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ELON MUSK’S TAKEOVER  
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Katie Harbath
November 14, 2024
Lawfare [[link removed]]

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_ A review of “Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter”
and “Breaking Twitter: Elon Musk and the Most Controversial
Corporate Takeover in History.” _

Elon Musk, Daniel Oberhaus (2018)/Flickr,
[link removed], CC BY 2.0)

 

The end of October marked two years since Elon Musk walked through
Twitter’s doors as its new owner. From the months just before
Musk’s takeover to the present, Musk has taken us on a
roller-coaster ride of sorts, frequently claiming to make decisions in
the name of free speech, while in fact advancing his own power, often
to the cheers of those on the right.

Two new books, Kate Conger and Ryan Mac’s “Character Limit
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and Ben Mezrich’s “Breaking Twitter
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provide even those of us who have followed every twist and turn of the
Musk/Twitter saga with new stories—and perspectives—of what
unfolded and why, each in a distinctive way. Through Musk’s story,
they give readers an important perspective on how tech CEOs have
started to change our information environment, in part by making
political bets to further their business interests. Musk’s purchase
of Twitter and his cozying up to Donald Trump offer a picture of a
modern-day media baron who used this acquisition to catapult himself
into the world of politics in hopes that if Trump won, it will help
his many businesses. These books tell the story of how that came to
be.

_“_Character Limit” offers a longer and more detailed account than
“Breaking Twitter.” Conger and Mac start their story with Musk’s
history of posting on the platform. Then they turn to his indecision
about joining the board, his buying the company, his attempt to back
out of the purchase, and, finally, his transformation of the platform
into something very different from the old Twitter—a new platform
called X. By and large, Conger and Mac take a journalistic,
matter-of-fact approach to recounting what happened.

Mezrich’s book, by contrast, is written for Hollywood. Having had
two earlier books used as the basis for screenplays, Mezrich
characteristically tells the Musk/Twitter story through a cinematic
lens. He spends more time painting pictures of the rooms where things
happened and speculating about the thoughts and emotions of the
characters in the drama than he does simply describing their
actions. 

Documenting a story as it continues to unfold is a challenging task,
especially when you are not the first to report on the saga. Kurt
Wagner
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Schiffer
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and Walter Isaacson
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published accounts of parts of the story before the latest two
contributions appeared.

Wagner covers much more of Twitter’s history in “Battle for the
Bird.” That was always supposed to be the focus of his book, and the
Musk portion of the drama unfolded as Wagner worked on it, so he
covers Musk only toward the end of his account. Schiffer’s
“Extremely Hardcore,” provides a first draft of the early history
of the Musk era at Twitter, but her book appeared before some of the
more recent developments that Conger and Mac describe. Isaacson’s
biography presents an in-depth look at Musk, the man.

These earlier accounts make Conger and Mac’s book a second draft of
the history of Musk at Twitter/X, including coverage of more of the
story after October 2023, which is when Schiffer’s account ends.
Conger and Mac break their version of the drama into three acts:

* Act I: Before Musk makes an offer
* Act II: Musk trying to get out of buying the platform
* Act III: Musk turning Twitter into X

The book’s introduction begins with two anecdotes that foreshadow
central themes. In the first, a data scientist delays his quitting by
a day so that he can tell Musk what he really feels about the
billionaire’s dictatorial running of the platform. The second starts
with Musk’s April 14, 2022, tweet suggesting that people were trying
to thwart him as the takeover unfolded. Once Musk achieved more
complete control, his rapid series of controversial decisions made
clear that Musk was using Twitter not to demonstrate his prowess as a
tech innovator, but to serve his own political and economic interests.
In just a short while, Conger and Mac write, “What was once called
the digital town square is becoming Musk’s mirror.”

