How two bizarre billionaires almost destroyed Twitter

Just over two years ago, Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, tweeted his delight that the company he’d helped to create was being bought by the world’s richest man for $US44 billion ($66 billion). Elon Musk, Dorsey thought, was the answer to Twitter’s problems: a staunch defender of free speech who would also ensure that everyone felt included. “Elon is the singular solution I trust,” Dorsey wrote. “I trust his mission to extend his light of consciousness.”

That statement, as one former Twitter board-member later put it, became “one of the worst-aged Tweets of all time”. In Kurt Wagner’s illuminating and comprehensive book, Battle for the Bird, we’re shown how Musk, chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, almost destroyed Twitter by loading it up with billions of dollars of debt, firing 80 per cent of its staff, damaging its advertising business, and alienating a great number of users.

Even the book’s title is apt. Musk has renamed the social-media company to “X”, killing the famous bird symbol and doing away with well-known terms such as “Tweets”, to the dismay of many users. Former employees tell Wagner that Musk, a billionaire with over 183 million followers, has no appreciation of the average Twitter experience. On buying the company, they say, he “gravitated towards products and features that would fit his own specific needs”. But just as importantly, Battle for the Bird suggests that Dorsey laid the groundwork for Musk by being an indecisive chief executive, becoming bored of running the company, and developing a bizarre infatuation with his successor.

Dorsey co-founded Twitter in 2006 at the age of 29, and helped to oversee its rapid success – 100,000 users within the first year – before being ousted in 2008. But Wagner, a technology journalist for Bloomberg, focuses on the period after Dorsey makes a triumphant return as chief executive in 2015. We see how the CEO, who’d grown up immersed in a “hacker culture”, constantly struggles with being “responsible for deciding what the world could and couldn’t say” on Twitter. He has an “aversion to making decisions”, Wagner writes, with a hands-off management style that infuriates or confuses staff and leads to “a constant stream of second-guessing”. In the end, some of Twitter’s most controversial decisions – whether banning Donald Trump from the platform or ramping up its misinformation labels around Tweets on Covid – are largely made without his involvement.

Dorsey also becomes increasingly weird, leading his entire workforce in group meditation sessions, encouraging them to drink “salt juice”, and asking fellow executives to “sing kumbaya”. By 2018, he’s meditating for two hours a day, fasting all weekend, taking ice baths and disappearing on silent retreats in Myanmar. He gets seriously into bitcoin, believing it will “create world peace”. By 2021, he seems to have become apathetic about Twitter in general, even turning off his camera for video meetings with staff. “Running Twitter,” Wagner suggests, “had become unfun.”

Luckily his fellow billionaire, and friend, Elon Musk has started to express an interest in buying the company, believing that Twitter is clamping down too heavily on free speech. It’s an interest that Dorsey strongly encourages. The book shows how Dorsey’s admiration for Musk bordered on the sycophantic, regularly siding with the Tesla owner when he made stinging criticism of Twitter colleagues. At one point Dorsey even publicly joked about a sexual harassment case that Musk was facing, causing dismay and disgust from Twitter staff.

Whatever the reason, Dorsey must now surely regret his eagerness to have Musk running the place. As soon as he’s made owner, Musk completely changes Twitter. In a bid to save money after borrowing billions of dollars to buy the firm, he fires more than 6000 members of staff, causing the company to fall into chaos. Executives are marched out by security, bosses suddenly have their email access revoked, and some staff only find out that they’ve been sacked when they’re booted off work calls mid-meeting.

Moderation policies are relaxed; banned accounts are reinstated. There’s a 1300 per cent increase in users tweeting the N-word. Advertising revenue falls by 50 per cent. Free speech thrives only on Musk terms: he calls for a ban on users who urge brands no longer to advertise on Twitter. Thanks to changes to how Tweets are fed to users, Musk’s own combative attitude online, and a lack of moderation policies, many begin to desert the platform anyway.