Well beneath Ben Mezrich's normal writing standard. Well beneath. Usually Mezrich has a gift for structuring a story in a way that makes it engaging, readable. But Breaking Twitter is dull and uncompelling. It's a strange experience reading this book: if you were to read it alongside his wonderful Bringing Down the House, you'd think it were two different writers.
Worse, a reader could make a strong case that Breaking Twitter belongs on the fiction shelf. Mezrich himself admits in the first pages that certain people in the book--as well as certain dialogues and descriptions--are not actually real. Some characters are anonymized or made into composites. Entire scenes, conversations and even chapters are largely made up, and Mezrich does something irritating to the reader's eye and ear by liberally using weasel words like "perhaps" or "might" to indemnify everything. See for example Chapter 5, featuring the weasel word "might" liberally used to describe a scene that Mezrich couldn't have possibly witnessed: "Elon might have taken a deep breath," "Elon might have shivered," "Elon might have held his breath." Far from being creative or artistic, it feels legalistic, as if the author were acting on the advice of lawyers. Is all this because Elon "might" sue? The reader is left in the dark as to why.
[A quick affiliate link to Amazon for those readers who would like to support my work here: if you purchase your Amazon products via any affiliate link from this site, or from my sister site Casual Kitchen, I will receive a small affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you!]
Thus this book is less about Twitter and more a carefully sculpted work of anti-Elon propaganda. Sadly, what Breaking Twitter can teach any perceptive, second-order reader is how facts can be skillfully arranged, omitted--even fully imagined--to create impressions and perceptions.
[Dear readers: what follows are my notes, quotes and reactions to the text. They are meant to help order my thinking and help me remember--and they are too long. Please skip them!]
Notes:
Prologue
1ff The book opens in a conference room and a purple prose introduction of Esther Crawford, as Elon bursts into the room; on how she manages him, on the conflict with Apple and its app store payment platform.
Chapter 1
13ff Mark Ramsey at the Twitter corporate conference in Houston, January 2020; commentary on the origins of Twitter; Mark's disappointment that the company lacks gravitas; that it's filled with snowflake employees. Jack Dorsey appears, and the author describes him in uncharacteristically bad prose: "Five eleven, a hundred and sixty-five pounds of lithe, laid-back charisma; a soft-spoken guru who, with his long beard, oversized hoodie sweatshirt, pierced nose, and perpetual slouch, looked like a cross between some sort of Jedi warrior and an antique marionette whose strings had just been cut. If Jack had pulled a lightsaber out from under his sweatshirt nobody would have batted an eye."
23ff The chapter ends with Elon on a video call to this conference on a jumbo screen, giving well-thought out feedback on Twitter on issues like verifying users and controlling bots.
Chapter 2
27ff Now the author fast forwards to March 2022; Elon is now laying on the floor of Tesla's Texas Gigafactory. On his mission for Tesla; he tweets a poll on Twitter asking whether it adheres to the principle of free speech.
33-4 Reference here to elon's famous "funding secured" tweet.
34ff The Babylon Bee is suspended from Twitter; on excessive moderation, shadowbanning, suspensions, etc., of accounts that didn't bow to majority opinions.
Chapter 3
37ff One month later: current Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, now six months into his job, learns that Elon Musk acquired 9.5% of Twitter; also interesting that Musk filed for his buy exactly one day late, probably just to fuck with the SEC.
42ff On the conflict between Jack Dorsey and activist hedge fund Elliot Management over Twitter.
44 A text discussion between Elon and Jack Dorsey on Jack's vision of what ought to be a new platform to replace Twitter: an open-source protocol without advertising revenue, also decentralized [he's describing Nostr, essentially]. "Twitter started as a protocol. It should never have been a company. That was the original sin."
Chapter 4
49ff The reader meets Jessica Kittery, a 34-year-old employee who "breezed through the glass doors" of Twitter's New York headquarters; on virtual teleconferencing robot units on wheels with screens with an employee's face on them that allows people to virtually wander the halls and even hang out in rooms or cafes at the office.
53ff We meet Yoel Roth, head of "site integrity" which would soon morph into head of "trust and safety"; "one of the most powerful people at Twitter, because in essence, he led the team that decided what was allowed on the site, and what wasn't." "His team's job was also to proactively try to keep the platform free from harmful tweets and accounts, by making rules and designing algorithms--with the help of computer engineers--that acted as guardrails against actors both malignant and inadvertently dangerous." [What really happened here was the site built a very robust capability to throttle, ban or suspend many dissident thinkers, under the guise of stopping "hate speech" and "misinformation."]
