Tomorrow - Character Limit with Kate Conger and Ryan Mac

Episode Date: October 10, 2024

Josh sits down with New York Times tech journalists, Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, to discuss their new book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter.  Was it worth 44 billion dollars? Only way to know is to listen. Or think about it, at all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey and welcome to tomorrow. I'm your host Joshua Topolsky and today on the show we have some very special guests, two technology journalists from the New York Times, also known as the gray lady, as I like to refer to her. I'm talking about Kate Conger and Ryan Mack, who have just written a terrific new book about the rise and presumably eventually the fall of Twitter and its leadership under Elon Musk. The book is called Character Limit. Ryan, Kate, thanks for being here. Thanks for having us.

Thanks Josh. So you guys have spent, how long did you spend, you've written a book where you probably had to write the name Elon Musk. I mean, I'm sure you have this catalog somewhere, how many times the name. But how long did you spend, forget about all of your life that you lived on Twitter as journalists and everything

leading up to it. How long did you spend writing this book? Like, do you remember when the day was that you started? Yeah, I mean it's interesting because it sort of dovetails from our reporting for the New York Times. We were both covering Musk's acquisition of Twitter in the run-up to the deal and then obviously the close of it. So we were building on that reporting, but we started writing the book in earnest in, I want to say, April of 2023. And then we finished it in March or so of this year.

So a little more than a year in total of just focus writing on the book. Yeah. And I would imagine, I mean, presumably the story begins, of course, like anything with Elon Musk, at least in the recent, I guess in the most recent years of his sort of public existence, you're like something, this is not, whatever we're writing, there's going to be twists and turns,

there's going to be ups and downs, but I assume there were some things that you could have seen coming, and some things you couldn't have seen coming with this. Let me just start at the beginning of it though. Um, the, the, you know, and, and, and help correct my memory on this, but when the deal was being done for Elon Musk to buy Twitter, it, it, at the beginning, it almost seemed like there was this whole period where he was backing out of

the deal and he seemed like he didn't even want to do the deal. And then ultimately it kind of was like he was forced to do the, to buy Twitter. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, from your perspective and in your reporting and in the book, like what, what, what is, what actually led up to the, what really was the motivator of him doing the deal? I mean, essentially it's, it's hard to pinpoint one thing. Um, but you know, he was, you know, Twitter, as we understand it is his favorite thing in the world. Um, in the way that, you way that billionaires might covet a super yacht

or a basketball team or an island, that's the thing he wanted and he wanted to buy. And at that point in time, Tesla's shares were skyrocketing, they were higher than ever. And he just made this offer kind of on a whim. There was this discussion about whether or not

he would join the board. He was buying up this small stake in the company. He became really frustrated about that conversation. And there was like, basically screw it. I'm just gonna do it myself and I'll buy the rest of the remaining 90% of the company. And I think that he did that on kind of a lark and it kind of morphed into something bigger and

you know, and we get this kind of snowball effect that we often see with him when he makes these kind of grand proclamations. Like he didn't expect it to end up the way it did. Is that I mean, did it snowball in a sense that it was out of his control or one that he was rolling the snowball? I think that he initially thought the board was gonna reject his offer to buy the company and that he would then be able to take a tender offer to shareholders and kind of keep thinking through the negotiation and what he actually wanted to pay for the company. And instead what happened is the board accepted his offer and he got locked into this really

high price that I don't think he ever expected he would have to pay. And we saw him over the course of the summer of 2022 try to get out of that. And eventually I think he was convinced by his lawyers that he was going to lose in court, and he was going to be forced to buy the company one way or another. And so I think there was a little bit of face-saving there at the end, where he wanted to appear as though he made the choice,

and he wanted to acquire the company rather than the narrative being that, you know, a judge somewhere forced him into it, or even worse, that the Twitter board was able to wrangle him. Right, okay, but that's like a very weird way to buy a company, right? Like just in terms of like spending, what was it, $44 billion to, I mean,

it's not like, you don't hear a lot about acquisitions where people are like, oh, well, I thought I might look bad, so I had to spend the $44 billion and become the CEO of the company. Like, this is I might look bad, so I had to spend 44 billion on the, and become the CEO of the company. Like, this is a fairly unusual thing, right? Are there any precedents for this type of transition from, of ownership like this? We thought about this really hard,

and I mean, this whole deal is unprecedented. It was, I mean, from the initial offer to, we detail on this in the book, but he doesn't sign an NDA to get non-public information. And so he can't really do due diligence because he doesn't sign his paperwork because he just wants the deal done as fast as possible. And some of this stuff is just so preposterous. And we talked to lawyers and bankers who have done this stuff their whole lives and they were just blown away by how this whole thing was run. And, you know, he was advised by top bankers at Morgan Stanley

and had the best lawyers and, you know, he still kind of did what he wanted. And when we think of precedent here, no, I can't think of really anything that comes close. Just a guy that wanted to do something on his on a whim and, you know, force it through. And I mean, just the amount of money is kind of preposterous or astronomical for one individual. Right. Like we compared it to Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post. But that was 250 million dollars. You know, this is orders of magnitude higher than that. So I, but that was $250 million.

