Elon Musk’s Destruction of Twitter Is The Ultimate Reason To Vote Against Trump

Monday’s feature of Barry's Substack is shared for everyone, because Election.

This review is timely because if Trump gets in he will bring a toxic team of destroyers with him – foremost among them Elon Musk.  This is the story of how Musk thinks, reacts, and treats people; it is shocking.  I thought it would be important to put this in front of everyone because if Trump wins, this is the kind of brain which will be controlling America and your life!

A new book by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac,  Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter tells the shocking inside story of Elon Musk’s unprecedented hostile takeover of Twitter. In this story, we can see the emergence of the man who is now supporting Don Trump – thus far with $180-million - with no regard to consequences or national pain.

That Musk had enough money at his disposal to buy Twitter was truly extraordinary, an aberrant feature of twenty-first-century capitalism. By the start of April 2022, Musk had a net worth nearing $270 billion.

Most loyal users referred to Twitter as a “hellsite,” a corner of the internet where something — or someone — was always burning. People walked away from a session scrolling through their timelines feeling angry, frustrated, disgusted — and yet they couldn’t wait to log back on.

And what Musk finally bought is no longer Twitter:  Gone are the people who built it idealistically, at a time when Silicon Valley’s utopian promises seemed much easier to believe, and gone is its company culture of debate, equality, and idealism.

Out of Twitter’s rubble, Musk built X, a harsher machine, governed by his own whims.

What was once called the digital town square is becoming Musk’s mirror.

Twitter became vulnerable to Musk in the era of COVID, when the world was flooded with misinformation about the illness, and its team of content moderators were overwhelmed.

Among the do-your-own-research experts on Twitter was Musk.

As it first started to appear, he tweeted,  “the coronavirus panic is dumb.”  Two weeks later, on a day when the U.S . reported 2,000 known COVID cases, he posted that the country would be “close to zero new cases” by the end of April and that “kids are essentially immune” from the disease. (Children were not immune from the virus)

Armed with seemingly little information aside from what he read in his Twitter timeline and the random links he clicked on, Musk argued with virologists and doctors on the site, cast doubt on the virus positivity rates in the country, and advocated for a drug — anti-malarial treatment hydroxychloroquine — that had no verifiable impact on the disease.

Musk also had a financial incentive to doubt the severity of the virus. A pandemic would destabilize the economy and, more important, the operations of Tesla and SpaceX.

Heading into the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the company was under fire to do something about President Trump’s endless cascade of reckless tweets. It had a long-standing policy of ignoring rules violations if they came from world leaders, arguing that the public interest outweighed potential harm.

Then Trump had started to rail against the electoral process, warning of fraudulent results and complaining about mail-in ballots.

The intervention Twitter undertook was small — just a link underneath Trump’s tweet that suggested users “ get the facts about mail-in ballots” by reading a CNN article. The reaction, however, was massive. Republicans decried “censorship” and Trump blasted Twitter in more tweets later that day.

Nearly 40 percent of Trump’s election tweets in the four days after the election received labels, warning that their content “might be misleading about an election or other civic process.”

When the riot happened against the Congress, Twitter decided that it was time to suspend Trump.

Trump returned from his twelve-hour time-out unrepentant. He declared he would not attend Biden’s inauguration. In another tweet on January 8, he referred to his supporters as “great American Patriots.”

To Musk, like many white male tech CEOs, his companies were pure meritocracies, where hard work and smarts rose to the top. Diversity initiatives were antithetical to success, watering down his workforces with underqualified female or minority candidates and discriminating against white or male applicants.

After being invited to join the Twitter board, Musk broke the news: He would not be joining the board. Instead, he intended to buy the whole company.

Twitter’s employees were concerned; they saw his treatment of workers at Tesla and how they had sued the company over allegations of racial discrimination. They brought up the misinformation he spread during the early months of the pandemic, as well as his false accusation of pedophilia on their very platform. Many knew their protestations would likely be fruitless — the decision had been made. But they felt obligated to say something.

One employee pointed out that if they or any of their colleagues posted some of the things Musk tweeted, they would be the subject of a human resources investigation. “Are board members held to the same standard?”

Musk offered a share price of $54.20 , which was a pothead reference  - the number 420 is often used  to reference all things cannabis - and a callback to his 2018 attempt to take Tesla private. It would value Twitter at about $44 billion.

One engineer would create a widely shared internal document titled “Reasons Not to Work for Elon Musk,” with two dozen bullet points of the billionaire’s character failings, among them his early COVID denial, extreme wealth, and online bullying.

Others were less comfortable with the idea of one human controlling one of the most important pieces of digital real estate. Fred Wilson, an early Twitter investor and former board member, called the platform “too important to be owned and controlled by a single person…The opposite should be happening…Twitter should be decentralized as a protocol that powers an ecosystem of communication products and services.”  But unlike email , Twitter wasn’t a protocol. It was a business and a public one, making it possible for a motivated individual with the highest net worth on earth to put in an offer.