55-6 Comments here on Twitter's temporary ban of the New York Post's twitter account after it published an article discussing the Hunter Biden laptop; [Note also here a weird misrepresentation and glossing over of Matt Taibbi's reports in the Twitter Files of the emails between the FBI and Yoel Roth, Mezrich here frames it as the USA's three letter organizations protecting citizens from election interference, when in reality there was much, much more to this story: where the USA censored its own citizens for statements that were true, likewise censoring qualified medical professionals during COVID, etc. Unfortunate to see this glossed over when in a lot of ways this was the really gripping drama underlying the whole Twitter buyout story.]
58 We also learn here that Jim Baker, at the time Twitter's deputy general counsel, had been "leading counsel for the FBI" during investigations into "Russian manipulation" in the 2016 election; he signed off on a decision to suppress discussion about the Biden laptop on Twitter.
58ff Eventually the company throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story, banning and disabling links, moderating tweets, banning accounts, even manipulating direct messages and trending topics. This was a huge precedent to suppress discussion on the platform; offhand comment here how these banning, throttling and censorship techniques at Twitter were also applied "especially as the pandemic moved into high gear and Covid misinformation proliferated on the platform." [Sadly, and too long after the fact, people learned that much of what was deemed "misinformation" and therefore censored turned out to be true. As always, the real power sits in the hands of those who get to decide what is and what is not "misinformation."] Next on the banning of Donald Trump's own Twitter account in 2021, on Yoel Roth's overt hatred of Trump; also on the discovery of compromising tweets Roth had made in the past about Trump.
60-61 The two tweets that triggered banning Trump's Twitter account are printed here, and then a discussion of the reasoning used by Twitter on how they were "being received and interpreted on and off Twitter." [Thus it wasn't the words themselves, it was assumptions made by third parties as to how they were being interpreted that drove the censoring and ban. Look, Trump grosses me out as much as the next guy, but this specific event should be fascinating to any student of censorship and propaganda.]
Chapter 5
65ff Melodramatic narration here of the test of the Raptor 2 rocket engine; speculation about what Elon felt and thought using frequent use of the word "might"; "Elon might have taken a deep breath," "Elon might have shivered," "Elon might have held his breath." [This is terrible, honestly.]
70ff Discussion here of SpaceX, the first private company to develop a rocket, to have reached the international space station, the first to land a booster vertically, the first private company to send astronauts into orbit, etc.
74 Interesting quote here talking about a text Elon received from "the conservative podcaster and comedian Joe Rogan": [Elon] didn't consider himself right-wing, nor did he identify as a Republican. He'd voted for both Obama and Biden, had gotten vaccinated, though he later seemed to regret it--how odd that somehow even medical positions have become signals of partisan tribalism--and would have called himself mostly centrist." [How even more odd to set that strange parenthetical statement in there!] The author goes on to suggest here that Elon is drifting to the political right.
76ff On Elon's initial texts back and forth with CEO Parag Agarwal; on his increasing frustration, on Elon's tweets (like "Is Twitter dying?" for example); He texts Agarwal that he would make an offer to take Twitter private; "fixing Twitter by chatting with Parag won't work"; they go from bromance to divorce within hours it looks like. Elon then makes a $43 billion bid for Twitter, at $54 a share.
Chapter 6
83ff More on Mark Ramsey here; also on the dismay, fear and loathing of Twitter shareholders in response to Elon's offer; also Tesla stock lost more than 12% after Elon bid for Twitter. On the first all hands on deck meeting with Elon at Twitter; on how Mark Ramsey watches Elon speak and gets completely pulled into his reality distortion field. [I know the feeling, it happened to me too when I watched Musk do a Tesla presentation for the media years ago. This guy is unbelievably persuasive, Steve Jobs-level persuasive.]