Act I gives us more insight into how Jack Dorsey, one of Twitter’s
creators and CEO, courted Musk and supported his takeover. Conger and
Mac set the stage with a brief overview of the content moderation and
political speech challenges Dorsey and the company went through during
and after the 2016 election. Dorsey’s part in Musk’s rise, as
someone who coordinated with Musk throughout the takeover process, is
a vital part of this story that tends to get drowned out by whatever
publicity-grabbing stunt Musk has undertaken lately. Dorsey had great
remorse about how Twitter had evolved, and Conger and Mac outline how
Dorsey thought Musk was the one to fix it all.

In Act II, Conger and Mac do an excellent job of exploring the
challenges that leaders such as Parag Agrawal (the CEO right before
Musk), Bret Taylor (Twitter’s board chair at the time of the
takeover), and Vijaya Gadde (Twitter’s general counsel) had in
shepherding the sale through despite the qualms they had about
Musk’s taking over. These are stories that couldn’t be printed
when they were still at the company and provide much needed context
for the chaos happening both on Musk’s side of the purchase and
inside the company just trying to keep things moving while knowing
they would be fired as soon as he took over.

Conger and Mac’s writing is quick to read as they review everything
from Agrawal’s trying to keep the company afloat while Musk accused
him of not doing any work, Musk’s trying to make massive changes to
the platform—such as allowing anyone to buy a blue verification
check mark mere days before the U.S. midterm elections—to
advertisers leaving the platform in droves.

Act III starts with Musk’s wanting to do code reviews and planning
the first round of layoffs. Conger and Mac go through the efforts to
make people pay for verification, the midterm elections, and the
onboarding of Linda Yaccarino as CEO.

The book ends with a fitting epilogue: the rekindling of Musk’s
relationship with Donald Trump that began when the two met in Florida
in March. Conger and Mac suggest that the two men needed one another
and that Musk saw Trump as a better alternative than Biden at the
time. That meeting of course led to Musk’s eventually endorsing the
former president, spending nearly $200 million backing his campaign,
and even going on the road in person to help him win.

While Conger and Mac do an excellent job of outlining company
leaders’ challenges, they could have better captured the trauma and
emotional toll that Musk put so many people through. Perhaps this is
my bias as a former tech employee who went through her own stresses at
Facebook, now Meta, but these are more than just jobs. The type of
fast-paced change, pressure, and verbal abuse employees may suffer day
after day changes a person.

People do what they can to survive. They make decisions in bad mental
states. They’re attacked for doing their jobs, as Yoel Roth, the
head of trust and safety at Twitter, was by both the Trump
administration and Musk himself, which led Roth to flee his home. 

Conger and Mac cover these stories in the book, but their account
feels too sterile. They fail to convey to the reader how bad Musk made
it for some people.

Mezrich’s book, by contrast, often focuses on people and their
emotions, but in a Hollywood script version. Mezrich makes this clear
on page one when he says the book is a “dramatic narrative” about
Musk’s takeover. He says he recreated scenes and imagined dialogue,
employing elements of satire and creating composite characters.

None of this materially changes Mezrich’s version of the story, but
it does mean that if you are looking for a definitive account of what
happened, “Character Limit”is the better choice. 

Like Conger and Mac, Mezrich opens with an employee story. His is
about Esther Crawford, Twitter’s director of product management, who
went viral after posting a picture of her sleeping at the office in
February 2023. She’s working late in the bunker, trying to keep Musk
from making a decision to declare war on Apple for their fee structure
that would end in disaster. Mezrich notes that Crawford quickly
learned Musk “wasn’t driven by facts or expertise, but by
instincts and intuition.”

Mezrich then takes us on a journey through the eyes of numerous
employees. Mark Ramsey, who was an early employee, thought that by
2020 the company’s internal culture had gone too soft and lost its
way. Jessica Kittery in New York had advertisers wanting to know from
the day it briefly looked like Musk would be joining the board what he
might want to change. We hear more of everything Roth went through,
from the Hunter Biden laptop controversy to Kellyanne Conway calling
him out on television as the person at Twitter deciding what content
was allowed or not, to Musk making false salacious accusations about
Roth that led to his having to flee his home.

