Flipping the Bird: Elon vs Twitter | Tweets Aren't Loading Right Now | 6

0:12Elon Musk walked into a Twitter HQ conference room full of engineers huddled together. It was just five days before Super Bowl 57. The Eagles were facing off against the Chiefs, and Super Bowl Sunday was reliably one of Twitter's busiest days of the year. Elon had owned the company for about four months now. In addition to losing roughly three-quarters of the workforce, he'd ordered a major server to be shut down, lost almost all of the site's reliability team, and most of HQ was worrying about whether or not the site would buckle under the massive traffic on the big day. But Elon was here to find out what was causing a different problem.

0:54Why were fewer people seeing his tweets? Elon had close to 130 million followers. He was Twitter's second most followed user after former President Barack Obama. Elon was also one of its most prolific power users, firing off an average of one tweet per hour. One of the features he'd insisted on rolling out was a view counter so users could see how many people saw a tweet. And Elon didn't like what he was seeing. Engagement with his tweets was dropping fast. He was sure that there was a bug in the algorithm that was suppressing his tweets. And he wasn't ruling out the idea that one of his own employees had introduced that bug to sabotage his popularity.

1:43He'd assigned some of Twitter's best engineers to solve the problem, and they were here today to give him answers. As Elon settled into his seat, an engineer stood up. He was a soft-spoken man and one of the highest-ranking engineers left at the company. He walked Elon through what they had found. One possibility was the site was glitching because of the removal of the server. But the engineer told Elon there was a more likely reason for the drop-off. People just weren't as interested in him anymore. The engineer pulled up a graph of Google Trends that showed searches for Elon Musk had peaked in April 2022 when he'd announced that he was buying Twitter.

2:28But now, almost a year later, interest was down, way down. His Twitter engagement was following the same trajectory. It wasn't a broken algorithm or internal sabotage. The engineer smiled, happy to have figured out the answer. Essentially, he was saying to Elon, Twitter users, they're just not into you like they were before. Elon's hands shook with fury. He stared at the engineer for a moment. And then... He just says, you're fired, you're fired. Zoe Schiffer from Platformer talked to several people with direct knowledge of what happened in the room that day. One of the things that we've heard from people is that you don't respond to Elon with the right answer.

3:15You respond with the least fireable answer. And unfortunately, this person responded with what he thought was the right answer. The engineer didn't say a word. He just walked out of the room.

3:32Elon had fired one of his top remaining engineers in a fit of rage, which sent a clear message to the other engineers working on fixing Elon's engagement issue. The Super Bowl was fast approaching and Twitter was operating on a shoestring. But as Twitter braced for the back and forth over the big game, Elon seemed far less focused on that than whether his own tweets would soar above the crowd.

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6:13From Wondery, I'm David Brown, the host of Business Wars, and this is Flipping the Berg, Elon versus Twitter. This is the sixth and final episode. Tweets aren't loading right now.

6:31I've tried my very best, I guess. Put me on a pedestal, but I'll only disappoint you. Tell me I'm exceptional, I promise to exploit you.

6:57Super Bowl 57 starts now.

7:05Elon Musk made his way into State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, dressed in a black t-shirt and jeans. His young son was perched on his right hip. He was one of 70 ,000 football fans packing the stands to watch the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs battle it out for the championship, with another 100-plus million watching the big game at home. The Chiefs won the coin toss. They've deferred. The Eagles will receive. Here we go. The Chiefs kicker sent the ball sailing into the end zone. And so the Eagles will start on their own 25-yard line. Elon watched the action from a skybox high above the field.

7:49He sat next to the head of News Corp, 92-year-old Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch was enjoying a hot dog and a photo op. Elon had spent a fair amount of time since buying Twitter, waging an increasing war against mainstream liberal media. So the pairing was notable. Elon looked confident and relaxed, and for good reason. Before the game began, he had already scored a major victory. After months of scaring off advertisers with his policy changes to Twitter and his own rash behavior, he had finally started to lure some back. using the Super Bowl as enticement. Erin Wu of The Information covers Twitter. There's a really big push to sell these ads in Super Bowl Sunday because they were very high profile.

8:39Elon held a fire sale, slashing prices, offering free ad space, making some promises to keep ads away from hateful content. His efforts worked. He convinced Pepsi to keep their$3 million in ads and sold another$2.4 million to Anheuser-Busch. So they were able to score some big deals, and this seemed like a good sign for the ad business. And for all the threats of people leaving Twitter after Elon bought it, there were a whole lot of users on the site that Super Bowl Sunday. President Joe Biden posted one of the day's most shared tweets. As your president, I'm not picking favorites. As Jill Biden's husband, fly eagles fly.

9:24And as the Chiefs tied the game in the first quarter, Elon sent off a tweet. Go Eagles! He included multiple American flag emojis with his declaration of support. Actress Kerry Washington tweeted that she was tuning in, but not for the game. Ready, set, Rihanna. She wasn't the only one. For millions, the halftime show was the show. Pop music superstar Rihanna was set to perform live for the first time in five years. Twitter bubbled with speculation. Super Bowl halftime shows usually have an unannounced special guest or two join the main act. Who joined Rihanna this year? The National Football League welcomes you to the Apple Music Super Bowl 57 halftime show.