Chapter 7
99ff Now some four months later; tangential musings here on Simulation Theory; on Elon walking back his takeover offer after disputes with Twitter about what percent of "subscribers" were really fake bot accounts, as well as after getting into the financials and realizing what a terrible situation the company was in; on the (expected) media backlash, but also the less-expected backlash from Tesla shareholders; he rescinds his offer, and then Twitter sues him (!); hilariously ironic given that Twitter was aggressively against the acquisition in the first place; now it "demanded that the barbarian return to the damn gate"; [holy cow what an incompetent company, you just can't believe how poorly run they were.]
105-6 Interesting text exchange here between Musk and Larry Ellison as Musk was seeking co-backers for his bid: Ellison texts him that he'd be good for "a billion or whatever you recommend" and Musk replies "I'd recommend maybe 2B or more" "Since you think I should come in for at least 2B I'm in for 2B" Ellison replies.
107ff This chapter ultimately is mostly about a virtual meeting between Musk and Sam Bankman-Fried; on "effective altruism" and SBF and his various gooferies [unfortunately Mezrich says "it was clear he was smart" when in reality he was not that smart, and clearly chosen to be in the place he was in]; Ultimately Elon doesn't believe that SBF has that much liquid capital available. [This is a strange and surreal chapter and most of it should be cut, or at least reduced to two paragraphs.]
Chapter 8
111ff [Another strange chapter: a less diplomatic book reviewer might call it a totally made up story based on the author's imagination, but let's be charitable and call it an "as remembered" telling of a Russian criminal in Kazakhstan operating a "troll farm" on the fringes of the internet, creating fake accounts, being a "Russian influencer," etc. Based on a few stray misnomers from the author you can tell he doesn't quite understand cryptocurrency fully: "The job he had just agreed to would involve a deposit of bitcoin into a numbered crypto account..."]
118 The job this imagined influencer farm owner accepts is a "trolling job... But Fyodr didn't really care who was behind the job, or what their intentions might be. In a matter of minutes, his team would begin concocting fake accounts--and soon after, over a period of less than three hours, barrage the target platform with a storm of comments fifty thousand deep. In this case, for whatever reason, the client wanted chaos. And as long as the client had Bitcoin to spend--Fyodr and his team would happily give them chaos."
Chapter 9
123ff This chapter opens with the author again putting his novelist cap on, extra tightly, as the reader learns that every nerve in Esther Crawford's body was "tingling with anticipation," we learn the coffee shop that she's in "vibrated with an energy that mirrored her own internal sense of excitement." We even learn about a cup of black coffee sitting untouched on a table "the surface of the liquid shimmering with an oily sheen, steam curling into the air." [Been a while since I read prose this purple.]
125 "Hey, Elon is in the building. If you happen to see him, say hello!" A strange, forced email to the entire Twitter staff from Twitter's head of marketing.
128ff Esther screws up her courage and marches up to Elon and says hi. We learn her backstory, the startups that she had attempted and had failed at, most recently a screen-sharing social app she created that Twitter acquired; we learn that she worked on the team that built Twitter spaces; Elon says to her, "And what do you do here?"
128 Note this unfortunate sentence: "She had been born into a household that wasn't so much broken as never whole in the first place, the 'secret child' of a man she didn't meet until she was in fourth grade and a disabled mother." [She didn't meet her father until she was a disabled mother?]
131 Immediately after talking to Musk she's approached by Walter Isaacson who was working on a biography on Elon and was following him around. "You do payments at Twitter? I think you're going to be really important going forward."
132ff Elon asks her to email him and set up a meeting, she does and he replies himself. Her manager finds out and tries to tell her to "get in line, there's a process around here" [this is oh so typical of scared corporate management] but she realizes this guy is going to get fired anyway, so she ignore him and goes to meet Elon. She learns that there's an internal group chat at the company monitoring who's coming and going, who has access to Elon, etc. She sits down with him at a conference table, he is disparaging of current Twitter management. He puts her in charge of a huge task that he wanted launched four days later.
141 Interesting also that she had game-theorized out the next few steps, and had created a list of the best engineers and innovators at the company, offered that list to Elon, etc. [You have to stay steps ahead, especially when things are fluid, you have to be ready to shoot your shot, etc. Most of the employees are going to get blown out anyway, so there's no downside, there's nothing to lose.]