This is orders of magnitude higher than that. I mean, that sounds like a steal. It sounds like very affordable by comparison. I mean, I guess that begs the question, what has more actual value? If you had to weigh these things, I mean, I look at, and we'll get it, we should talk about, obviously we're gonna talk about where Twitter is now,

but yeah, $250 going to talk about where Twitter is now. But yeah, $250 million for the Washington Post seems like possibly a better, I mean, just a better long-term investment than whatever we're seeing with Twitter. Like $44 billion, that value has been completely destroyed now, right? Basically, over the last, I mean,

how long has he owned the company? Is it two years? It feels like way longer. Yeah. Yeah, about 100 years. I think we're almost at the two, I mean, how long has he owned the company? Is it two years? It feels like way longer. Yeah. Yeah. I think we're almost at the two year mark a little bit later in October. We will have hit two years. Yeah. And what is the current, what is the current valuation of the company last? Like, I mean, I know there were some reports about this recently, but what are people saying it's worth now? So Musk has valued the company internally, I think around 1919 billion was what he priced it at when he was deciding what employees' equity would be worth.

So about a 50% loss in value, a little bit more. And then the most recent estimates from his investors, like Fidelity, have been around I think $8 or $9 billion. So I mean, there's nothing about this transaction that's normal and the destruction of value that has gone on is part of that. It's just kind of incomprehensible. Yeah, like I'm not a, you know, I'm not a professional business person, you know,

day to day. Is that good? Is it good to go from 44 million to eight or nine? Or is that generally viewed as unfavorable? I think in first grade I was told 44 is a lot higher than nine, so. Is it good to go from 44 million to eight or nine? Or is that generally viewed as unfavorable? First grade I was told 44 is a lot higher than nine. Right. And generally when you buy a business,

if you're like, hey, I got big plans for this, it's like the line's supposed to go basically in the other direction. Usually the stonks go up. Yeah. Yeah. OK, so OK. So your book opens with this great,

you've got this great sort of little narrative of, so go ahead. One point I wanted to make, though, to be fair, is that we talk about his wealth destruction with Twitter, but he's taking the Twitter data or the X data and built XAI, which has raised a couple billion dollars, I think, at a 24, 26 billion dollar valuation. So you almost have this odd other wealth creation off of X. And it's kind of like he's pulled this out of thin air. So I guess to be fair to him, I guess if you know you're in plus

minuses here, right? There's a bit of that. But yeah. So your suggestion is there any do you think there's any premeditation that he was going to do that? Was that a calculation in buying Twitter? Because he wasn't, the only thing he was talking about AI, the main thing he was talking about when it came to AI around the time of this purchase was that AI was very dangerous and was gonna destroy the world.

Right. We should get it regulated or not do it or something like that. Yeah, I don't think that was planned. He's kind of, I mean, there's no way he could have predicted that that AI market, the fundraising market would go that way. But he has somehow managed to wrangle another business

opportunity out of this. He's taken some of the same investors who back the X deal, who have gotten crushed in that deal, have just given him more money for X AI And it's just kind of right fascinating to see well, there is something about his track record, right? I mean that's and that's touched on early in the book too. It's like he he does find himself You know for whatever reason maybe because he's a great genius Involved in these companies that end up becoming wildly successful sometimes

After he's been involved with them and sometimes, you successful, sometimes after he's been involved with them and sometimes, you know, like because he's involved with them. But I mean, that narrative seems to be like, well, they're like, well, he keeps making money in all these different businesses. Why not like, why not bet on something known, right? He's a bit more of a known quantity than sort of a random, like the WeWork guy or whatever. I guess he was a bit,

you know, whatever, whose name now escapes me, by the way. Adam Newman. Thank you, Adam Newman. I think he just raised money again for some other companies. It's so awesome, God, I wish I were rich, because people just, like, the thing that's always so galling about the rich

and successful is that, you know, it's like the people least in need of the Oscar gift bag are the people at the Oscars, you know, it's like, it's like they're the people who don't need the Rolex or whatever is in that bag and yet there they are. But right, so. You just walk around the Lower East Side in Barefoot like he did, or I think it was like

the East Village, you walked around Barefoot and you can read. Adam Newman or Elon Musk? Elon Muskfoot like he did. Or I think it was like the East Village you walked around Barefoot and you can read. Adam Newman or Elon Musk? Elon Musk seems like he would be, he would more have a Howard Hughes take on walking around Barefoot. He seems like, I mean, I don't know. And I certainly don't want to.

Well, Howard Hughes was drinking his own piss by the end of his life, but yeah. Well, I think who isn't if they know what they're doing. But that's great. I mean, I don't know that we can rule that out for some of our current billionaires. But Elon Musk not walking around the Lower East Side barefoot, but instead parlaying his Twitter purchase

into the birth of a new company, which is XAI. And we're calling it Twitter, but he's renamed it X. You touch on this early in the book as well about this sort of like this idea he's had of FX. He's obsessed with this letter and is sure that it's going to do something magical for him. It seems like everything X actually touches in some way, the X part of it goes badly.

PayPal was called X, right? And then they were like, no, we're not gonna use X, let's get rid of X. And then it became the PayPal that we all know and love or whatever. Here's a case where he renamed Twitter to X and it's gone from $44 billion to nine or whatever. Feels like the X doesn't mark the spot.

Okay, that's great stuff from me. His kid is also named X too, but. And again, I'm worried. No judgment on the kid. I worry for that child, especially given his track record with his children. But I was gonna touch on this. You have this sort of little narrative

at the beginning of the book where you've got this, I think it's a data scientist, right, who kind of has this plan to go in and tell Musk what he thinks. And to me, the striking part, and obviously this is a theme for him and obviously in the book, is that he has fallen prey to, one of the things this data scientist is most worried about

is that somehow he fell for some kind of like weird hoax tweet or story and was retweeting it. And the guy's reaction was basically like, well, this only stupid people would fall for this. I mean, Elon Musk is widely considered to be one of the greatest geniuses in technology ever and perhaps in business ever.