Crawford makes appearances throughout, and one story that Mezrich has
in “Breaking Twitter”that Conger and Mac don’t have in
“Character Limit” is an altercation Crawford had with Jay
Sullivan—a product leader at the company—in late October 2022.
Crawford had taken her shot at talking to Musk one on one, and
Sullivan was furious she had gone around the “process” he and
other leaders had created. Mezrich presents the moment as one in which
Crawford realized that old guard leaders such as Sullivan weren’t
relevant anymore and that if she wanted to survive, she needed to
align herself with Musk and his crew. Yet her story ends like so many
people’s at Twitter did—being fired by Musk. Crawford says she
didn’t hate Musk after that but did think he was “maybe the
saddest, loneliest man she’d ever met.”

Mezrich ends his book saying “Elon had broken Twitter, and that in
turn, Twitter had broken Elon”—by tarnishing his reputation as a
business leader. Musk was no longer the lauded innovator and
businessman who sent rockets into space and revolutionized electric
cars. As Mezrich points out, “Twitter wasn’t SpaceX, and the
Twitter platform wasn’t some rocket you could toy with, tinker with,
maybe blow up. Twitter was built around people.” And that is a very
different type of business for someone like Musk to run.

Conger and Mac end theirs with a pointed and telling observation:
“Musk may have convinced himself he bought Twitter to protect the
global town square or build the world’s most important app. But the
truth was much simpler. … He had bought it for himself.”

Conger and Mac’s and Mezrich’s books, like many others on the big
social media platforms, still leave much to explore about the
contradictions that remain in figuring out how to amplify these
platforms’ positive impacts on society while mitigating their
harmful effects. For instance, many books about Facebook/Meta and
other online platforms vilify them for selling ads that can be
microtargeted based on the data people give them by using the
platform. Shoshana Zuboff called it “surveillance capitalism
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Yet, in the Twitter/X story, Musk is vilified for not listening to
advertisers and giving them what they want—such as keeping their
content from appearing next to posts about terrorism, hate speech, and
the like. When do you give companies what they want versus doing what
is good for society? When is it okay to look out for your platform’s
business interests, and when not? What does that mean when you say you
are protecting free expression?

I started this piece by discussing Musk’s claim that his purchase of
Twitter was about protecting free speech. However, as “Character
Limit” and “Breaking Twitter” show (and Musk’s more recent
behavior has confirmed), that is not Musk’s goal. He is a man
desperate for attention and one who wants to do what he wants when he
wants and be accountable to no one. 

Musk’s story continues to unfold, including a vast political chapter
that will likely provide the basis for his own book and many others
after this U.S. election. How will Musk’s takeover of Twitter and
his own participation in support of Trump affect the second Trump
administration’s policies? What impact will the fact that numerous
journalists are no longer tweeting have? Musk claimed he took over the
platform to save free speech. Still, as Mezrich rightly points out,
Musk “could never have launched a rocket built by ‘citizen
engineers,’ the Twitter platform would never be an ultimate source
of Truth without the participation of those who had spent their lives
learning to report the news.” 

Musk thought he could run Twitter better and would be praised for
doing so. While there is no check on his power to make changes to the
platform, he has no power to make people praise him—except those he
pays to do so. As criticism of him continues to grow, he gets wilder.
The question is: How will that affect our democracy, and will it be
the ultimate end of one great platform experiment? These two books
give us a glimpse into the answers to those questions by giving us an
inside look at how Elon Musk makes decisions, his lack of regard for
being held accountable, and his poor business decisions that have
tanked the valuation of the company.

_KATIE HARBATH is CEO of Anchor Change, a technology consulting firm.
A global leader at the intersection of policy, democracy, and
technology, Katie’s been called an “election whisperer to the tech
industry” by Foreign Policy. Her career spans political campaigns,
civil society, and technology. Prior to Anchor Change, Katie spent 10
years at Facebook, where she built and led global teams that managed
elections and helped government and political figures use the social
network._

_LAWFARE keeps you informed about the difficult national security
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