Chapter 10
145ff We now meet "Jessica" [I don't think we ever get a last name for her, presumably she is a composite or made-up character] at a company Halloween party in San Francisco; rumors about the cuts, possibly 50%, possibly immediate; Twitter's lead legal counsel Sean Edgett was marched out of the building right during the party; the CEO, CFO and other senior managers avoided the humiliation by already leaving before the Halloween party got going, but all three had already been fired by email. All Twitter engineers were instructed to print out 50 pages of code they'd done in the last 30 days; then this request was countermanded: they were instructed to shred the paper and show the code in person on their laptops; and then this command was also rescinded [note that there's always chaos when a change of Tsar happens, you have to be ready for things to happen or not happen, you have to be ready for things to be very fluid, with commands and countermands coming from above, etc.]
155 [This is an interesting sentence from a rhetorical standpoint because it takes certain reasonable things, along with other things taken out of context, and still other things that Elon has done all along, plus one thing that's a little weird and a little paranoid, and the author creates an entire vibe of malevolence. Well done.] "When you escort long-time employees out of your headquarters, ask engineers to shred documents, surround yourself with bodyguards, and ban any impromptu meetings of the Tweeps you haven't fired yet--it sure seems like you are afraid of something."
Chapter 11
157ff "Mark" another Twitter employee [presumably this is the Mark Ramsey from earlier in the book?], on his way to a Halloween party with his wife, in costume; he gets a call from his boss saying in twenty minutes we need a list of people we want to keep and reasons why; discussion here of Elon's plans to fire anyone who managers don't specifically fight for.
Chapter 12
163ff Another strange chapter, a fully imagined narrative of what happened at the Pelosi household when there was that intruder who attacked Nancy Pelosi's husband Paul. Mezrich's narrative is fully "regime media compliant": it frames the intruder as a crazy dude radicalized by too much social media and too much Fox News. This is a bizarre chapter and the reader struggles to understand why it's included.
Chapter 13
175ff Elon, with his mother, braves a gauntlet of paparazzi to go to a hip Halloween party with models and celebrities everywhere. This is another atrocious chapter, it strikes this reader as Mezrich's homage to Jay McInerney's coke-addled 1980s-era novel Bright Lights Big City, right down to writing it in the second person. It's out of place and incongruent.
178-9 There's a reference to the prior chapter's made-up version of Paul Pelosi's house attack situation, calling out Elon's tweet that "There is a tiny possibility there might be more to the story than meets the eye." On the rage that everybody had about this because this was a "fringe conspiracy theory." [This is a weird way to frame this: there almost certainly was more to the Paul Pelosi story than meets the eye, we just don't know what that might have been. Also, by now we all know the heuristic for "conspiracy theories": they have weirdly high odds of being true. Which is why in order to know what's going on in the modern era you need to get yourself a conspiracy theory friend!]
Chapter 14
181ff Comments here on getting rid of most of the major salespeople in contact with key Twitter advertisers; on the company's attempt to put new people in charge of these jobs; also more commentary from the author on what he calls Elon's "erratic tweeting"; concerns that Elon would plan "some sort of amnesty" for banned accounts [this actually happened in the medical dissident community: all of the doctors and COVID dissident experts who were sent to "Twitter heaven" were reanimated and had their accounts restored]; the author mentions unspecified theories in the press that this resulted in "a storm of antisemitism, racism, and personal attacks" on Twitter. In reality, according to the author, "something much more sinister" happened: Twitter had come under a "coordinated troll attack" as "over three hundred fake accounts had spewed over fifty thousand racist, antisemitic, and violent tweets across the site in a period of a few hours--the biggest spike of hate speech Twitter had ever seen." [The author is conflating a couple of unrelated issues here, as if Elon's de-censoring of certain previously banned Twitter accounts somehow opened the floodgates for the creation of three hundred bots spewing hate. These are separate issues that have nothing to do with one another. It's also worth noting that the "bot problem" still is a serious issue at Twitter.]
189ff An email goes out notifying employees that they will be let go, the firings begin, and various problems happen at the company: one company directory that no one could access because the IT guy who knew the password had been fired. [One takeaway here is to recognize that, look, this is true corporate America, this is W2 living. It is terrible: your company doesn't care, it will never care, and you have to dig your way out of Shawshank as soon as you can.]
Chapter 15
193ff On Esther Crawford's unfortunate viral tweet showing her sleeping at the office, it was seen as simping for Elon Musk.
196 On various revenue-generating products on the table like paying for blue checks and Twitter blue; also rumors that insiders were selling blue checks to wannabe influencers.