The level of hero worship that Musk — who often cast himself as the savior for the world’s problems — received gave him confidence. This was the right move.

Musk expected that within six years, the company would take in $12 billion from advertising; $ 1.3 billion from a new payments business; and some $10 billion in subscription fees from Twitter Blue, an existing product that offered improved features for the site’s fanatics.  Musk also referenced a mysterious product known as X. While the bankers didn’t know exactly what X would be, they still parroted Musk’s projections for 104 million subscribers to the unknown service by 2028.

Musk said he would need five years to turn Twitter around.   And, he told investors, running a social media company was nothing like launching rockets or manufacturing cars. To him, it was just a website where people posted whatever they wanted. How hard could it be?

Most of the board members felt resigned. Any emotions about the prospect of selling the company to someone who planned to upend it had fallen away, and all that was left was a grim determination to make Musk pay full price.

Musk wanted no delays. Not only had he thrown together his own acquisition agreement, he was insisting that it be finalized and signed by the very next morning, so that it could be announced to the public before the stock market opened that Monday.

Twitter’s deal team was in a state of disbelief. No normal buyer would engage in such an expensive and elaborate transaction without first looking under the hood.

Had Musk signed a Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA), he and his bankers would have been able to see Twitter’s depressing financial projections.

But Twitter’s lawyers could hardly believe their luck. They knew they were dealing with a slippery character and angled for an agreement that placed all the legal risk on the buyer. Musk’s draft did most of that work for them. By pushing his lawyers to get the deal done immediately, Musk undermined his own position. After his team sent the agreement on Sunday, he was eager to finalize everything by Monday morning.

But there was no provision for a look “under the hood” at Twitter’s numbers.

Twitter’s board gathered on another video call to discuss final steps. The meeting was a virtual funeral.

What about the impact on Twitter’s employees, or the likely destruction of the platform?

The lawyers reminded everyone that their role was simple — they were there to represent the interests of the shareholders. The only thing to consider was whether the people who owned Twitter’s stock were getting a fair price and the best possible outcome.  The impact on people didn’t count.

When Musk realized what the price impact would be as the world of finance closed down, he began to uncork in the only way he knew how, unleashing a steady stream of criticism about Twitter on Twitter.

After an evening of posting about spam, the culture war over paper straws, and supposed media hoaxes, he fired off something that caught everyone by surprise. “Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.”

To Musk’s inner circle, the move was seen as self-sabotage. Even if Musk believed he had a way out of the deal, what was the use in announcing it to the world and tipping his hand?

To Twitter’s board, Musk’s logic was particularly shoddy. Correcting bots and spam were one of the particular reasons the billionaire gave for buying the company, after all.

Twitter’s rank and file saw the lack of public reaction as an extension of their CEO Agrawal’s meek personality. Musk was openly denigrating their work — on the platform they built — and their leader said nothing.

Employees began openly poking fun at their subdued chief executive.

Later that month, Musk’s own personality came into question when his oldest child changed her name to Vivian Jenna Wilson, removing her father’s last name. She wrote that the reason for the change was “Gender Identity and the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape, or form.”

Twitter’s engineers set up the information that Musk requested on a tool that allowed them to track how Musk’s side ran queries of the data in order to audit what they were looking at. Early on, they realized the billionaire’s team wasn’t doing much of anything with the data or running particularly meaningful searches.

 Peiter Zatko was better known by his hacker moniker, Mudge.  Unhappy with his termination, the former security executive signed on with Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit legal organization, and the group agreed to help him submit a complaint to Congress, the FTC, and the SEC.

Twitter’s security program was a complete disaster, Zatko claimed.

The report was a boon for Musk and his lawyers. His case to escape from his Twitter bid had been floundering, and a week after Zatko’s claims were published, his lawyers wrote to Twitter to break off the deal again.

It was refused.

Musk suddenly had to corral the funds all his friends had promised him.  From the outset, Morgan Stanley had pitched the Twitter deal as an opportunity to back a generational entrepreneur. But rising interest rates meant investors were more cautious than they had been.  Some of Musk’s potential funders, like Reid Hoffman, who had once considered putting in $2 billion from his venture fund, pulled out completely.  Saudi billionaire Al Waleed invested $1.9 billion, and became one of the largest outside shareholders in Musk’s Twitter .

It quickly became apparent to the Twitter execs that Musk lacked basic knowledge of the merger agreement he had signed.  What would happen if the Chinese government put pressure on Twitter to censor something it didn’t like on the platform and threatened Tesla?  A similar scenario could occur fin India, where Prime Minister Modi was stifling criticism of his government.