10:15Rihanna appeared standing on top of an eliminated platform swaying 60 feet above the ground. Below her, an army of 280 backup dancers. She was dressed in a baggy red jumpsuit layered over a skin-tight red bodysuit. The camera zoomed in close. Rihanna stood still, the microphone poised next to her lips. Her chin angled down, her eyes sultry. As soon as she started singing, the camera went wide. Rihanna stood wide-legged and rubbed her belly. Was that a baby bump? This was the type of cultural moment Twitter was made for. The site lit up. Everyone just Googled Rihanna pregnant, right? Sex appeal, Rihanna has while wearing a baggy chucks.

11:03I was just going to say, Rihanna's performance was... I hope Rihanna wins this super ballgame. Posts flying, people bouncing off each other's observations. Even people who weren't watching Rihanna perform could feel like they were part of the moment. But then... Did Rihanna's perfect performance overwhelm Twitter? Not re-re-breaking Twitter, lol. All I'm seeing are tweets are not loading now error messages. It was the second outage in four days. Just a few days earlier, the site had gone down for an hour and a half. Twitter employees had scrambled to restore the site. Elon had sent out a company-wide email directing employees to stop working on any new features and to make stability during the Super Bowl the top priority.

11:55But the Super Bowl was here, and Twitter was failing at a crucial moment. Rihanna was performing pregnant, and users couldn't tweet about it. Advertisers were losing views they had paid for. Employees scrambled once again to fix the site. They managed to do so in under 30 minutes, but the outage was long enough for the world to see that the platform was unstable. And yet, reporter Zoe Schiffer says that even as the site failed on Twitter's most important day of the entire year, Elon was still focused on another problem. He's kind of distracted because he sees right away that his tweet about the Eagles is doing very poorly compared to Joe Biden's.

12:43To add insult to injury, the Eagles ended up losing to the Chiefs. And this is like a double loss for Elon Musk because he doesn't like picking the losing team and he doesn't like losing personally and both of these things have now happened. Elon furiously deleted his tweet and then got the hell out of Arizona. Elon boarded his private jet and headed straight to San Francisco. He reached out to his cousin, James Musk, who had been inside Twitter recently working as Elon's personal fixer. He needed him to rally the troops. Just hours after the game ended, James sent out an urgent Slack message at 2.36 a.m.

13:24to all Twitter employees. He's like, hey, we're dealing with this engagement issue. This is like super high priority. If you know how to code, essentially get your ass in the office. Roughly 80 engineers heeded James Musk's call, arriving at HQ bleary-eyed in the wee hours of the morning. They are told Elon Musk's engagement is not what it should be, and this is a massive problem, and you need to fix the problem. And ideally, you need to fix it tonight. There was only one way to guarantee Elon higher engagement. Reprogram the algorithm. Twitter's algorithm has heuristics in place that stop you as a user from seeing the same person's account show up all over your feed.

14:11So when you open the app, you shouldn't see like an entire feed of my tweets as much as you'd want to. You would see a variety of different tweets. The engineers worked through the night to reprogram the algorithm to make sure Elon's tweets outranked everyone else's on the platform. And they do a second thing, which is they apply what's called a power user multiplier. It's a little boost that will essentially ensure that both his tweets and his replies show up very prominently. The effects were immediate. Monday morning rolls around. We all open our apps. And what do we see? An entire feed of Elon Musk.

14:51Like his replies to obscure right wing accounts are showing up at the top of the For You tab. The response was swift and negative. People were like, my man is paying$44 billion just to get his tweets boosted. But Zoe's sources told her that Elon was thrilled. He thought it was super funny, both that his tweets were everywhere and that people were really pissed that his tweets were everywhere. Elon registered his joy with a meme, an image of a blonde woman pulling back the hair of a brunette and force-feeding her milk. He labeled the blonde Elon's tweets and the brunette was labeled Twitter, as if he was force-feeding his tweets to every Twitter user.

15:34Eventually, even Elon seemed to realize he'd gone too far. A few days later, engineers rolled back the multiplier they had added to his account, so his tweets were no longer as dominant across everyone's feed. But the fundamental change was still there. Twitter was now hard-coded to make sure its owner was always at the center of the town square. It was kind of scary, you know, when you have the person who literally has the biggest megaphone on a platform who's now also reconfiguring the megaphone to make sure his voice is always the loudest. That's not a great situation for a social platform, particularly one that plays an important part in the civic discourse globally.

16:19Elon wasn't only focused on his popularity. He was continuing to push the team to roll out all kinds of new features, even if he was doing so haphazardly. The lack of content moderation was making the site unpredictable and even toxic for many advertisers. But Twitter was also doing things to woo advertisers back. Advertising was likely to be Twitter's main way to make money for the foreseeable future. And Elon seemed to acknowledge that.