198ff Elon gives Esther the task of launching a new blue check product, he wanted the team put together in one hour and the product launch within a few days; it's actually interesting to read here that this kind of "move fast and break stuff" effort could never have happened at Twitter pre-Elon; it goes towards how Elon somehow manages to get the best out of people, there's something about his leadership or his expectations that produces these kinds of miracles. "There had never been a moment like this at Twitter 1.0."
203ff Esther becomes the one person who can push back on Elon; people start saying "maybe Esther can bring this up" or "let's have Esther tell him."
206ff On charging a monthly fee for the blue check, $20 was the initially conceived price point; on pushback from the author Stephen King: "$20 a month to keep my blue check? F*** that"; on Elon's response tweet: "We need to pay the bills somehow!" She attempts to warn him that it won't go well, that the verification and anti-impersonation security can't handle the scale. His response: "'Sounds like Esther is talking out of fear,' he said to the room. 'I don't make decisions out of fear.'" They launch Twitter blue and it quickly goes sideways, a disaster. [I think the author misunderstands what the various facetious parody accounts he mentions are really all about. They're not indistinguishable from the real accounts! Even Elon is laughing at some of these tweets and some are genuinely hilarious.] [Another interesting notion here is how Elon is cool with the thing being a flop; he shuts it off, he's got a twinkle in his eye about the whole thing, even though the corporate suits are all rattled and unsettled by it, this is the mindset of a guy who really knows that life is a simulation, while he's surrounded by a bunch of corporate suit NPCs who don't know it.]
213ff The blue check "fiasco" was "Yoel Roth's final straw"; he resigns, then douchily goes public with an op-ed in the New York Times a week later discussing why he left, and all the perils he sees in Twitter's future. On the "betrayal" that the author believes Elon felt from this.
Chapter 16
217ff The author (and by extension his characters) are appalled once again by something Elon does: sending out an email asking people to be sure they want to be part of the new Twitter, with instructions to click yes on the link below, or otherwise receive three months of severance; I think an objective writer familiar with corporate life would recognize that during desperate financial times this is an admittedly unusual but not ridiculous email to send out; the author frames it as Elon "demanding some bizarre pledge of loyalty." Also: "The minute Mark received the email, he knew how it would go down. People were already raw and upset at how impersonal the firings had been; this email was going to push a lot of them off the ledge." Ironically, the opposite happened: this actually boosted people's morale, it produced a sort of coherence among the remaining employees, nearly the opposite of what the author makes this character say.
Chapter 17
225ff Elon calls an all hands meeting, November 21st 2022; the author once again claims if Elon's hardcore email "had been meant to be some sort of motivational tool, it had clearly missed its mark." Half of Twitter's remaining employees resigned [one way to read this would be to say the email achieved the company's goals]; the author cites another thing that's meant to be embarrassing: "In one comical instance, Twitter's own user handle had gone dark on the platform, because the only person who had access to its password was no longer employed by the company." [In retrospect, now we see Twitter as a platform obviously functioning with stability today, one could argue that these laid-off employees weren't as critical as the author makes them appear.]
228 Robin Wheeler gets fired effective immediately by Elon for refusing to make more cuts in headcount; the character "Jessica," in the back of the room at this meeting "realized she was witnessing a total disconnect" thinking the "traumatized" Twitter employees "were still the same fawning and awed NPCs who had followed him through the halls that first morning."
230 The author talks about the "reinstate former president Trump" tweet that Elon tweeted and "Jessica's" reaction to it [the composite/anonymized characters Mezrich is using here are interesting rhetorical devices the more I think about it: when you create a made-up person in your story, you can really frame most of your views using that person, use them as a mouthpiece for whatever you want to say or have a person think about your subject, but yet it all seems more objective than it really is. By now the reader can feel Mezrich's obvious contempt for Elon, and this contempt gets sort of magnified but also made seemingly factual via this device.] Elon says during the meeting "'This isn't a right-wing takeover of twitter. It's a moderate-wing takeover of Twitter.' From there, the all-hands [meeting] spiraled downward."
232 The author comments again about a sense of fear, of impending doom, although the reader can only read so many portents of impending doom out of a book like this describing events three years ago, while right now Twitter is as vibrant an ecosystem as it ever was. It makes you wonder, where was all this impending doom, exactly?