Nevertheless, Musk arrived at Twitter on the afternoon of Wednesday, October 26, to tour his coming conquest with a made-for-Twitter stunt. He carried a white porcelain sink as if it were a stack of pizza boxes. “You can’t help but let that sink in,” he said to no one in particular.

He was immediately interested in Twitter Blue, a small part of the company’s business that allowed die-hard users to pay $ 4.99 a month for premium features, like the ability to edit tweets or change the appearance of the Twitter icon on their phones. To Musk, this represented an untapped financial opportunity.  If people relied on the site as much as he did, then of course they would pay for it.

Twitter’s top-ranking employees crammed into the conference room for one last session before Musk took over.  CEO Agrawal’s deputies were there, as well as vice presidents from finance, product, human resources, and sales. Even more executives dialed in on video conference from New York and around the globe, their faces tiling the screen at the end of the room. It was clear to everyone there that it was Agrawal’s last meeting.

As the meeting ended, some of them embraced each other, while others hung back to say their goodbyes to their bosses.

And as the closing of the deal crept closer, Musk became increasingly paranoid, just as he had done in times of crisis at SpaceX and Tesla. All the Twitter employees hated him, he believed, and he’d seen some of them tweeting openly about their opposition to his ownership.

Before closing the deal , Musk had already given directions for his first order of business once he officially took over. Musk determined that Agrawal and other executives would be fired “ for cause”.

It would potentially allow Musk to avoid paying the $120 million in exit packages he owed to the leaders once Twitter changed hands and its shares were delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. By terminating them “for cause” he was snipping their golden parachutes.

With the firings of half the C-suite, hundreds of Twitter employees were now reporting directly to Musk.

Musk wanted to start layoffs immediately, saving money by shedding their salaries. He deputized some of his associates, including his cousins, James and Andrew, and asked them to develop lists of who to keep and who to jettison. There would be no mercy.

Musk’s people believed they were smarter than Twitter’s workforce. The Twitter employees had contributed to a floundering company that failed its potential, they thought.

Time and time again, Musk reminded his team that Twitter had a workforce bloated with many people who did nothing.

Engineers would be judged by volume: those who had written the most code were people they might want to keep around.  But sometimes, the best code was short and elegant.

Online, tweeps (Twitter employees) mocked the code reviews.

Musk didn’t seem to have a clear plan. He wanted deep cuts and suggested about half of the company’s 7,500 employees would have to go, but the billionaire wasn’t decisive about how many jobs he wanted to eliminate or which departments he wanted to shrink.

His new employees were rapidly learning that Musk hated excuses and explanations but loved to be admired.

Twitter’s workforce woke up Saturday morning in a state of panic. Managers compiled lists in tightly held Google Docs that they traded back and forth. For the workers they wanted to retain, leaders were required not only to describe what the person did but also include a description of why they were exceptional.

The billionaire, racked with paranoia, had also convinced himself that not all of Twitter’s employees were real.   With a team of finance folks, one of his staff got down to work, reaching out to managers around the world and asking them to confirm their employees were human. He and his team had two days until the vest date to confirm the identities of more than 7,000 full-time employees.  (They were).

Around the same time, a disturbed man who embraced far-right conspiracy theories about the 2020 U.S. election broke into the home of Nancy Pelosi,  attacked her husband with a hammer and fractured his skull.  When Hillary Clinton offered her condolences online, Musk replied to her note: “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” with a link to the story from the Santa Monica Observer with the headline “The Awful Truth: Paul Pelosi Was Drunk Again, and in a Dispute with a Male Prostitute Early Friday .”  That same paper in 2016 had pushed the idea that Hilary Clinton had died and been replaced with a body double.

As screenshots of Musk’s reply proliferated, the company’s executives sent frantic messages to one another. Could Musk really believe this trash? Musk deleted the tweet within a few hours, but the damage was done. Advertisers, already nervous about the prospects of his ownership, had the clearest evidence yet that Twitter’s new steward was not serious about policing misinformation. 

General Motors announced that it would pause advertising on Twitter, and other brands were rumored to be heading down the same path.

In front of a crowd of well-heeled businesspeople at the New York Times’s DealBook Conference,  with seemingly little thought or calculation, he cocked his head back, scowled, and uttered the first impulse that came to his mind. “I hope they stop [advertising].” “You hope — ?”  “Don’t advertise.” “You don’t want them to advertise?” “No.” “What do you mean?” “If somebody is going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money — Go fuck yourself.” “But —” “Go. Fuck. Yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is. Hey Bob! If you’re in the audience…”   [Bob Iger, CEO of Disney]

He had just come off a tour to explain his belief that Jewish people are funding causes meant to “annihilate” them.

To him, anyone could see that X’s business collapse would be attributed to the advertisers who had conspired against him .