He's like a Steve Jobs level character to a lot of people. Is he stupid? Is he dumb? I think he contains multitudes, I think is the answer to that. Me sitting in my armchair therapist office. But yeah, that anecdote's actually really telling and it kind of encapsulated a lot for us and why we started the book. But he basically right after the takeover

tweets out a Paul Pelosi conspiracy theory. This is after Paul Pelosi was attacked in his home by an intruder. And the far right Internet kind of spread this rumor that actually it wasn't a vicious attack, but a quarrel between lovers. And it became completely fabricated, completely fabricated, and it showed up on this weird site known for spreading conspiracies. I think it was like the Santa Monica observer or something like that. Yeah, and Elon Responds to Hillary Clinton's tweet about the attack

With with a link to that site and says, you know, this is not all that it may seem or you should check this out What's going on here? Oh God, it's so embarrassing. Just that also, to Hilarie Clinton, like, hey, I've done some research and maybe, okay, so he responds to Hilarie Clinton, yeah. You know, and he gets in a lot of shit for it, and it scares a lot of advertisers

who are already queasy about his takeover and worried about misinformation spreading on the site. And for that data scientist who actually was pretty optimistic about the takeover, you know, Twitter wasn't a perfect place before. He thought this guy was, you know, somewhat of a great entrepreneur who built these other companies. He could really get product going at Twitter, which had stagnated. Maybe this was the guy to change it.

And that moment when he tweeted the Paul Pelosi thing, he was like, nope, I've studied misinformation, I've studied how conspiracy theories spread on the internet, and this guy that I thought I believed in is falling for it like the most basic person. And it was an eye-opening moment for that data scientist. is falling for it like the most basic person and it was a it was an eye-opening moment for that for that data scientist and You know, I think to understand that Again, he contains multitudes. He can be very smart in some things and you know be a once-in-a-lifetime entrepreneur but when it comes to

you know basic media literacy, there is maybe a gap there or. Maybe. Yeah. So yeah, that, yeah. I mean, it's just, it's just, yeah, it's an interesting, I mean, it reminded me of exactly that to your point, like the, you know, the him containing multitudes, it reminded me of the disparity between like the Elon Musk that I thought existed at one point

and the Elon Musk that seems to exist now. And a large part of that, I mean, if I think it's fairly reasonable to say, and I've made, I mean, we've, you know, pretty much on every podcast where Twitter ever comes up, I mean, we've, you know, pretty much on every podcast where ever, where Twitter ever comes up, I bring up this point, but it's reasonable to say that if Elon Musk had not been, one, if he had not bought Twitter and had not been tweeting so much, I might have a very different opinion of like what he is and what he does, like

as a human being, like I might have a very, very different opinion of like where he's coming from and what his contributions are. Uh, but it does seem like he has fallen into some unusual, like I consider it to be fringe, right? Um, set of beliefs that are very much like talking points of the far right. Sometimes, I mean, that are very much like talking points of the far right, sometimes, I mean, literally verging into like Naziism and antisemitism and racism and just outright, unvarnished, like good old fashioned racism. Like, I mean, what is your insight?

I mean, you've spent so much time writing about him and you know, and the book is brilliant. I mean, you touch on so many things, but what is your insight about that? Can you talk about like, how does an Elon Musk, was he always there? Did we just not see it because he wasn't tweeting as much or is this has this been a de-evolution of his like character? I do think that it's something that has changed over time. And I think Musk is sort of an extreme example of a lot of things.

He's sort of like the most extreme example of unfettered capitalism. And I think he's also one of the more extreme examples of the kinds of radicalization that we see a lot of people go through on social media, especially when they depend on it as their sole source of information, like he does. He reads X, and he only reads X, and that's especially when they depend on it as their sole source of information like he does. He reads X and he only reads X and that's where all of his information is coming from.

And it allows him to come across all of this kind of fringe right-wing content and just ingest it and not be skeptical of it. And I think it's something that we've seen happen to so many other Americans over the last couple of years, people who are just getting all of their news from Facebook, for instance, and then buying into these crazy conspiracies. We saw someone on Facebook recently launch this conspiracy about people in Springfield

eating their pets. And then that spread very virally on X and Musk ended up kind of boosting it and amplifying that theory. So he, I think, is sort of part of this broader group of people who are too dependent on social media as their sole source of information and are becoming radicalized by the kinds of information that do well on social media, engagement bait, rage bait,

kind of extreme or unbelievable ideas. I'll also say that there were elements of this that were always there that we didn't see. I think of something like the the pedo guy incident where he called the this cave rescuer in Thailand a pedophile on Twitter and gotten a lot of trouble And he was believing information that was being fed to him wrong information by a fake private investigator that he had hired basically a con man, right and You know in the higher than He hired the private investigator,

I guess I missed this part of the story originally, but he hired, after tweeting about the guy, right, saying he was a pedophile basically, because he lived in Thailand, that was his only information, I believe, to make the comment. It wasn't like this guy had a bunch of tweets that were questionable or he found his Reddit or something.

He then hired a private investigator to like dig up dirt on this guy, which the guy did not, he produced a bunch of fake stuff, right? Well, the private investigator actually was a con man who emailed him out of the blue, and so he hired him thinking he was a private investigator. But that's fucking nuts, okay, hold on, just right there. And then.

We're talking about one of the richest men in the world. At this point, I don't know, he might have been the richest man in the world. I know there was a point where he was. I think he was up there. I don't think he was quite there yet, but he was up there. Okay, let's say like in the top five

richest people in the world. Like unbelievable power could be wielded with that kind of money, right? And here's a guy who he's on Twitter. He makes some offhand like remark about this guy. I mean, this just seems so unbelievable to me, so unhinged. And then instead of saying, now, presumably he surrounds himself with security people, right?