Chapter 18
233ff Now back to Yoel Roth; sometime after his New York Times op-ed attack on Twitter and Elon Musk, someone reposted a pro-pedophilia tweet Roth wrote back in 2010. Elon replies underneath saying "This explains a lot." The author then describes how Musk posted a controversial excerpt from Roth's PhD thesis; the author claims that it was pulled out of context and a minor part of a 300 page thesis [Interesting and a little strange that the author would jump to Roth's defense here]; then the author discusses the Twitter files, smearing it a bit by saying it was "posted by a rogues gallery of well-known conservative and libertarian journalists" but then in the same paragraph saying how the Twitter files revealed how the FBI [appallingly] pressured Twitter to ban individual tweets and accounts, the author plays this tremendously important set of documents down: again it's strange and intriguing how the author chooses to frame this.
239 Yoel Roth, now that his highly questionable tweets have been made highly public, "had no choice but to run." It's very interesting how the author rearranges this to try to make Elon look as bad as possible; we'll see in Chapter 20 where he uses an interesting sneaky phrase from a rhetorical standpoint: "Yoel Roth had once been a Friend of Elon. Now Yoel was hiding in some hotel, fearing for his life." It makes it seem like Musk directly threatened Roth's life when nothing of the sort happened.
Chapter 19
243 Yoel Roth and his partner "their lives upended by hate upon hate upon hate..." while Elon is at the hottest ticket in town, watching Will Smith and Chris Rock headline a comedy show, having just tweeted "my pronouns are prosecute/fauci" in a tweet that, according to the author, "was a work of troll art: a heady blend of dog whistle, straw man, and conspiracy theory that would have made the highest-paid troll farm operators in Eastern Europe proud. But this tweet hadn't come from some warehouse in Azerbaijan, it had come from Twitter's own CEO."
246ff On the weird moment on stage with Dave Chappelle where Elon was booed, the author describes it as "a hit to [Elon's] esteem."
249 See the photo below for a weird thing that Mezrich does at the end of certain chapters, a sort of ee cummings vibe. I'm not sure it works, if anything it makes this book sound even more like a work of fiction.
Chapter 20
251ff The author is likely projecting here, using his "use the people in the book as mouthpieces" technique, but he's describing through the perspective of Esther Crawford that Elon is losing his sense of humor here and now he has an edge more morose or serious maybe, even "an undercurrent of what seemed like real anger."
255 Still more skillful rhetoric here: "Yoel Roth had once been a Friend of Elon. Now Yoel was hiding in some hotel, fearing for his life." As if Elon was responsible for this! Very well played; game recognizes game here.
257 Discussion here of the surname-less character Jehn [I don't think the reader has been told her last name, and at first I assumed this character was a composite or an anon, but it turns out she is a real person, Jehn Balajadia, who had a baby with Elon Musk]; we learn that she has a 1-year-old back home in Austin who she barely sees. Esther Crawford has a long conversation with her and wonders who she is, an executive, a confidante, an assistant to Elon?
Chapter 21
262ff On the deranged Uber Eats driver who believed that Grimes, the mother of one of Elon's sons, was communicating with him through coded messages and that Elon was monitoring his real-time location.
264 On Jack Sweeney, the Florida college kid who ran a Twitter account that followed Elon's private jet.
266ff In response to the person targeting his kid the author alleges that Elon had frozen the accounts of a list of various reporters, this is followed by "universal condemnation"; [note an irony here: criticizing Elon for "censorship" here, but yet remaining silent about the extremely wide censorship at Twitter before Elon took over. Once again, the dissident doctor movement is a perfect example here of a free speech domain that was silenced to the point where even any talk of its silencing was likewise silenced. Yet these media institutions are free to criticize Musk for censorship when it suits their purposes.]
268 The author cites a tweet from Elon: "They posted my exact real-time location, basically assassination coordinates, in (obvious) direct violation of Twitter terms of service." calling it "purposefully inflammatory language"; [this is again fascinating rhetoric, and a bit ironic coming from a book filled with purposefully inflammatory language.]
271 Speaking of inflammatory language: "But a dark cloud was building around Elon, obvious to anyone who was too slow to avoid his presence as he stalked Twitter's headquarters that weekend."