He seemed to suggest that perhaps advertising wasn’t important.  “Tesla currently sells twice as much in terms of electric vehicles as the rest of electric car makers in the United States combined. Tesla has done more to help the environment than all other companies combined. It would be fair to say that therefore, as a leader of the company, I’ve done more for the environment than everyone else and any single human on Earth…I’m saying what I care about is the reality of goodness, not the perception of it.  And what I see all over the place is people who care about looking good while doing evil. Fuck them.”

As an aside, the PAC that Musk contributes to for the election of Trump musk is funded by coal company billionaire Joe Craft.  Tesla cars have reduced carbon emissions by some 20 million metric tons a year.  Craft’s Alliance Resource Partners mined more than 30 million metric tons of coal.  

Musk willingly took 'power funds' from a company that more-than-undid his entire environmental impact cause.  both men share an ambitious vision to eliminate environmental regulations, which are cutting into their companies’ respective bottom lines.  Craft in fact noted that his company was doing better than expected due to heightened electricity demand fueled by EVs.

With Musk, you always look under the hood.

When he took over Twitter he callously slashed and burned the people who worked at the company.  Musk’s mass layoffs had made those the pain certain. Musk’s self-aggrandizement had loaded the company with debt. The debt was his doing.

On top of that pain, he brought back toxic Twitter influencers. Andrew Tate, the misogynistic former kickboxer and internet personality who was later charged with rape and human trafficking, came back with gusto, as did Kanye West, who had been suspended for tweeting that he would go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.”

Then there was Trump.

Imagine the kind of drama and engagement that would come with Trump’s reintroduction, Musk told some of his lieutenants.  Without consulting anyone he ran a poll asking if he should “Reinstate former President Trump.”  Within twenty-four hours, more than 15 million accounts had voted, with 51.8 percent in favor of bringing back the former president. “The people have spoken,” Musk tweeted.

Unsuspending Trump wasn’t just a matter of clicking a button, however. As one of the most followed accounts on the service — with some 88 million followers at the time of his January 2021 ban — @ realDonaldTrump was an anomaly.  In reinstating him, Twitter’s systems had to rebuild all those connections, re-creating the hundreds of millions of follower relationships, tweets, and engagements that existed prior to the suspension. The site became noticeably slower as the systems tried to re-architect the connections. At one point, Twitter almost crashed. There was another problem: Musk had no idea if Trump wanted to return.

And Trump had learned to live without Twitter.

And under Musk’s judgement calls, Twitter lost more than 80% of its value in two years.

Slurs against Black Americans tripled; antisemitic speech is up more than 60 percent since the change in ownership.

Some of the heaviest scrutiny came from the Federal Trade Commission. To Musk, this was government harassment by the Biden administration, which he had come to loathe for its positions on immigration and organized labor.

Twitter’s actions under new management made it clear just how contradictory the views of the self-proclaimed “free- speech absolutist” actually were.

Musk removed the limitations on Russian and Chinese state media accounts that previously prevented those accounts from being recommended by Twitter’s algorithm.

One media figure that Musk was content to support, however, was Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host and demagogue whose broadcasts on immigrant  “invasions” and threats to white society found a captive audience among disaffected Americans.

Some of Musk’s views became indistinguishable from those at a Trump campaign rally – so he went the distance and joined Trump’s cause.

Musk has pledged to cut $2 trillion dollars from the federal budget, if Trump is elected.

The total federal budget is $6.75 trillion.

He would cut the budget by one-third.  In the process, the US would lose its health care, social security and a good portion of its work force.

This is the same kind of economic plan that trashed Twitter.

And it’s worth remembering that both Tesla and SpaceX exist because of federal funding.

Musk is not a man who thinks of consequences.  When you are born with millions, why should you?

For men like Musk, social media is a plaything to mold in their own image.

But conversation and capital should never have been intertwined.

Today Twitter has become a feature that you can find on nearly all social media services. On Instagram, tweets are Threads. On Substack, they are Notes, while Mastodon, the open-source platform that had inspired Musk to embark on a jealous crackdown, has toots. On Bluesky the community refers to their posts as skeets.

Musk bumbled into buying Twitter for $44 billion, overpaying to control a global internet platform where he measured his self-worth in likes and replies. A man allergic to criticism had bought himself the largest audience in the world, and hoped for praise. It wasn’t an unheard-of pursuit — social media users everywhere seek affirmation from the universe. Musk succeeded in becoming Twitter’s main character but struggled under the scrutiny of millions of users who loved the combative ethos of the platform.

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. Whether or not he wanted to admit it, he had bought it for himself, and for a brief moment, he had the thing he wanted most. He owned Twitter — and then it was gone.

To everyone, thank you for reading Barry’s Substack.

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