at Twitter.

4:05

Naya finished reading the email

4:07

and went into her mom's room.

4:09

She says, do you still have a job? And

4:12

I said no. Employees

4:15

bracing for getting fired started posting

4:17

on Slack with the salute emoji.

4:20

Person after person, just thousands upon

4:22

thousands of salute emoji, just filling the channel.

4:25

People were just kind of expressing their appreciation

4:28

for each other. You know, I respect you. I

4:31

thank you for your service and all you've done for us. For

4:33

me personally and for the company and for our team.

4:36

It was a bit heartbreaking, but also a bit heartening,

4:39

if that makes any sense. Some

4:42

went on Twitter to say their goodbyes. Well,

4:45

my entire team just got locked out. Love

4:47

you all my little birds. The dream

4:49

job and the dream team. Grateful to

4:51

have been on this ride. Bird gang forever,

4:54

y'all.

4:55

Some users responded with a photo of

4:57

Twitter's iconic bird, but upside

4:59

down and with the words RIP

5:02

Twitter above. The

5:04

layoffs spread across the people who

5:06

moderated the content, wrote the code

5:08

that kept the site running, who sold the

5:11

ads that paid the bills. Many

5:13

employees didn't even get an email confirming

5:16

they'd been let go before they were

5:18

simply locked out of their work accounts. By

5:22

the day's end, 3700

5:24

employees, half of Twitter's

5:26

entire workforce,

5:28

were let go in a single day.

5:33

Jim Redmond was not fired

5:36

that day. I was a bit relieved

5:38

that I wasn't initially laid off. I was

5:40

also, I was sad for the

5:42

people who had been let go because their lives have

5:44

been upended very, very abruptly. When

5:47

I found out about specific people, I was angry

5:49

because this is a good engineer and you're letting them go

5:51

for some, for some terrible

5:53

reason that you're not telling us. I

5:56

would think of this as like the

5:58

aftermath of a battle.

5:59

like seeing who survived, who's

6:02

still around, who should we mourn?

6:06

Jim was one of the employees left behind,

6:09

part of the new regime with the job

6:12

of keeping Twitter going. Arguably,

6:16

a fate worse than being fired.

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to business work. And this is

8:02

Flipping the Bird, Elon vs

8:04

Twitter. This is episode 4, extremely

8:08

hardcore.

8:31

Nearly everyone expected lots of people

8:33

would lose their jobs at Twitter. In

8:36

a tweet on the day of the mass layoffs, Elon

8:38

tried to explain this inevitability. Regarding

8:42

Twitter's reduction in force, unfortunately

8:44

there is no choice when the company is losing

8:46

over $4 million a day. Everyone

8:49

exited was offered three months of severance,

8:52

which is 50% more than legally required.

8:55

Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had advocated

8:58

for Elon to get involved with Twitter. Now,

9:01

he put the blame for the carnage on

9:03

himself. I own

9:05

the responsibility for why everyone is

9:08

in this situation. I grew

9:10

the company's size too quickly. I

9:12

apologize for that.

9:14

Zoe Shiffer of Platformer has been

9:16

one of the reporters who broke many of the twists

9:19

and turns of Elon's takeover of Twitter.

9:22

There was no doubt in really anyone's mind

9:24

that the company needed to lay off

9:26

a sizable portion of the staff.

9:28

Twitter had been losing money for years. On

9:31

top of that, Elon had grossly

9:33

overpaid at $44 billion, and

9:36

the interest on the loans to buy the company

9:38

at that inflated price was astronomical.

9:42

More than a billion dollars annually that

9:44

Twitter would have to pay. Elon

9:48

had to cut costs, so

9:50

he took a massive ax and

9:53

swung it through Twitter's workforce. But

9:56

the size, speed, and the way

9:58

it went down... Well, it

10:00

didn't have to be that way. The

10:03

way that Elon Musk conducted

10:05

the layoffs that was so problematic,

10:09

it was haphazard.

10:09

Elon Musk

10:12

might have saved himself a whole lot of payroll

10:14

costs, but he also put

10:16

the site at risk.

