Flipping the Bird: Elon vs Twitter | Assassination Coordinates | 5

0:10Elon Musk had sent Twitter employees an email with an ultimatum. My extremely hardcore way. Or the highway. Many Twitter employees had feared this message, this culture from the very beginning. And now, they had just till the end of the day tomorrow to decide. Do I stay? Or do I go? The vast majority of people were like, what the hell is he thinking? What is he talking about? Zoe Schiffer covers Twitter for Platformer. If you're trying to rally the troops, to me, this is just so not the way to do it. The email quickly caused chaos. Beyond the alarming message, it contained a link to a Google form, which gave only one option.

0:56Yes, I'm in. Twitter employees wondered if the email was even real or if it was spam. And then the transition team, the people that Twitter employees called the goons, followed up and were like, no, this is legit. Please click the link if you want to stay. And so it was kind of mayhem internally. A lot of employees didn't want to stay. A whole bunch of people had not signed the email and they started trying to shut off accounts. And they realized that a lot of people who they really needed at the company were effectively resigning. Elon and the goons quickly realized that they had miscalculated.

1:36His plan had been to keep only the true believers, to get rid of the employees who didn't want to be a part of Elon's Twitter. But even he knew he couldn't run Twitter without some semblance of a workforce. When they realized what they'd done, his advisors started to panic. And so then they had to personally call those people and say like, hey, can you, you know, please reevaluate your decision? Would you consider staying? By the time the Thursday deadline rolled around, Elon's attempt to reset the company after the chaos of the mass layoffs and the disastrous Twitter blue rollout had just turned into another mess.

2:13The New York Times is reporting that as many as 1 ,200 employees resigned this week. Now, sources tell CNBC Twitter's headquarters and all of its offices will be closed until Monday, and engineers and other employees posted goodbye messages to group chats. As questions mount over Twitter's future, Elon Musk offered little reassurance he has a permanent plan, tweeting, what should Twitter do next? One ally stuck with Elon through the continued chaos. Jack Dorsey. He tweeted out his belief in Twitter's future under Elon. Twitter will survive and thrive, but it'll take some time. When asked if Twitter's survival depended on a change in management, Jack was unequivocal.

2:56Yes, it going public to private was critical, and I'm very grateful for that. With 1 ,200 more employees gone, Twitter's workforce was about two-thirds smaller than it had been just a few weeks earlier. People both inside the company and out were now worried that the site was going to break. Possibly even that night. The hashtag RIP Twitter trended, flooding timelines with sarcastic memes, earnest eulogies, and angry shots at Elon. It's been a pleasure tweeting with y 'all the past 13 years. Elon always thinks he's the smartest person in the room. He's about to be standing in an empty room, and it still won't be true.

3:39I just tried sending a tweet to someone by a DM, and it sent the wrong one. Twitter's already starting to fail. RIP Twitter. Reports circulated about internal chaos, that certain teams critical to the site had resigned en masse. There were unconfirmed stories of employees getting stuck in the parking garage after their badges had been turned off. But it turned out reports of Twitter's death were greatly exaggerated. Everyone was like, this is it, this is the end, goodbye everyone. And I looked at that and was like, okay, clearly a lot of these people have never worked in a tech company, Like, this isn't how tech companies work.

4:19They do so much work over the years to make the sites stable so that it can operate for a really long time without that many people. Twitter did not die on that November night. But with what happened next, some people may wish it had. Because soon after Elon lost control of his workforce, he took his chaotic reign directly towards the users.

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6:56From Wondery, I'm David Brown, the host of Business Wars, and this is Flipping the Bird, Elon vs. Twitter. This is Episode 5, Assassination Coordinates.

7:33It had been just over two weeks since Elon Musk sent his email demanding his employees be extremely hardcore. His deputies had begun asking employees to refer their friends. He needed more people to keep key functions going. Now, Elon was boarding his$70 million Gulfstream jet in Oakland, heading to Washington, D.C. Elon, can you hear us? Awesome. Elon, can you hear us? I think he's up. It takes a while to load. Can you hear me now? Yeah, I can hear you now. Fantastic. Sorry, guys. I think there's maybe some glitches in the spaces that we need to fix. I'll dig into it next week. Elon had been extremely busy, barely sleeping.

8:19But he didn't rest. He decided to spend most of the flight chatting with users on Twitter spaces. I do have a lot of shit going on right now. And also, I've got to make sure Twitter is stable from a financial standpoint and is not losing tons of money and going bankrupt. So, you know, we're juggling a lot of things here, to say the least. The connection wasn't great, but it was Elon's own satellite internet system, Starlink, that was allowing him to participate. At its peak, 100 ,000 users crowded into the virtual room to listen and interact directly with Elon. I was just saying how cool it is that you talked to us from your private jet.