Chapter 22
273 Esther Crawford again here, sensing that "things had changed" with Elon, that "he'd become visibly morose, quick to anger." [All of this would be more understandable if you just had your 2-year-old kid stalked by a deranged psycho while you were on the other side of the country...]
276ff Meanwhile Esther Crawford is working on an email to Elon that says Twitter is in a death spiral. He replies quickly but responds on a totally separate subject. And now we return to the very beginning of the book with its in medias res beginning, with Esther then lecturing Elon, trying to reach him. [I don't think it's literally the same meeting which was about the Apple app fee structure: this meeting happens a few weeks later and its about other topics; but it gives the narrative kind of an arc of completion by returning to a similar, if not the same, scene.]
278-9 Interesting discussion here to consider as Esther is trying to get Elon to recognize that the company's going in the wrong direction, losing revenues, losing advertisers, you can't build a company with people who don't trust you, etc. [Companies either build a culture of wanting to hear bad news or they build a culture of never wanting to hear bad news. The latter usually quickly collapse when a crisis happens because nobody in a position of power really knows about the crisis until it's too late because no one can send any bad news upstream. You have to have employees there who aren't afraid to be fired, who aren't afraid to talk back to management, who aren't afraid to tell the truth to management even though it might cause them to lose their jobs; it's a type of fearlessness that you don't often find in the corporate world, which is why this is a common problem.]
Chapter 23
281ff Now Elon is in a luxury box at the World Cup in Qatar. The next few pages are a waste of the reader's time as Elon live tweets a match between Argentina and France. "The simulation was back on track." Then on Elon writing the infamous "Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll" tweet.
Chapter 24
287ff Two days later, Elon is back at the office; there's a funereal vibe at Twitter headquarters; Elon sits alone in a conference room, "a despondent billionaire ... moving through the halls with his head down and his shoulders hunched. Even his own bodyguards had remained an extra few feet behind him as he'd moved..." Again, the author, not there, indulges himself to surmise this as due to the results of Musk's "should I step down" Twitter poll. Note the 363 million people viewed that tweet, and about 17 million people voted, with 57% voting yes.
291 The author goes overboard here, once again using the legalistic "might have" language, as the "Jessica" composite non-character walks by a couple of women from the old Trust and Safety team: "Jessica might have heard the words 'wellness check' and believed, with a start, that the two women were actually considering calling San Francisco law enforcement to ask for a wellness check. On Elon Musk." The character Jessica then leaves to fly home, writing her resignation email while on the flight. Meanwhile, Elon "had begun to wriggle out from under" the CEO poll. "The way Jessica saw it, Elon Musk didn't break Twitter. Twitter broke Elon Musk."
Chapter 25
295ff We return to the Mark character, he is cleaning his new home after a Super Bowl party in February 2023 while his pregnant wife sleeps, mourning the fact that "Twitter had lost much of its vibrancy" at this point. He stumbles onto a high urgency message on the company's Slack channel, supposedly a tweet by Musk received far less engagement than a tweet by President Biden; Elon immediately flies to San Francisco to demand a fix to this issue with engagement across the platform; the engineers fix it by magnifying Elon's tweets by a factor of 1,000, as reported by two tech journalists at the website Platformer.
Chapter 26
301ff Now back to Esther Crawford, now unhappily at a water park outside of San Francisco with her family; she had been optimistic that Elon had heard her warnings of Twitter's decline, but now after the Super Bowl "he'd gone back on the warpath." Examples of him firing engineers by tweet here, etc. And then Esther herself gets fired, learning about it when she tried to fire up her laptop while on vacation and recognizing that it had been bricked up by the company. She's left to wonder why.
Epilogue
309ff The author attempts to poetically describe another SpaceX rocket test, and then describes the negative media coverage on it, saying the rocket "explodes mid-flight" when it was just a partial launch test. Given the amount of rhetoric, mouthpiece-using and other techniques the author has used all throughout the book, we see a rare allowance here where he openly points out an example of the media unfairly framing things against Musk: "All the headlines would be factually correct, but there were facts, and then there was the Truth." But then the author regresses once again to fiction, describing a scene he didn't see with (again) liberal use of the weasel word "perhaps": "Sitting back in his white chair as the engineers applauded, perhaps Elon's jaw tightened, his eyes narrowed. This should have been his moment."
To Read:
Nick Bostrom: Superintelligence
Nick Bostrom: Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?