10:17

You had entire critical

10:19

engineering themes that had one

10:23

to two people, some of them had no people

10:25

on them overnight.

10:26

One of the biggest

10:28

shocks to Twitter's employees was that

10:30

Elon didn't seem to have much of a plan

10:32

for how to run the company with half the people.

10:35

And if he did, well, the tweets

10:38

hadn't heard anything about it. Communication

10:41

at Twitter was basically non-existent.

10:44

Sasha Solomon was one of the remaining.

10:47

She worked in infrastructure, one of those

10:49

key divisions that keeps Twitter functioning for

10:51

its hundreds of millions of users.

10:53

It was like basically my entire team

10:56

was gone and a bunch of teams that were

10:58

related to my team were also gone. Most

11:00

of infrastructure was just completely gutted. I

11:03

was one of two managers left, myself

11:05

and the other person were kept

11:07

because we used to be engineers before,

11:10

so we were technical enough to remain.

11:13

Sasha figured she was kept on for her

11:15

engineering skills, but she

11:17

didn't even know who she reported to now or

11:20

what she was expected to be doing. It

11:22

was like, I hear Elon's going to work on this, like

11:24

he wants us to work on this project. Nothing's

11:26

planned for us, just kind of like at his whim, he'll

11:28

like tweet a thing and then everyone's like, we got to work on

11:31

that now because he tweeted it.

11:34

Twitter rank and file employees who

11:36

were left at the company who wanted to understand

11:38

what Elon's plans were. They

11:40

were directed to an unexpected source

11:42

of information,

11:44

a podcast. Some

11:47

of Elon's closest friends in Silicon Valley

11:49

had started a tech bro hangout pod

11:51

during the pandemic called the All In

11:53

podcast with Chamath Paliapatiya,

11:56

Jason Calacanis, David Sacks

11:58

and David Friedberg. Two of

12:00

the four hosts, Jason Calacanis

12:02

and David Sachs, were part of Elon's

12:05

inner circle at Twitter. And as the

12:07

layoff drama unfolded, All

12:09

In became a place where they would share some

12:11

of what was happening behind the scenes,

12:14

where the insiders hung out. So

12:16

I guess we can talk about it now. Elon

12:18

has closed the deal. I guess we can

12:20

talk about it now. In an episode

12:22

recorded hours after the deal had closed,

12:25

Jason and David offered some clear insight

12:27

into what they and Elon were thinking

12:30

and professed an almost messianic faith

12:32

in Elon's ability to lead Twitter to

12:35

a new promised land. What's

12:37

cool about what Elon is doing is he's starting

12:39

with this mission

12:40

of restoring Twitter to being a

12:43

free speech platform, of being the town

12:45

square it was always meant to be. There's

12:47

no doubt that I think Elon

12:50

can turn this around pretty quickly and

12:53

to make it massively profitable, I

12:55

think, and clean up the bot problem very

12:57

quickly. This isn't rocket

13:00

science and Elon's done rocket science.

13:02

So I think he's going to figure it out. To

13:05

Elon's inner circle, he was a

13:07

level 99 mage who had

13:09

conquered space, time and electricity.

13:13

As far as their opinions on how things worked

13:15

at old Twitter, well, it was no

13:17

secret that Elon and his advisors

13:20

didn't believe Twitter's workforce was particularly

13:22

hardcore. I'm

13:24

looking forward to some tofu salads and

13:27

meditation. Namaste. Literally,

13:30

I think 8,000 square feet is meditation

13:32

rooms that haven't been used in five years. The

13:35

Oatly has left the building. Let's just leave it

13:37

at that.

13:39

Twitter employees were dealing with the aftermath

13:41

of a mass layoff event and

13:43

two of Elon's closest advisors were

13:46

gleefully mocking them. But

13:50

there were a growing number of Twitter employees who

13:52

seized on the opportunity to get on board

13:54

with Elon and embrace their new boss.

13:57

No one quite as publicly as product

13:59

manager.