He has like, okay, presumably I don't know, cause I'm not a billionaire who, you know, from, from Silicon Valley or whatever, but presumably there's a phone number you can call. Like you call like Mark Andreessen or you call,'t know, because I'm not a billionaire who, from Silicon Valley or whatever, but presumably there's a phone number you can call, like you call like Mark Andreessen, or you call Bill Gates or somebody, you go, hey, listen, I need the best. Like I need to get dirt on somebody.

I need the best private investigator. I want the best lawyer, whatever it is. Elon Musk gets an email from a random, gets an email? Was it an email? Not a DM? Yeah, an email. Okay, not a slide into the DM. Okay, he gets an email from a random person. Gets an email? Was it an email? Not a DM? Okay, not a slide into the DM. Okay, he gets an email from a random person.

How he even read the email, I would love to get, I'd love to just, I'd like to read 400 pages on that. Just how he ends up perusing the inbox or whatever. He reads a lot of email? He used to have a Google alert on his own name to track everything. Well, we all have a Google alert on our own name. So that's not unusual.

That humanizes him more than anything. Yeah, sure. But he reads a lot. He reads a lot. Yeah. That's the mistake is reading too much. I mean, imagine being Elon Musk and getting the Google alert.

I mean, it must be, you would have to hire a person just to manage the Google alerts, I feel like. Okay, sorry. I don't wanna get off track, but because this is fascinating to me though. So somebody emails him. He and they're like, I'm a private investigator. I'm going to get dirt on this guy for you. I think he is a pedophile or something like that. And Elon Musk is like, okay, like sight unseen. Basically, yeah. And then like, did this guy have a website? Did he have credentials? credentials no oh he I think he fakes some credentials and then he got he got his right hand manager at virtual to interact with him Jared creates a fake name and a fake email address called James Brickhouse to then be the go between but he's he's and so then they get this information from this guy they

pay him I think 50 grand for the information I think it was 50 yeah I would have that guy would ask for way more. Yeah. It's just a huge opportunity. But it's all shit information, right? It's all, it's made up. And then Elon takes that information and tries to seed it with a reporter. Off the record, he claims it's off the record. And that reporter was me. He tried to send it to me. And I went back and forth with him on email a couple of times. And we ended up he claimed the emails off the record. I never agreed. But this is that when I was at BuzzFeed, we ended up publishing the full email that he sent to just remember this his state of mind.

Now, now you're saying it's all it's all coming back. Yeah, this is like 2018. Right. This is 2018. Yeah. And this is just insane. But also that Elon Musk is emailing a reporter. The deal on must doesn't have like a handler or somebody who's like going to be the go between or a PR person, a comms person is like again, we're not talking about. I understand if you like a startup founder and you've got

like 10 employees and like you don't have the budget for a publicist or a comms person or whatever. And you're like, okay, I'm going to work this story myself. I've been there. Like, I get it. But if you're, you've got the fifth, let's say fifth richest guy, just for the sake of the argument, this is just unusual to me. Like, uh, like it just doesn't seem like, like there's somebody

somewhere who goes to him like, hey, Elon, there's a better way. You're impossibly wealthy. Like you don't have to be down in the dirt here. Like you don't have to be on the email thread. Well, it's something that we see with him so much where he just is kind of like compulsively over involved in every detail of the things that are going on in his business is. I mean, we saw it with X where he was like bickering with people about where to place a comma in ad copy or bickering over, you know, the pixel width of certain things on the

timeline. Like he likes to be very in the weeds, very in the detail. I get that. I actually appreciate that. Like, sorry, go ahead. Yeah. Oh no,. He used to be like a co- You're talking about him responding to email. He used to be like a compulsive email responder. Like, you would email him, and he would most likely respond within 20 minutes all the time. And so he's just kind of like, yeah, deep, deep, deep in the weeds of every possible thing

that he could get involved in. And I think he really, I think it comes from a place of feeling like he is the best person for that job. Like no one could be a bigger expert than him. He's the best comms. No one could do a better job than what he could do himself.

Right. Yeah. And I'll bring it back. I mean, to show, I mean, that was the level of, I guess, conspiracy he was willing to engage with to make his own thing true. And I think the greater lesson in all this is, when he believes something,

he uses his force of will to make it true. He calls someone a pedo guy and then kind of backfills the evidence or tries to find the evidence to make that true. And in some ways that's worked for him really well in the past. He's used that force of will to will electric cars into existence and to build a reusable rocket company

when no one said it was possible. And so that's kind of his way of viewing his perspective in life and how to go about getting things done. And it has led him to some dark places, especially now. Right. I mean, it's like very much Steve Jobs, like reality distortion field, like master marketer, right? Like that is the model for a guy like Elon Musk is Steve Jobs, obviously, right? Who again was not, is not, I mean, I know Elon is hands on,

but in reality, he didn't design the Tesla. Like he was not, he didn't invent the car, right? Like other people invented it, and then he was like, okay, cool, let me run with this. So he kind of jumps in on things, and then I guess what, micromanages them, and so sometimes unbelievable success, right? So if you're like, I created the first electric car

that anybody in the world actually wanted and we made like an entire market out of it, your confidence level will be through the roof when it comes to like, I don't know, trying to prove that the guy is actually a pedophile. You're like, well, if I can create an electric car, like what can I do? But like, it's interesting talking about that

in sort of thinking about the way that he talks in, in, on Twitter now and generally about like the media and about the truth and about like, you know, he's, his whole trip seems to be like, they're not telling you what's really going on. Like this is all the mainstream media can't be trusted. Like, you know, it's all, there's a conspiracy, but like here's a case where he's literally manufacturing. He's manufacturing, he's this conspiracy.