16:52Twitter had launched with a single tweet from co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey. Jack had transformed it from a startup curiosity to a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company. When Elon proposed taking Twitter private, Jack had been his biggest champion, calling Elon the singular solution to take over Twitter. Jack believed that Twitter no longer being public would set it free. But by April of 2023, Jack was ready to admit that things with Elon and Twitter hadn't turned out the way he hoped. When a user asked him whether he still believed that Elon was the right leader for Twitter, Jack responded, No.

17:37Nor do I think he acted right after realizing his timing was bad. Nor do I think the board should have forced the sale. It all went south. I think he should have walked away. And the kicker? Jack's response wasn't a tweet. And the user who asked him wasn't on Twitter. Jack had already moved to posting on a rival platform that had sprung up called Blue Sky, a platform Jack helped create and invested in. Everyone from Jack Dorsey to Tesla investors were ready to see Elon move on from being CEO of Twitter. He'd promised back in December he would step down and find a replacement. The question was, would he be able to step away?

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21:21The World Government Summit is like Davos, if a lot hotter and drier. It's an annual gathering of politicians, business leaders and celebrities in Dubai. This year, featured guests included the president of Egypt, the actor Idris Elba and, you guessed it, Elon Musk. Ilan beamed in via satellite, his face appearing on a giant screen on the main stage. It was just three days after the Super Bowl, and the moderator asked the question on many people's minds. You've been running Twitter as the chairman, as the owner, as the CEO, and that takes a lot of time. Did you identify a CEO and when you are going to hire him?

22:06Well, I think I need to stabilize the organization and just make sure it's in a financially healthy place and that the product roadmap is clearly laid out. So, I don't know, I'm guessing probably towards the end of this year would be good timing to find someone else to run the company, because I think it should be in a stable position around the end of this year. Ilan also talked about his view of how free speech should work on Twitter. Obviously that varies a lot by jurisdiction, but I think in general social media companies should adhere to the laws of countries and not try to put a thumb on the scale beyond the laws of countries.

22:52So I think that's the general idea, is just to reflect the values of the people as opposed to imposing the values of essentially San Francisco and Berkeley, which are somewhat of a niche ideology as compared to the rest of the world. But Twitter was, I think, doing a little too much to impose a niche San Francisco-Berkeley ideology on the world. So, you know, I thought it was important for the future of civilization to try to correct that thumb on the scale, if you will. But it was looking more and more like Elon's Twitter was just putting the thumb on the other side of the political scale. Hate speech was on the rise.

23:44Anti-Semitic, racist, and homophobic comments. Elon believed that unless it incited direct violence, this kind of speech deserved to be tolerated on the platform. In an interview with the BBC, Elon loudly protested the idea that hate speech had risen under his watch, despite multiple reports from reputed research institutions saying that it had. I'm just curious. I'm trying to say what you mean by hateful content. I'm asking for specific examples. and you just said that if something is slightly sexist, that's hateful content. Does that mean that it should be bad? You've asked me whether my feed, whether it's got less or more.

24:28I'd say it's got slightly more. That's why I'm asking for examples. Can you name one example? I honestly don't. Honestly, I don't. You can't name a single example. I'll tell you why, because I don't actually use that for your feed anymore because I just don't particularly like it. Actually, a lot of people are quite similar. I only look at my followers. You said you've seen more hateful content, but you can't name a single example, not even one. He also made a surprising announcement. He had finally found a new CEO. Maybe Elon was ready to take a step back and let someone else take the reins. My dog, Floki, is the CEO.

25:04He's taken over. His dog. dog. Elon had tweeted this out in February, but now he was doubling down. Okay, so you said that you were going to stand down as the chief executive, right? Okay. I can tell you, I'm not the CEO of Twitter. My dog is the CEO of Twitter. Okay. Have you got any... It's a great dog. Other than the dog. He's very alert and it's hard to get anything by him. Elon did acknowledge that he'd made multiple mistakes, like his decision to shut down one of the main servers. I thought the service centers were redundant, but there were, in fact, a lot of things that were hard-coded to this one service center.

25:48So when we shut it down, we actually, it was quite catastrophic. We lost a lot of functionality, which sort of really rushed to put it back. He also publicly admitted that he only went through with the sale because he thought he'd lose in court against Twitter. So then you changed your mind again and decided to buy it. Did you do that? Did you do that because... Right. Did you do that because you thought that a court would make you do that? Yes. Right. Yes, that is the reason. Right. So you were still trying to get out of there, and then you just were advised by lawyers, look, you're going to have to buy this.

26:24Yes. And he admitted that the past six months had been hard, likely harder than he expected. I'd say the pain level of Twitter has been extremely high. This hasn't been some sort of hearty. It's been really quite a stressful situation the last several months. But I think I dare that it should have been done. I think were there many mistakes made along the way? Of course. It was clear that he'd made some miscalculations in buying the site. He'd overpaid, for one thing. He'd underestimated how hard actually running Twitter would be for another. He'd thought that if he could land rockets on barges in the middle of the ocean, he could run a social media platform.