13:59

Esther Crawford. On

14:02

November 2nd, Esther tweeted a photo

14:04

of herself in a sleeping bag with an eye

14:06

mask for added effect. The

14:09

message?

14:10

When your team is pushing round the clock to make

14:12

deadlines,

14:13

sometimes you hashtag sleep

14:15

where you work. Esther

14:18

was working on a high value project, one

14:20

that Elon had tasked her with launching.

14:23

The photo was a not so subtle signal

14:25

that she was all in. To

14:28

Sasha, Esther's post felt

14:30

like it went beyond just poor

14:32

work-life balance. It also feels

14:34

very performative. I mean, I didn't work with Esther, but

14:37

a few people may be similar to Esther that you're like, wow,

14:39

I thought I kind of like knew you or

14:41

like knew what you were about. And they're kind of just like

14:43

flipping, I don't know, like backstabbing to

14:45

like climb the little corporate ladder.

14:48

Jim Ruttman saw it too. Aside

14:50

from Esther, a handful of other employees

14:52

were fawning over Elon on slag,

14:54

defending the layoffs and posing for selfies

14:57

with him around the office. I think a

14:59

lot of the people who chose to be very

15:02

vocally pro-Elon, they

15:04

wanted his attention. They wanted

15:06

that kind of afterglow

15:09

basking in the in the lights

15:11

of Elon. Tweeps were

15:13

falling into two camps. Those

15:16

who still saw him as an invader and

15:18

those who were excited about being part of Elon's

15:21

Twitter. But what was

15:24

Elon's Twitter? It didn't matter

15:26

which camp you were in, neither side had

15:28

the answer. Two

15:33

weeks after Elon closed the deal to buy

15:35

Twitter, and a week after Elon

15:37

had decimated the workforce, Jim

15:39

was just going about his business.

15:42

He'd woken up that morning to his first email

15:44

from Twitter's new boss, announcing that work

15:46

from home was over.

15:47

Now Jim heard from him again.

15:51

Elon was holding it all hands in 20

15:53

minutes.

15:59

This was the first time Elon

16:02

was addressing his remaining employees

16:04

since buying the company. Anyone

16:07

in HQ that day packed into a large

16:09

meeting room. Jim and the rest of

16:11

the Twitter employees working from home joined

16:14

a live stream. Once

16:16

again,

16:17

Elon strolled in fashionably late.

16:19

We were all waiting and waiting and waiting. About 10

16:22

to 15 minutes after the alleged

16:24

start time, he finally shows up, grabs

16:27

a microphone and is walking around the front of the room.

16:30

Elon began with niceties.

16:33

He told his new employees that he believed

16:35

Twitter could be the town square where

16:37

people exchange ideas and

16:40

where once in a while they change their mind. Then

16:43

he opened it up to questions. Many

16:46

employees wanted to know about what their futures

16:49

would look like. The last seven

16:51

months had upended most everything they

16:53

knew and gutted their company. The

16:56

moderator asked Elon how he was going

16:58

to bring people together and get everyone focused

17:00

on the big vision. I can tell

17:02

you philosophically what works at SpaceX

17:05

and Tesla is people being in the office

17:07

and being hardcore. And it's

17:10

one of our people who can get a tremendous amount done

17:13

in that situation.

17:15

It was a Twitter all hands, but Elon

17:18

just kept right on talking about Tesla

17:21

and SpaceX.

17:23

He credited Tesla's AI autopilot

17:26

team with just 150 engineers

17:28

for outperforming 3000 person teams.

17:31

He acknowledged that Tesla and SpaceX

17:33

were companies that manufacture hardware

17:36

but claimed their excellent software made

17:38

him fully understand what Twitter needed.

17:42

And Jim heard the message of what, according

17:44

to Elon, Twitter needed. We

17:46

really need to be hardcore. We need to push. We

17:49

need to work really hard to make this work. But

17:52

it wasn't clear what this was. The

17:55

more Elon spoke, the less it

17:57

looked like he had a real plan.