Like in the case of this guy, right? His attempt was to essentially like back into the conspiracy, like creating a conspiracy about this guy and then making it true, which is like seems to be the thing that he's most concerned about everybody else doing, right? Like is making stuff up, which is like seems to be the thing that he's most concerned about everybody else doing. Right. Like is making stuff up. Um, which is an interesting, I mean, parallel, like given the fact that he's now in control of, well, I don't know, I'd say like he's in control of Twitter. It's so important. Is it important? Does Twitter matter? Like is Twitter relevant in our world?

You know, I think it is. And we talk a lot in the book about the ways that the platform has been destroyed. Obviously, it's not even Twitter anymore. It's X. The value destruction that we spoke about earlier has just been really enormous. But I think that these social platforms have a level of stickiness. People take a really long time to migrate away.

And I think we've drawn the comparison before to something like Yahoo Mail, where it's not a destination anymore. People who are going today to be like, I think I need an email account. That's not the first place that they're stopping. But it still exists, and people still use it. And X-Mate had in that direction over time. But right now, there's still this really big captive audience

there who is now being exposed to a lot of this kind of really like fringe crap that we were talking about earlier. And I think that the power of it is to really seed these kinds of misinformation narratives and blast them out to this large audience. And we've seen it over and over again where Twitter is sort of the breeding ground for these really big conspiracies, particularly around elections. Here in the US after the 2020 election, in Brazil after their election in 2022.

We've seen recent stuff, these really ugly racist misinformation campaigns going on around electoral politics in the UK, and that often bleeding out into violence in the real world. The platform, as much as I think people are starting to move to alternatives, has a lot of influence and has a lot of sway in bringing these kinds of fringe, sort of 4chan ideas into the mainstream and making them cultural talking points. Right. I mean, if you listen to Linda Iaccarino, who's now

the CEO of the company, and you listen to Musk talk about it, it's like, X, AKA Twitter, has been a runaway success. Like, it's crushing it, it's at the top of the app charts, like on the app store. Is Twitter growing? Like, is there any, like, do we have, we must know at this point, right?

Like, I think I've seen data on this, but I feel like you guys would know better than anybody. Like, has Twitter grown under Elon Musk? So, from a financial perspective, no. The revenue is down significantly, and they really have not been able to bounce back on that. And then from a user perspective, it's a little less clear. I think Twitter's last public earnings report before Musk bought the company, they had something like 240 or 250 million daily active users. And Musk has claimed many times that usership has grown since then and that they're hitting new records of users. But the metrics that he's using aren't really clear. None of that is ever published or there's that data backing up the metrics that he's using aren't really clear. None of that is ever published.

Or there's that data backing up the things that he's saying. It's just kind of like he's out there saying like usage is higher than ever. And we don't have any data to look at. Right. I mean, you basically there's no way to know. But I mean, anecdotally, when I look at it, it doesn't feel like the vibrant. Now, of course, maybe I'm biased, right?

Because I'm a journalist and I've been on there for too long. I mean, I don't know when you guys signed up, but I think I signed up in 2007, which is feels like a long time ago. Yeah, but like, I kind of avoid it personally. I mean, it seems like a very unpleasant place. Like when I look at it, now Twitter's always been unpleasant to some degree.

Like part of its charm was actually that it is like, you encountered some very unpleasant things on it, or people. But it also felt like it was balanced by real conversation and people that you wanted to be listening to and seeing on there speaking. It seems crazy to, I mean, I don't know. It doesn't seem like celebrities, for instance,

are using it as much, or even politicians, to some degree, are using it as much. It feels like very secondary. But there's no way to know. It's just this is my anecdotal. This is my vibe. I would agree. I'm also a journalist, so bias in my own experience.

But I'm getting far less engagement on the platform, fewer replies, and fewer likes, and retweets, and that kind of thing, to the point where I'm finding more engagement on like blue sky and threads. Yeah. Also, you know, I look at those view counts, for example, that are on X's tweets or, you know, what it posts in the videos, and I'm not sure if I believe those all the time and

I'm not sure exactly how they're counting them or if those are to be trusted. But I think beyond that, I think the lasting legacy of Musk is that there are alternatives out there that exist now that are attracting wide swaths of users, whether that's threads or blue sky. I mean, when X was banned in Brazil recently, I just got thousands of followers from Brazil on Blue Sky. They were flooding to another place. And maybe those people still maintain a presence on X or still have their account that they check every now and then. But they're now going to also go to those other places. And their attention is going to be

divided between their X account and their Blue Sky and their TikTok. And that might be the lasting legacy of Musk where he he has allowed these other things to exist and thrive so yeah I mean it does seem also like I mean he's followed this path of like I mean Twitter now the experience is very much this like for you page right like when you log on certainly if you're a new user even for existing users, it throws you to that first and foremost.

And I, you know, it feels like engagement. I think you somebody said engagement bait. It does feel like that's the lifeblood of the platform now. I mean, obviously it's always like going viral or whatever was always a thing on social media, but it feels like the space between like actual discourse or conversation and like going viral or whatever was always a thing on social media, but it feels like the space between like actual discourse or conversation and like going viral has like just widened tremendously. And it's like really that is what they've encouraged on the platform, which is, I mean, I don't know. I mean, is this Elon by design? Like,

how much is he, how much has he directly influenced this? Like the type, I mean, it seems like quite a bit, but the type of discourse and the way it's presented on the type, I mean, it seems like quite a bit, but the type of discourse and the way it's presented on the platform. I mean, is that all him? Like, is he just in the weeds on that every day? I think, you know, there are a couple ways he's really influenced the discourse. One, you know, is the things that he posts and the accounts that he engages with and elevates to his followers. He's the most followed user on the platform. So the things that he discusses are naturally going to cause a lot of conversation.

