Twitter’s Pre-Musk Plans Mirrored Elon’s Vision—Until He Abandoned, Trashed Or Ignored Them

Failures

from the so-much-missed-opportunity dept

Today, the new book by NY Times reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, comes out. If you’re at all interested in what went down, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s a well-written, deeply researched book with all sorts of details about the lead-up to the acquisition, the acquisition itself, and the aftermath of Elon owning Twitter.

Even if you followed the story closely as it played out (as I did), the book is a worthwhile read in multiple ways. First, it’s pretty incredible to pull it all together in a single book. There was so much craziness happening every day that it’s sometimes difficult to take a step back and take in the larger picture. This book gives readers a chance to do just that.

But second, and more important, there are plenty of details broken by the book, some of which are mind-boggling. If you want to read a couple of parts that have been published, both the NY Times and Vanity Fair have run excerpts. The NY Times one covers Elon’s infatuation with “relaunching” Twitter Blue as a paid verification scheme a week after he took over. The Vanity Fair one looks at the actual closing of the deal and how chaotic it was, including Elon coming up $400 million short and demanding that Twitter just give him the money to cover the cost of closing the deal.

Both excerpts give you a sense of the kinds of amazing stories told in the book.

But as I read an advance copy of the book, two things stood out to me. The first was Elon’s near total lack of understanding of the concept of Chesterton’s Fence. The second was how much the old regime at Twitter was already trying to do almost everything that Elon claimed he wanted to do. But as soon as he took over, he was so sure (1) that the old regime were complete idiots and (2) that he could reason his way into solving social media, that he not only ignored what people were telling him, he actively assumed they were trying to sabotage him, and did away with anyone who could be helpful.

Elon rips out some fences

If you’re unaware of the concept of Chesterton’s Fence, it’s that you shouldn’t remove something (such as a fence) if you don’t understand why it was put there in the first place. Over and over in the book, we see Elon dismiss all sorts of ideas, policies, and systems that were in place at Twitter without even caring to find out why they were there. Often, he seems to assume things were done for the dumbest of all reasons, but never bothered to understand why they were actually done. Indeed, he so distrusted legacy Twitter employees that he assumed most were lying to him or trying to sabotage him.

It’s perhaps not that surprising to see why he would trust his own instincts, not that it makes it smart. With both Tesla and SpaceX, Elon bucked the conventional wisdom and succeeded massively. In both cases, he did things that many people said were impossible. And if that happens to you twice and makes you the world’s wealthiest person, you can see how you might start assuming that whenever people suggest that something is a bad idea or impossible, you should trust your gut over what people are telling you.

But the point of Chesterton’s Fence is not that you should never do things differently or never remove policies or technology that is in place. The point is that you should understand why they’re there. Elon never bothers to take that tiny step, and it’s a big part of his downfall.

In Character Limit, we see that Elon has almost no actual intellectual curiosity about social media. He has no interest in understanding how Twitter worked or why certain decisions were made. Propped up by a circle of sycophants and yes-men, he assumes that the previous regime at Twitter must have been totally stupid, and therefore there is no reason to listen to anything they had to say.

It is stunning how in story after story in the book, Elon has zero interest in understanding why anything works the way it does. He is sure that his own instincts, which are clouded by his unique position on the platform with tens of millions of followers, represent everyone’s experience.

He’s quite sure that his own instincts can get him to the right answers. This includes thinking he could (1) double advertising revenue in a few years (when he’s actually driven away over 80% of it) and (2) eclipse even that erroneously predicted increased advertising revenue by getting millions of people to pay for verification. In actuality, as the book details, a tiny fraction of users are willing to pay, and it’s bringing in just a few million dollars per quarter, doing little to staunch the losses of billions of dollars in advertising that Elon personally drove away.

The stories in the book are jaw-dropping. People who try to explain reality to him are fired. The people who stick around quickly learn the only thing to do is to lie to him and massage his ego. And thus, the book is full of stories of Elon ripping out the important pillars of what had been Twitter and then being perplexed when nothing works properly anymore.

He seems even more shocked that tons of people don’t seem to love him for his blundering around.

Old Twitter was already planning on doing what Elon wanted, but way better

Perhaps this is somewhat related to the last point, but the book details multiple ways in which Parag Agrawal, who had just taken over from Jack Dorsey a few months earlier, was already looking to do nearly everything Elon publicly claimed he wanted to do with Twitter.

When Elon first announced the deal to buy Twitter, I suggested a few (unlikely, but possible) ways in which Elon could actually improve Twitter. First up was that by taking the company private, Elon could remove Twitter from the whims of activist investors who were more focused on the short-term than the long-term.

The book goes into great detail about how much activist investors created problems for both Dorsey and Agrawal, pre-Musk. Specifically, their revenue and user demands actually made it somewhat more difficult to put in place a long-term vision.