17:59

He said Twitter

18:01

should be more like YouTube or TikTok,

18:04

or that Twitter should offer bank accounts.

18:07

Whatever trust and goodwill still existed

18:09

among Twitter ranks was

18:11

quickly crumbling.

18:14

Jim tweeted out his frustration. I'm

18:16

not sure I've ever been to a worse meeting than

18:18

this rambling, unfocused, bullshit

18:21

buffet.

18:22

One employee brought the conversation

18:24

back to return to office. Elon

18:27

had sent a middle-of-the-night email the night before,

18:30

killing work from home.

18:31

Now the employee wanted to know why. Elon

18:34

was asking for this if teams are spread

18:36

out around the globe. Elon

18:39

just doubled down on the demand. The

18:41

person who asked the question basically

18:43

interrupted him to say, that is not an answer

18:45

to my question. Even if people return to the

18:47

office, the offices are separate offices. We

18:50

won't be in person anyways. You could

18:52

tell that this annoyed him very, very much.

18:55

Yes, but you can still maximize the amount of impressing

18:57

activity. Tesla's not in one place

18:59

either. But, you know,

19:01

it's basically if

19:03

you can't show up in an office and you do

19:05

not show up at the office, resignation

19:08

accepted. End of story.

19:12

It was like flipping a switch. It went from

19:13

easygoing, conversational

19:16

to, you know, it's a very stark

19:18

change and very sudden. I

19:21

don't know that I'd go so far as to say it's like Dr. Jekyll

19:23

and Mr. Hyde. Because that seemed

19:25

like it would be a lot more gradual of a change. This

19:28

was

19:29

very, very, very sudden. It was

19:31

this brand new person out of nowhere, just materialized

19:35

and was answering questions. The

19:39

all hands ended and the employees

19:41

returned to work. But

19:44

it wasn't yet clear what they should

19:46

be prioritizing. Elon

19:48

had cut costs in the form of layoffs. Now, he

19:52

needed to figure out how Twitter would make

19:54

more money. Elon

19:56

and his team had one priority over everything

19:59

else.

19:59

charging users to get verified.

20:04

And pretty soon, the entire

20:06

site would be singing the

20:08

Twitter Blues.

20:12

Lou Pearlman seemed like the ultimate American success story.

20:17

A kid from Queens who became a self-made millionaire and pop culture

20:19

icon. He created two of the biggest boy bands on the

20:21

planet. NSYNC

20:24

and the Backstreet Boys, and then squeezed them

20:26

for every penny. Stay tuned until

20:28

the end of this episode to hear a preview of Scamfluencers,

20:32

So Many Strings Attached.

20:42

As Elon Musk entered his second week as the owner of Twitter, the

20:48

pressure

20:48

was on to make money. And his plan was to

20:50

get people to pay $8 a month for Twitter's most valuable

20:54

status symbol, the blue check mark. A

20:58

check mark on a Twitter account meant the account

21:01

holder had proved that they

21:03

were the companies or people they said they were. It

21:06

could also be a sign that the person behind the account had

21:08

a better account.

21:10

It could also be a sign that the person behind the account mattered.

21:14

Elon's friends and advisors were all in

21:16

on the idea of getting people

21:18

to pay for this privilege, as they discussed

21:20

on the All In podcast. If

21:23

people are opting in to putting themselves

21:25

into the top class of verified users, well

21:27

that's a revenue stream, right? And so all

21:29

of a sudden, you know, I don't know how many millions

21:31

of people would instantly say, I'll pay for this

21:34

for five or ten bucks a month to be verified.

21:36

I feel like

21:38

evening the playing field while also

21:40

bumping up Twitter's revenue and critically

21:43

shifting it away from being so dependent

21:46

on ads.

21:47

He

21:50

put the fear of God in employees. He was saying

21:52

things like, if this doesn't roll out on schedule, everyone's

21:54

fired.

21:55

The

22:00

trust and safety team wrote up this seven

22:03

page document laying out all of the risks

22:05

for allowing people to pay for verification.