And as he's discussing some of these weird fringe things and sharing clickbait, that is being disseminated really broadly across the platform. I think the other thing that he's done that's had a really significant impact is reinstating all these accounts that were banned under Twitter previously. So, you know, folks like Alex Jones, Andrew Tate, like these are all the voices

that he has brought back to the platform. And those accounts have grown very significantly and been able to reach new audiences and broader audiences than they ever did before. So I think some of it, when you're scrolling the timeline, it's like, yeah, OK, this might just be the vibe of my timeline and who I follow and whatever.

But there is this sort of broader impact that's happening, I think, universally on the platform. Oh, no, for sure. I mean, I see things, I'm exposed to like hardcore, like right wing conspiracy theories that I would never have seen, I never saw on the platform unless like somebody was making a point to call it out,

right, somebody in my circle was like, hey, this is crazy or something. Like those are now, I mean, if you look at the news tab or if you look at the For You page or whatever, they're all like, it seems to be favoring like the Andrew Tates of the world. It does seem to be like pushing them towards the mainstream. Yeah, and there's like a lot of just like weird junk too.

Like I never look at the For You tab, but like Ryan and I will sometimes sit and we'll look at it on his phone. And it's like these really violent videos that come up, these sort of not pornographic, but vaguely suggestive videos that come up. Just kind of the lowest junk content that you could consume online. And those are the things that are appearing in that feed more and more. And it's boosting a lot of video content too. And, you know, we know that graphic

and often violent videos get some of the best engagement in terms of viewership. I remember early on in his takeover, I got a video of a man walking in on his partner, cheating on him or something, and then stabbing her. And it was like, I remember, I took a screenshot of it at the time. It's mentioned in the book,

but it had more than 2 million plays on it based on those metrics. Again, not sure what to believe on those metrics, but that was not an account I followed. It was pushed to my feed on the For You page. And like, you know, I'd never seen anything like that on Twitter, never engaged with anything like that on Twitter.

Right. And that's what was, you know, being suggested as good content. Yeah. No, I mean, I remember when, you know, there was some period where there were like beheading videos or something going that were like, but like it was to find them, to see them was like you needed to seek them out basically. There was one really bad one that got circulating that pissed off Musk.

And I can't remember if he included included this detail in the book, but it was a Cat being put in a blender which was just like horrifying shit and right like it really really fucked up people inside that company and They didn't know how to take it down because it ended up becoming like a kind of Streisand effect Situation where more people would post it and post it and right, that was being elevated by by the platform. Yeah.

Right. I mean, they ended up just blocking searches for a couple days for the word cat. That was the only way they could try to manage it. This was like not that long ago, like a year ago or something. This was not. I mean, I mean, this to me is is you know, they essentially disbanded a lot of the team that was in charge of that kind of moderation, right? One of the things that Musk did was kind of tear apart the moderation capabilities of internally at Twitter.

Is that correct? Yeah. I mean, the layoffs when he came in obviously were incredibly disruptive. He laid off more than 75% of the company and a lot of that happened in trust and safety. And then, you know, I think because he is really focused on content moderation and very interested in making decisions there, he continued to kind of clash with the leaders that he put in place in that department and slowly continued to chisel away at it over the ensuing months.

And so it was an area of the business that really got pared back. And Linda Iaccarino, you mentioned earlier, has spoken recently about trying to build out the content moderation department again and build this new center in Austin, Texas to accommodate that. build out the content moderation department again and build this new center in Austin, Texas to accommodate that. But I'm not sure how far along those plans are

and what content moderation will look like under Musk, because we've seen this pattern of him saying there will be moderation and then getting into these weird tiffs with the people who are running that and laying them off or firing them. Right. So we mentioned earlier that we're almost two years into his ownership of the business. Is he, I mean, from your reporting

and working on this book, like, is he as invested in this product as he was two years ago? Like, is this still like a huge focus point for him? I mean, I'm just curious because it feels like at some point the novelty has to wear off, right? He's certainly not in the office every day like he was and spending late nights there like he was in the early months of the takeover,

but he's using the platform more than ever. He's sometimes tweeting up to 75 times a day. You know, it's largely about election stuff and terrible stuff about immigrants and stuff like that. But you know, in terms of his own personal usage of the site, it's higher than ever. He's now using it as a political tool to boost his own pack for Donald Trump and promote that kind of stuff. But yeah, he's in the weeds still.

I mean, he's still engaged. Obviously he's deciding to move the company out of San Francisco. That happened recently. So it's not like he's completely checked out there. He still has other businesses to run as well, but it's still front and center for him for sure. So I know we don't have a ton of time, but I want just a couple more things I want to ask about. One is, you touch on the political stuff,

and that is like, if you look at his feed now, which I have done recently, because we do a thing every week on the show where we try to find the two worst Elon Musk tweets, and then we do, we're creating an ultimate bracket of bad Elon Musk tweets from 2024. So it's like there are two every week and then eventually we'll have a super bracket of all of the worst. Last week there was, I think we just agreed that what the tweet he'd done was so bad that

we just, it was like that there will be no more elections if Kamala wins. We're like, well, that one's just so out. It was like long. It was like a blog post basically about how immigrants are gonna vote blue and like illegals are gonna vote blue, therefore you'll never be able to have an election in America again, which is like honestly just so absolutely fucking crazy.