8:59We really appreciate it. It's like a typical Elon moment. And we're just all in awe about you taking these risks to your business and to yourself to fight for free speech. Elon had spent the past couple of weeks making Twitter his version of the free speech haven he wanted it to be. Despite the threat it posed to his already dwindling advertising revenue, Elon reinstated Donald Trump's Twitter account after running a snap poll that came out in favor of the former president. But Trump had declined to return to Twitter, preferring to keep posting on the platform he owned, Truth Social. When Twitter had allowed Kanye West to return to the site just before the takeover, Elon had enthusiastically tweeted, Welcome back to Twitter, my friend.

9:48his friend who had been suspended for posting anti-Semitic tweets. But just two nights before this Twitter Spaces event, Elon had to ban him again after Kanye posted an image of swastikas. I think it's important that people know, okay, that was my decision. At some point, you have to say, what is incitement to violence? Because that is against the law in the U.S. Turns out, these kind of content moderation decisions weren't easy. I think, you know, posting swastikas is an incitement to violence. I personally wanted to punch Kanye, so that was definitely inciting me to violence. He reminded his audience that running Twitter and defending free speech was putting him in danger.

10:29Frankly, the risk of something bad happening to me, of even literally being shot, is quite significant. I'm definitely not going to be, you know, doing any open-air car parades, let me put it that way. Maybe he was referring to the fact that he was in the midst of his biggest push yet to promote his idea of free speech and transparency. Elon had recently given a few hand-picked journalists access to Twitter's internal documents so they could see how the old Twitter had made content moderation decisions that supposedly suppressed conservative voices and amplified liberal ones. The journalists claimed to reveal how Twitter had worked inappropriately with government agencies to ban certain content.

11:11The expose was called the Twitter files. You know, on the Twitter file stuff, I mean, the idea here is simply to come clean on everything that has happened in the past in order to build public trust for the future. I think that's essential. Like, why should people believe Twitter in the future if Twitter does not come clean about the past? The night before, one of the journalists involved, Matt Taibbi, had tweeted out the revelations. Here's Taibbi talking with Maria Bartiromo on Fox News. I think the major revelation of the Twitter file so far is that we've discovered an elaborate bureaucracy of what you might call public-private censorship, typically through the DHS and the FBI, but these requests were coming from basically every agency in the government.

11:57and in many cases, Twitter is complying. Taibbi had unspooled these revelations over 41 tweets several minutes apart. He shared screenshots from emails and Slack messages that showed how Twitter employees came to the decision that the New York Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop violated their policy against posting hacked materials and banned the link. Erin Wu covers Twitter for the information, and she had watched the tweets slowly trickle in. It's essentially a look at how content moderation was happening within Twitter, using a lot of Slack messages and internal emails and things that are really interesting, like things that do in a way offer kind of an unprecedented look into how a major social media company is making these decisions.

12:47On Twitter spaces, Elon shared what he believed the Twitter files uncovered. It's just obvious that there's been a lot of controlled information, suppression of information, including things that affected elections. But to other observers, it was something else entirely. It ended up being something that gave some interesting insights into the ways that Twitter employees were making these decisions. But I don't think that it was something that led to the kind of bombshell that he was hoping for. there was like no evidence of collusion or anything like that. Rather than a smoking gun, observers were divided over what the files showed or didn't show.

13:29Some, like Elon, saw collusion between politicians and content moderators, a pattern of suppression, while others raised suspicions about Elon's handpicked selection of journalists and wondered what the fuss was all about. They saw a company engaging in the tough and messy conversations about what content moderation looked like in practice. The rollout of the Twitter files, predictably, included some missteps. There were a few cases where I think we should have excluded some email addresses. Yep, names and email addresses of Twitter employees had appeared all over unredacted documents, doxing them and putting them at risk.

14:11And perhaps most embarrassing for Elon, That included Jack Dorsey's private email. Sorry, Jack. Jack at Pizza is now, you know, it might be in a different email address. So we often need to not have email addresses in there. But it wasn't sharing his email address that had rubbed Jack the wrong way about the project. If the goal is transparency to build trust, why not just release everything without filter and let people judge for themselves, including all discussions around current and future actions. Make everything public now. Jack called Elon out for doing the very thing he railed against, cherry-picking and gatekeeping information.

14:56The thing about the Twitter files is that the way that they were rolled out and the writers that he chose to work with him on this turned the release of the files themselves into this really partisan event where it was hard to know what was being released compared to the bigger picture of what was going on because of kind of the selective nature of how that information was released. But the crowd on Spaces was appreciative of the Twitter files. And Elon. You know, there are a lot of people in the last decade that have lost hope because what's happening in politics, what's happening in the media, There's so much frustration.

15:41And I think the most important thing that you've done here, Elon, with your steps that you are taking, is to give people hope again. Well, great. I mean, I'm really glad to hear that. And like I said, I'll do my best here. A lot of us have been fighting this culture war for free speech, basically. And, you know, I think a lot of people have lost hope because they didn't see anyone caring about it. Yeah, I mean, I'm like, I'm like sort of worried about the future of civilization. You know, just like, are we headed in a good direction? The overarching goal here is that, on balance, that Twitter be a force for good for the future of civilization.