In my original post, I talked about continuing Twitter’s actual commitment to free speech, which meant fighting government attempts to censor information (not just when you disagreed with the political leaders).

But beyond that, there were things like further investing in and supporting Bluesky (see disclaimer)* and its ATprotocol. After all, Elon claimed that he wanted to “open source” the algorithm.

Moving to an open protocol like ATProtocol would have not just allowed the open sourcing of the recommendation algorithm, it would have opened up the ability for anyone to create their own algorithm, both for recommendations and for moderation. Instead, that’s all happening on the entirely independent Bluesky app, which really only exists because Elon threw away Twitter’s deal to work with Bluesky.

Furthermore, the book reveals that well before Elon came on the scene, Parag and other top execs at the company were working on something called Project Saturn, which was discussed a bit in Kurt Wagner’s earlier book on this topic, but which is explained in more detail here.

The book reveals that Parag very much agreed with Elon (and Jack) that expecting companies to constantly completely remove problematic content was not a very effective solution.

So they created a plan to basically rearchitect everything around “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach.” Ironically, this is the very same motto that Elon claimed to embrace soon after taking over the company (and after firing Parag).

But Parag and others at Twitter had already been working on a system to operationalize that very idea. The plan was to use different “levels” and “circles” in which users who were following the rules would have their content eligible to be promoted to varying degrees within the algorithm. The more you violated the site’s rules, you would move to further and further outer layers/rings of the system (which is where the Project Saturn name came from). This would lead to less “reach,” but also less of a need for Twitter to fully remove accounts or tweets.

It was a big rethinking of how social media could work and how it could support free speech. In reading about it in the book, it sounds like exactly what Elon said he wanted. A small team within Twitter, pushed by Parag’s vision, had been working on it since way before Elon purchased his shares and started the takeover process. According to the book, even as Elon caused such a mess in the summer of 2022 trying to back out of the deal, Parag kept pushing the team to move forward with the idea.

Once Elon took over, it appears that a few remaining people at the company tried to show him Project Saturn and explain to him how it would match the ideals he had talked about.

But Elon ignored them, tossed out all the work they had done on it, and just randomly started unbanning people he thought belonged back on the platform without any plan on how to deal with those users if they started causing problems (and driving away advertisers). He assumed that his new verification plan would solve both the revenue issues for the company and all moderation issues.

Even the idea that Twitter was too bloated with excess employees and a lack of vision seemed to be part of Agrawal’s plans. Before Elon had made his move, the book reveals that Agrawal had drawn up plans to lay off approximately 25% of the company and greatly streamline everything with a focus on building out certain lines of business and users. He did move to lay off many senior leaders as part of that streamlining, though it wasn’t as clearly explained at the time what the larger plan was. Elon’s effort to buy Twitter outright (and then back out of the deal) forced Agrawal to put the layoff plans on hold, out of a fear that Elon would view those layoffs as an attempt to sabotage the company.

It’s truly striking how much of what Elon claimed he wanted to do, Parag and his exec team were already doing. They were making things more open, transparent, and decentralized with Bluesky. They were decreasing the reliance on “takedowns” as a trust & safety mechanism with Saturn. They were betting big on “freedom of speech, not reach” with Saturn. They were fighting for actual free speech with legal actions around the globe. They were cutting employee bloat.

But the company was doing all of those things thoughtfully and deliberately, with a larger strategy behind it.

As the book details, Elon came in and not only tore down Chesterton Fences everywhere he could, he dismissed, ignored, or cut loose all of those other projects that would have taken him far along the path he claimed he wanted to go.

So, now he’s left with a site that has trouble functioning, has lost nearly all of its revenue, and is generally seen as a laughingstock closed system designed just to push Elon’s latest political partisan brain farts, rather than enabling the world’s conversation.

Of course, in the wake of all that destruction, it has enabled things like Bluesky to spring forth entirely unrelated to Twitter, and to put some of this into practice. Just this weekend, Bluesky passed 10 million users, helped along by Elon’s (again) hamfisted fight with Brazil, which (like so many other things Elon) may have a good reason at its core (fighting against secretive government demands), but was done in the dumbest way possible.

If there’s one thing that is painfully clear throughout the book, it is that Elon was correct that there were all sorts of ways that Twitter could be more efficient, more open, and less strict in takedowns. But he handled each in the worst way possible and destroyed what potential there was for the site.

Later today on the podcast, I’ll have an interview with Kate Conger about the book and Elon where we talk some more about all of this.

* As I’ve said before, I’m now on the board of Bluesky, which wouldn’t have been necessary if Elon hadn’t immediately cut Bluesky free from Twitter upon taking over the company.

Filed Under: character limit, chesterton fences, content moderation, elon musk, free speech, kate conger, parag agrawal, project saturn, ryan mac, social media
Companies: bluesky, twitter, x