But you know, fine. You know, we all believe. I mean, that's borderline great replacement, right? In someone's control. No, borderline, I don't think it's borderline. I think it's exactly that. I think it's like the immigrants are gonna come in and they're gonna take your country from you.

And the Democrats are, that's why the Democrats are letting them come over the border. This was the theory, right? And I'm like, I don't, this guy is supposed to be like, this guy was like the Tony Stark guy, right? Like the visionary, he's gonna take us all to Mars. He's gonna like make cars clean or whatever. He's gonna create fucking tunnels.

I don't know what the tunnels, the tunnel thing was always seemed like kind of bullshit, but you know, it was like, oh, this guy is truly special. And this stuff is, I mean, to the point of the big opening your book, it is like really down in the, at the lowest levels of like critical thought. Like you are not exercising critical thought

if you can repeat those kinds of theories to the, what does he have? 200 million followers on Twitter or something stupid. Cause he's like the auto follow for every single person who signs up. By the way, I don't know the last time you created a new account on Twitter, but it is an eye opener.

If you just start from scratch and create a new account, it's very, very clear what they want you to see and it is not good. But to the political stuff, he's become very, very, very political. Now he's always had like a bit of a political bent. I mean, in some ways like Tesla was, the company itself was political because,

his fight seemed to be like with big oil and this sort of like the status quo. And there's a lot of like policy making around that, which like, by the way, I was like, yeah, hell yeah. Like, stick it to big oil. Like we gotta change things, you know? Here's a guy who's coming in. Can we talk for a second about his politics

and how they've shifted and why they've shifted? It seems that it's dovetailed with his ownership of Twitter. Like it's more severely, it's gotten more severe with his ownership of Twitter. We touched on it here, but like, is there, are there specific things that have triggered him into this like particularly hard right viewpoint? I mean, he wasn't pro Donald Trump a few years ago from what I could tell. Right, and you know, he said things before that he was a Democrat or a centrist at one point,

and I think his description of himself comes more from being politically disengaged than where his actual viewpoints might fall in politics. And I think that's a really good point. I think that's of himself comes more from being politically disengaged than like where his actual viewpoints might fall in politics. So I think he's always been a little bit more to the right. But he has claimed to support Democratic candidates in the past. And we saw a couple things that really seemed to shift his politics in reporting the book. One of them was COVID lockdowns in California.

He was really upset that those interfered with Tesla's manufacturing facilities here and pushed back a lot at the state government for doing that. And we saw him at the time posting all these kind of fringe conspiracy theories of the threat of COVID is overblown. It's going to be gone by April of 2020. Kids can't contract to the virus. Those are the kinds of things that he was posting at the time.

So you see him kind of dipping a toe into some of those more fringe beliefs already at that point. And then the other thing that was going on with him in that era was one of his children had come out as trans and was beginning her transition. And he has spoken about just how adverse he was to that and how much it affected him. He's said that she's basically dead to him

and that he feels like woke, quote unquote, woke ideology stole his child from him. And so I think that was like a very radicalizing moment for him as well. And then in 2021, the Biden administration held a summit for EV vehicles at the White House, and Tesla was not invited. And I think in part

because, you know, Biden has been an ally of unions for a long time, and Musk had resisted unionization efforts in his facilities. And so he was excluded from that event, and he immediately started lashing out at Biden and criticizing him, calling him a union puppet and all this stuff. And I think from there, just sort of that resentment

was able to build and to push him further to the right. But even at the beginning of this election cycle, I think he was still pretty skeptical of Donald Trump. He hosted Ron DeSantis for his presidential campaign announcement on X, and only recently has kind of boarded the Trump train. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting in thinking about Trump and the way that they both have, well, I mean,

Trump doesn't really tweet anymore, I guess, for better or worse. Like, he's not really active on the platform, though he was reinstated by Musk, right? Mm-hmm, that's right. How much do you think Elon Musk has taken a page from Trump in terms of his style of communication on the platform or his use of the platform as a kind of cudgel? Do you think there's any connection there?

No, I think he's always been that way. In the past, he used it to really push back on the media. I remember tweets, we were looking up his old tweets in 13, 14, 15, where he's like arguing with Bloomberg Businessweek over like what he ate for breakfast because it was reported wrong in a story. And keeping him honest. Yeah, exactly. Or, you know, arguing with a Belgian blogger at like 3am. You know, his Twitter style is very unique. He's always been this kind of shoot from the hip, first thought that pops into his mind kind of guy.

And if he sees something wrong, he's going to try and correct it no matter who it is. If you have 5,000 followers or five followers. And you know that's what endeared him to a lot of people. It got to a lot of people. It got him a lot of fans. He didn't have those layers of PR people between himself and the keyboard. And I would say, yes, he's become more, obviously the volume has gone up recently,

but those same instincts are still there. And now he's getting more political for sure. I mean, that's the difference. Like in the past, he may have not shared the political beliefs online or, you know, not just he obviously hasn't been as radical as he is now, but, um, but the communication, the style has, has sort of always been there for him. Right. All right. So I know we're, we're getting close to, to needing to wrap here real quick.

I know you guys don't have a crystal ball, but you've probably researched this better than anybody in the world. So what happens? What is the end game for Twitter? What is your prediction for where this goes? Like how this this story resolves itself? I think it's a platform that's becoming increasingly politicized. Twitter is always a place for political conversation, but now it's a place for conversation that supports a particular political viewpoint. And I think that's going to continue and accelerate over time. And that may end up driving folks off the platform

and making it obsolete. I think something that's interesting is that Twitter was never a very solid business. It always struggled to make money. It was always a place that had misinformation and harassment and all of these things. Horrible moderation. It's always been bad on that level.