16:21The public was sharply divided on Elon's approach to free speech on Twitter. Like so much in America today, it really depended on your point of view. On Twitter spaces, fans of Elon were praising him for being on the front lines of the culture wars. Inside the Chase Center in San Francisco was a different story Less than two weeks later another front-line combatant in today's culture wars was on stage Dave Chappelle co-headlining a show with fellow comedian Chris Rock 18 ,000 people were packed into the arena laughing at edgy jokes about cancel culture, politics and of course how Rock felt about getting slapped by Will Smith at the Oscars As the show was nearing the three-hour mark in the middle of his set, Chappelle brought out a special guest.

17:13Make some noise for the richest man in the world.

17:20Elon strutted onto the stage in black pants and a Twitter t-shirt. There was a smattering of cheers and applause, but the boos kept growing. Hey, Dave. Elon awkwardly paced the stage, following Dave Chappelle around with a mic held limply in his hand. It sounds like some of them people you fired are in the audience.

17:45Anytime Elon tried to talk, they drowned him out.

17:52Dave, what should I say? Don't say nothing. Okay. It'll only spoil the moment. Do you hear that sound, Elon? That's the sound of pending still unrest.

18:08Chappelle tried to keep the show moving, making some jokes about how the people booing had terrible seats. But the heckling wouldn't stop. After what felt like an eternity, Elon thanked Chappelle for having him and headed off stage. I'm at best! Yes, he shouted Chappelle's famous line, I'm rich, bitch, on his way out. If Elon was affected by being booed on stage for almost 10 whole minutes, he didn't take it as a sign to slow down the pursuit of his vision for a, quote-unquote, free Twitter. His next target, Twitter's Trust and Safety Council. This was an outside group of experts that had advised the company on how to address issues like hate speech and abuse on the site.

18:53The council worked as volunteers. Marcin de Kaminski was a member of that council and is the director of security and innovation at a human rights organization in Sweden. The Trust and Safety Council played an important role for making the platform safer because part of the conversation that we had with Twitter was always on looking at the most vulnerable users that they have on their platforms. Marchin had firsthand experience on how vital Twitter's role was in protecting those vulnerable users. His organization worked with activists in some of the most repressive countries in the world. Twitter had been a bastion of activity among human rights and democracy activists.

19:37Think Arab Spring. Twitter invited people like Marchin onto its Trust and Safety Council. It sought their feedback and changed their product to serve their needs. One women's rights activist Marchin had worked with in an East African country had her address posted on Twitter. A literal mob had formed outside her gates. A journalist he worked with in Central Asia was detained by the government, who then took over his account to identify and target the journalist's network. People like colleagues, sources, and family. Both times, Marchin reached out to his contacts at Twitter, who had immediately sprung into action, blocking accounts and taking down the offending posts.

20:20They did it urgently because they understood that this is a matter of not only a social media account, but actually a matter of life and death, possibly. Now, when Marchand reached out to his contacts at Twitter, no one responded. And Twitter had repeatedly pushed back the date on the next Trust and Safety Council meeting. First, a week, then a month. The week before, three key members of the council resigned because of Musk. In a press release, they said, It is clear from research evidence that, contrary to claims by Elon Musk, the safety and well-being of Twitter's users are on the decline. They pointed to reports that showed a clear spike in hate speech since Elon had taken over, particularly slurs against black people and gay men, as well as a rise in anti-Semitic posts.

21:11So as Marcin was getting ready for the first meeting of what was left of the Trust and Safety Council since Elon took over, he was anxious. Since Elon Musk took over the leadership of Twitter, he has been very clear on the fact that the Trust and Safety Council was about to be reformed. Exactly how, we didn't know initially. But less than an hour before the meeting. We got an email saying that the meeting was canceled, Trust and Safety Council was dissolved. We were not prepared to have this drastic turnover in the relation with Twitter. And it also worries us because the activists that we work with, they are still using Twitter as one of their main platforms for advocacy, for coordination and for organizing.

22:01By the end of the following week, almost everyone Marchand had worked with at Twitter was gone. Elon was rapidly removing the guardrails that kept users safe on Twitter. This, to Elon, was what a free and open town square should look like. But suddenly, when he felt like he was a target, he took a very different approach to regulating free speech on Twitter. He'd take care of it by himself.

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25:26The Twitter account ElonJet had bothered Elon for years. ElonJet, as the name implies, tracked the comings and goings of Elon Musk's personal jet. It was run by a 20-year-old college student named Jack Sweeney, who was a big fan of Elon's. And the account was a big hit with other fans of Elon's. But Elon hated it so much, he'd once even tried to pay the kid who ran it$5 ,000 to take it down. It was sort of a high-profile account and one that had interacted with Elon and also directly seemed to be about him. BuzzFeed senior tech reporter Katie Notopoulos was at home on the morning of December 14th, doing what any good internet culture writer would, scrolling through Twitter.