22:08

Things like people will impersonate

22:10

brands and that'll create PR disasters

22:12

for those brands. People will impersonate world

22:14

leaders and spread misinformation and that will

22:16

be very bad for everyone.

22:18

But Elon forged ahead.

22:22

Two weeks after Elon's takeover, Twitter

22:24

Blue 2.0 was released.

22:26

Almost everything that employees were

22:28

very nervous about happened and it happened within

22:30

like 48 hours of launch. Immediately,

22:34

users' timelines were filled with celebrity

22:36

impostors. Someone pretending

22:38

to be LeBron James demanded a trade

22:41

to another team. A fake Lockheed

22:43

Martin announced they would stop selling weapons

22:45

to the United States.

22:48

Sean Morrow, a reporter

22:50

and activist with an odd sense of humor, was

22:53

sitting on Amtrak scrolling through Twitter.

22:56

I was watching people making accounts

22:58

of, you know, Mario flipping the bird

23:00

or Joe Biden saying he can

23:03

do lewd acts or other

23:05

just completely absurd things. And I was

23:07

like, oh, that's kind of funny. I should maybe do something

23:10

along those lines. I considered

23:12

some absurd things like saying I'm Subway

23:15

and saying our footlongs are now 14 inches

23:18

long or that I'm Ted Danson

23:20

and that Becker is coming back on the air. Something

23:23

super silly.

23:24

But then he realized something. I

23:26

thought to myself there's possibly

23:29

real power here. And

23:31

I wanted to do something that would have an impact.

23:34

He decided to take aim at the high cost

23:36

of pharmaceuticals. He picked

23:38

his target, Eli Lilly, one

23:41

of the top insulin producers in the United

23:43

States. Now, all

23:45

he needed was a blue checkmark. I

23:48

found that to verify an account,

23:50

you need to have an account that lasted over a certain amount

23:52

of days. But Sean had that. He

23:55

paid his $8 and got to work,

23:57

if you can call it that. It was shockingly.

23:59

easy to set up an account that looked just

24:02

like Eli Lilly's real account. I

24:04

go to Eli Lilly's own Twitter. I do a little

24:06

right click, download their logo, the

24:09

profile picture, download their header

24:11

image. He uploaded them to his

24:13

imposter account and filled out the bio.

24:16

Pharmaceutical company. But then I also

24:18

write satire in all caps a bunch

24:20

of times. I set the location

24:22

to Parity City. Now

24:25

to tweet. He knew exactly what

24:27

he needed to do to cause Eli Lilly

24:29

maximum

24:29

embarrassment. Write something that sounds

24:32

enough like corporate speak and is promising

24:34

to do something good. If

24:37

you're promising to do something good, you're putting the

24:39

company in a position where they have to admit, no,

24:42

we would never do that. He played around

24:44

with it for a few minutes before he landed

24:46

on the perfect phrasing. We

24:48

are excited to announce that insulin is

24:50

free now.

24:52

Which sounds just professional enough to kind

24:54

of be how they would really do it. He

24:56

hit sand and watched it spread.

25:00

You started to see people like Congresswoman

25:02

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Senator

25:05

Bernie Sanders tweeting out, yes,

25:07

insulin should be free.

25:08

That tweet went completely viral

25:11

and Eli Lilly's stock dropped and the

25:13

executives at the company at this big pharma company

25:16

were calling Twitter, begging them

25:18

to take down the tweet.

25:21

It wasn't just that only a few people were

25:23

paying the $8. It was also

25:25

decimating their other existing revenue

25:28

stream. Advertising

25:32

Advertisers had already been fleeing the site since

25:34

the acquisition,

25:35

worried about a rise in misinformation

25:37

and toxic content. Elon

25:40

himself had been alternating between being

25:42

hostile to them and trying to win them

25:44

over. Four

25:46

days after the deal closed, Elon

25:48

had shown up in New York with his mother in

25:51

tow to meet with advertisers. He

25:53

was there to reassure them that Twitter would

25:56

not become a free-for-all hellscape.