It's always struggled. And yet, no one was willing to jump in and create a competitor. And even someone who's as competitive as Mark Zuckerberg, right, was not really willing to touch that space. And now with Elon, he is, and he's building a competitor with threads. And so I think there is a real danger for X that these other platforms are going to kind of continue to cannibalize the user base and that it's going to end up, you know, as more of like a

fringe social media service like Truth Social or Rumble or like all of these kind of right-wing alternatives to mainstream social media. Right. All businesses that are doing not great, right? I mean, I don't, Truth, I don't know. Is it successful? I don't think it is. I believe their IPO did not go well or where we at we're now They just got out of part of it's truth part of the DJT thing. Is that yeah Yeah, I mean, you know, it's going the stock went up significantly and it was being it adds a lot of wealth to Trump's Net worth but you know, as soon as you start selling those shares, I think it'll scare off investors. And their revenue is absolutely abysmal.

I mean, last time I checked is like a... The revenue is basically nonexistent. And the expenditure is huge. It's a platform of one, right? Like, there's one person that matters. That one person is now posting a lot on X now. Right. So that maybe challenges, you know,

the value proposition of a true social, but yeah. That's the threat. Does threads do it? Does threads kill it? I mean, I feel like it's getting there. That seems like the most likely candidate. I like blue sky feels more like Twitter, but the reality is like widespread adoption

of any new services tough. It doesn't have the hook. I mean, threads has the Instagram hook. Is that the most likely to sort of obsolete Twitter? I don't think it does it for me yet. It doesn't have the real time stuff that Twitter has. Like if I'm- Yeah, it's kind of abysmal for breaking news.

Very bad. It doesn't do that. If I want to do like a protest and like look at that, I'm going to go to Twitter. I'm not going to go to threads, because I'll see it on threads three days later when it surfaced to me on the page. But I think the prediction here in the next couple of years

is we'll continue to see the splintering of social media. If you want your soccer content, maybe you go to threads. And if you want your political content, maybe go to Blue Sky. And if you want to figure out if there was an earthquake in your neighborhood still, maybe you go to threads. And if you want your political content, maybe you go to Blue Sky. And if you want to figure out if there was an earthquake in your neighborhood, maybe you go to X. So it's exhausting. Yeah, it is. I mean, I'm trying to do it right now

as we promote this book across multiple platforms. And it's a full-time job, it sucks. And there's no central watering hole anymore. Well, the point was, right, the point with these networks was to find one that you felt like was the place for you. Right, isn't that like what Instagram was and what Twitter was, like in the earliest days, you're like, oh, I wanna express myself visually.

Like Instagram's this great platform to like share my, whatever, my life or my photos. Twitter was a place to share your like, these like quick Twitch thoughts you had, right? It was like, oh, I'm thinking, I mean, that is like what Twitter was best for, right? It was like some er quick Twitch thoughts you had. Like, right, it was like, oh, I'm thinking, I mean, that is like what Twitter was best for, right? It was like some errant thought that you had for better or worse.

And you just could just shoot it out into the ether and see how people reacted to it. Sometimes it was great. Sometimes it was like the Justine Sacco, you know, tweet before she got on a plane or whatever. But, okay, well listen. It's calling someone a pedo guy. Right, sometimes it's, you know's logging on at 3 a.m.

and making false accusations about somebody being a pedophile. Well look, the book is terrific, everybody should read it. It is called Character Limit. By the way, who came up with the title of this book? Was that a shared effort? No, it was actually our editor at Penguin Press who came up with the title. And we were a little resistant to it at first.

Really? Yeah, we had kind of locked in on the idea that we wanted to call the book Hellsight because we thought that would be funny. Oh, that's pretty good too. And we got some very gentle and constructive pushback about that and ultimately decided to go with character limits.

So shout out to Will for that one. I mean, Hellsight sounds like a, probably like a horror novel or something, you know? Like- I mean, this is a horror book in some ways. No, it's true, it's true. There's something very horrific about the situation over at Twitter, but Character Limit, it requires a tiny bit of,

you know, cerebral, you know a tiny bit of cerebral, a bit of thinking, but then you're like, oh my God, this could not be, I have to say, when I was like, that's the title, it's very perfect, it works on so many levels. So yeah, hats off to your editor, I think it's terrific. Kate, Ryan, thank you for doing this. The book is, characterit. You can purchase it wherever you get a paper book or an electronic book.

There's an audiobook version, I believe. Ryan, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you either threaded, or what do we say about threads? Posted or tweeted. There's like the audiobook version of the... It's one of my favorite parts. It's our epigraph.

And we have our audiobook reader. Our epigraph is a tweet. It's the reaping and sowing tweet for all the Twitter heads out there, which is... And he reads it out loud. And it's just like the funniest thing I've ever... I like listening to it every day still. And it gives me life.

So that's what you got going for you. No, it's amazing. That's the tarot tweet, right? Like with the guy, the swords. Is that the sword? No, it's the one where it's like me reaping. Oh, right, right, right. Ha ha, fuck yeah. Me.

Right, there is a similar one with like the. Yeah, yeah. There's a similar one with like the tarot card, like with the person with like the swords. It's like they get all these swords, and they're like, why do I have all these swords? It's sort of, in my head they get mixed up. No, the reaping and sowing tweet is a classic.

Anyhow, the book, Ryan, Kate, thank you. The book is terrific, and everybody should go out and read it, and thank you guys so much for coming on the show. Yeah, thanks for having us. Thanks, Josh. Well, that is our show for this week. We'll be back next week with more tomorrow. And as always, I wish you and your family the very best.