25:59

They asked the obvious. obvious question. Would

26:01

Elon reinstate Donald Trump's account?

26:04

Elon immediately began typing on his phone.

26:07

It was a tweet. If I had a dollar

26:10

for every time someone asked me if Trump

26:12

is coming back on this platform, Twitter

26:14

would be minting money. He

26:17

showed it to the room and asked if he should post

26:19

it.

26:20

One of Twitter's ad execs who knew it

26:22

would undo any progress that had been

26:24

made in that meeting, emphatically

26:27

told him, no. Elon

26:30

posted his tweet, as his

26:32

mother and the CEO of one of the most powerful

26:35

ad agencies in the world looked on, and

26:38

then fired his ad exec

26:40

later that week.

26:43

Elon couldn't help but continue to destroy

26:46

the trust he kept asking advertisers

26:48

to have in him. With every

26:50

dick butt meme or masturbation

26:52

joke or outright threat to go nuclear

26:55

on advertisers, he was costing

26:58

himself and Twitter. General

27:01

Mills, General Motors, and

27:03

Audi of America had already paused

27:05

their ads on Twitter. After

27:08

the Twitter blew debacle, more blue

27:10

chip companies joined them.

27:13

Elon had to walk back Twitter blue,

27:16

at least for the moment.

27:18

Elon wasn't listening to the people

27:20

who'd been doing this for a while,

27:23

and sometimes it seemed like he didn't

27:25

even respect them.

27:27

On a Sunday afternoon, just a few days after

27:29

walking back Twitter blue, Elon

27:32

tweeted about the app being quote, super

27:34

slow in many countries.

27:36

App is doing more than 1000 poorly

27:38

batched RPCs

27:40

just to render a home timeline. Twitter

27:44

engineer Eric Fraunhofer was at home scrolling

27:46

through Twitter

27:48

when he saw the tweet. And I looked

27:50

at it for a while, this doesn't make sense. Eric

27:53

disagreed with Elon's assessment. So

27:56

he drafted a reply. I've spent

27:58

around six years working. on Twitter for

28:00

Android and can say this is wrong. But

28:03

then he sat there for a second.

28:06

Eric hit send and went to get a coffee.

28:31

So I grabbed the dog and we walked

28:33

up to Starbucks.

28:35

When he returned,

28:36

Elon had replied to him. Then

28:39

please correct me. What is the right number?

28:43

Twitter is super slow on Android. What

28:45

have you done to fix that? Eric's

28:48

colleagues asked him what he was going to do. I

28:51

think I only have one choice is to reply. I thought

28:54

it was like, hey, this is the time to shine, you

28:56

know, and share a bit about how Twitter works

28:58

and share a bit about Twitter for Android and

29:01

share about like my work and

29:04

the work of my team. I

29:06

think there are three reasons the app is slow.

29:08

First, it's bloated with features that get little

29:11

usage. I continue to engage Elon

29:13

directly and give him information,

29:15

like actual information about how

29:17

Twitter works. Second, we have accumulated

29:20

years of tech debt as we've traded velocity

29:23

and features over perf. Third,

29:25

we spend a lot of time waiting for network responses.

29:29

And I continue to kind of poke fun at some

29:31

of his trolls.

29:31

So the guy who owns Twitter and has

29:34

access to the entire system is wrong, but

29:36

random internet dude is right. You

29:38

know, you are the random internet dude, right?

29:41

I actually helped build this thing.

29:44

Eric put down his phone and went

29:46

to bed. When

29:49

he woke up, he was overwhelmed

29:51

with all the replies, thousands

29:53

and thousands of them. For the

29:55

first time, Eric understood

29:58

what it was like to be a celebrity on Twitter.

29:59

Twitter, what it was like to be Elon

30:02

on the site. It was a rush, and

30:05

he got caught up in the whirlwind of it. The

30:08

exchanges with his boss's fans got

30:10

a bit testy. Ultimately,

30:13

someone said something to the effect of like, why don't

30:15

you guys just take this internal? I've

30:17

been a developer for 20 years, and

30:19

I can tell you that as the domain expert

30:22

here, you should inform your boss privately.

30:25

And my reply was, he knows

30:27

where to find me. Maybe he should ask

30:29

questions

30:29

privately, maybe using Slack

30:32

or email, Shrug emoji. And

30:35

then someone says, oh, that's

30:37

pretty rude. Are you going to take that Elon from

30:39

him? And that's

30:41

when he said, he's fired.

30:45

You know, your heart kind of sinks a little bit. Like

30:47

this is the end of eight years. This

30:49

is how this ride's going to end. A

30:53

few hours later, Eric's access

30:55

to his work computer was turned off. He

30:58

posted the salute emoji on Twitter to signal

31:01

that his time with the company was up.

31:04

Once the adrenaline wore off from publicly

31:07

tangling with one of the world's most powerful people

31:09

and his boss to boot,

31:11

he started to feel some regret.

31:14

I mean, not that tweet, maybe

31:16

been a little less spicy about it. Maybe

31:19

not engage some of the trolls. But

31:23

one thing he didn't regret was

31:26

telling the truth.

31:28

Jim Redmond was watching the

31:30

back and forth play out.

31:32

I was excited to see this whole

31:34

response from him basically explaining in great

31:36

detail why Elon was wrong and

31:39

doing it publicly. I was excited because

31:41

it was someone pushing back on the

31:43

kind of nonsense that was getting pitched

31:45

from the top level. Jim

31:48

liked Eric's tweet and a bunch

31:50

of others that were critical of Elon. When

31:53

he woke up a few days later, he

31:56

was the one flooded with messages and notifications.

31:59

God, you've been fired. What's going on? Are you

32:02

OK? And this was news to me. I did not know anything

32:04

about this. So I checked my

32:06

email and sure enough, I had

32:09

a message from Twitter, HR, saying that I had been fired,

32:12

that my behavior had violated company policy.

32:15

Twitter didn't specify which behavior

32:18

or which policy. I knew

32:20

this was a likelihood of

32:22

being critical of Elon.

32:26

Sasha Solomon was also frustrated by

32:28

Elon's tweet about the slowness of

32:30

the site. He could have talked to anyone about

32:32

how this works and he didn't. So

32:35

I was just like, this is just so ridiculous.

32:38

It's like, you know, he can't be

32:40

bothered to talk to us internally about

32:42

anything, but he's just going to tweet stuff out and,

32:45

you know, bad mouth stuff that my

32:47

team works on. So I was just mad about the whole

32:49

thing. I quote tweeted him and

32:51

said, you did not just lay off almost all

32:53

of infra and then make some sassy remark about

32:55

how we do batching. Did you even

32:57

bother to learn how GraphQL works? You

33:00

don't know what the it does while you're also scrambling

33:02

to rehire folks you laid off. The

33:04

next day, she got an email

33:07

like Jim's. She was fired.

33:09

I tweeted the wall got fired for shitposting,

33:11

followed up by the I

33:14

said it before. And I'll say it again. Kiss my ass, Elon.

33:16

And then the kissy face emoji. Twitter,

33:20

by the way, responded to our questions about

33:22

these terminations. With a poop

33:25

emoji.

33:27

Elon's first two weeks as chief

33:29

twit had been a disaster. Have

33:32

hazard, embarrassing, ineffective.

33:35

The critics reviews were in. Elon

33:38

had cut costs, but if his goal was

33:40

to make money, he needed people to

33:42

help him accomplish that goal. Elon

33:45

decided what he needed from Twitter's

33:47

employees was greater

33:49

commitment and loyalty.

33:52

In the middle of the night on November 16th,

33:55

an email from Elon hit the inboxes

33:57

of all employees.

33:59

Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0

34:03

and succeed in an increasingly competitive

34:05

world, we will need to be extremely

34:07

hardcore. This will mean

34:09

working long hours at high intensity.

34:12

Only exceptional performance will constitute

34:14

a passing grade. If

34:17

you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter,

34:19

please click yes on the link below. Anyone

34:22

who has not done so by 5pm

34:24

ET tomorrow will receive 3 months

34:27

of severance.

34:29

Whatever decision you make, thank

34:31

you for your efforts to make Twitter successful.

34:35

Elon. Employees

34:38

had until the end of the next day to decide

34:41

if they were in or they

34:43

were out.

34:44

If you're trying to rally the troops,

34:48

to me this is just so not the way

34:50

to do it.

34:51

That's

34:54

on the next episode of Flipping

34:56

the Bird.

35:02

Hey Prime Members, you can listen to episodes of Flipping

35:04

the Bird, Elon vs. Twitter, ad

35:07

free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon

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Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself

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by completing a short survey at wondery.com

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slash survey.

35:21

From Wondery, this is episode 4

35:24

of 6 of Flipping the Bird,

35:26

Elon vs. Twitter. I'm

35:29

your host, David Brown. Austin Rackless wrote

35:31

this story. Our producers are Nika

35:33

Singh and Dave Schilling. Julia

35:35

Lowry Henderson and Karen Lowe are our

35:38

senior producers. Reporting by Emily

35:40

Corwin. Production assistance by Emily

35:42

Locke and Mariah Dennis. Fact

35:44

checking by Nawal Anjani. Voice

35:47

acting by Emily Frost. Consultant

35:49

is Kurt Wagner, Bloomberg journalist and author

35:51

of an upcoming book about Twitter and Elon

35:53

Musk. Sound design by Kyle

35:56

Randall. Program supervisor is

35:58

Scott Velasquez.

35:59

on sync. Senior Managing Producer

36:02

is Lutha Pundya. Managing Producer

36:04

is Olivia Weber. Coordinating Producer

36:07

is Heather Baloga. Executive

36:09

Producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman,

36:11

George Lavender, Marshall Louis and

36:14

Jen Sargent.

36:15

For Wondery.

36:34

You're about to hear a preview of Scamfluencers.

36:37

While you're listening, make sure to follow Scamfluencers

36:39

wherever you get your podcasts.

36:48

It's Thanksgiving weekend, 1998. Lance

36:51

Bass and his in-sync bandmates are sitting with

36:53

their manager, Lou Pearlman, in

36:55

a private room at Lowry's Steakhouse.

36:58

Lowry's is in Las Vegas and it's capital

37:00

F fancy with dark wood paneling

37:03

and velvet covered chairs. Lance

37:05

is a sweet looking kid. He has big blue

37:07

eyes and bleached blonde hair. He and the rest

37:10

of the guys are pretty young. They're all still

37:12

in their late teens and early twenties. And

37:15

right now their group, In Sync, is

37:17

one of the biggest bands on the planet. They've

37:20

sold 15 million albums

37:22

and they play sold out stadiums all over

37:24

the world. Tonight, they're

37:26

here to eat, celebrate and

37:28

to receive their first ever paychecks.

37:32

I knew it was bad. I didn't realize

37:34

they were just getting their first paychecks three years in.

37:37

Yeah, I know. It sounds ludicrous. But

37:39

for the past three years, the members of In Sync

37:42

have not been paid. Their hotels,

37:44

transportation and even their meals

37:46

have all been covered by their manager, Lou.

37:49

The only money they've seen is the $35 they're given

37:51

as spending money each day.

37:53

The band is incredibly busy.

37:56

So until recently, this setup

37:58

hasn't actually seemed like a problem. Here's

38:00

how Lance remembers it in an interview with Access

38:03

Hollywood.

38:03

I was 16 years old when we started,

38:05

so I didn't really know how the business worked. So

38:07

we just kind of assumed that,

38:10

oh, you have to work really hard for, you

38:12

know, a couple of years before that

38:14

money starts accumulating and then they just give

38:17

it to you in one big check.

38:18

But lately, they've been asking questions,

38:21

which is probably why Lou set up this elaborate

38:24

dinner to present their checks.