Elon Musk was dissatisfied with his performance on his own social network. He called a meeting with the technical team and demanded an explanation for the drop in engagement on his most recent posts.

He expected the answer to lie in a flaw in the algorithms. But a machine learning engineer dared to point out an external factor: searches for Musk’s name on Google had dropped significantly since the troubled Twitter acquisition process had ended months earlier.

In other words, perhaps people had simply lost interest in the richest man in the world.

Musk didn’t like the explanation. “You’re fired. Fired!” He said to the engineer, who had worked at Twitter for almost ten years.

The episode took place in 2023, a few months before Twitter was renamed X. And it is just one of several examples of Musk’s explosive personality collected by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, technology reporters for The New York Times, in Character Limit – How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter (Todavia; 488 pages; translated by Bruno Cobalchini Mattos, Christian Schwartz, Marcela Lanius, and Mariana Delfini), which arrives in bookstores this Monday.

This chronicle of the Twitter acquisition delves into the intricacies of large corporate mergers, the technical intricacies of managing a global network, and the heated ideological battles around freedom of speech. However, the focus of the narrative ultimately converges on Elon Musk’s idiosyncrasies. It was on a whim that he decided to buy Twitter, which is now largely governed by his obsessions.

Musk

The story begins in 2015 when Jack Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter, returns to the CEO position from which he had been removed seven years earlier. It was not a triumphant return.

The network had a solid position – in 2020, it had 152 million daily active users and was valued at around $25 billion – but Dorsey did not show an innovative drive to face new competitors like TikTok and Snapchat.

In November 2021, Dorsey handed over the reins of Twitter to a successor of his choice, engineer Parag Agrawal. As a board member of the company, however, the former CEO became enthusiastic when a man he admired presented himself to overthrow Agrawal: Elon Musk, the chief of Tesla and SpaceX.

The offer from the world’s richest man was irresistible: he would buy Twitter – where he had 22 million followers – for $44 billion. After signing the contract in April 2022, Musk, always volatile, wanted to back out, claiming that Twitter had not disclosed the actual percentage of bots and fake accounts.

Only in October, pressured by a lawsuit, Musk finally paid the promised billions. Twitter became a privately held company under his command. Agrawal and his closest collaborators were fired on the first day.

Character Limit details the excruciating ins and outs of the negotiations. But the best part of the story comes next when the new king and his court enter the company’s headquarters in San Francisco.

Musk was convinced that Twitter was dominated by leftists who censored right-wing users. He had his reasons for thinking so.

During the 2020 election campaign, The New York Post published a story indicating that Hunter Biden, the troubled son of then-candidate Joe Biden, had facilitated a meeting between a Ukrainian businessman and his father. The investigation was based on leaked messages from a laptop.

Twitter took down the sharing of the story, under very weak pretexts. This fiasco was bigger and more serious than what Kate Conger and Ryan Mac hint at in the book. Under Musk’s guard, however, the fiascos would be even more numerous and uproarious.

One of the first disasters was the idea of selling user verification badges for a modest $8. The novelty led to a disastrous proliferation of fake profiles. There was even a fake account from pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly promising free insulin distribution – which caused a 5% drop in the company’s shares that day.

In his devastating wave of layoffs, Musk dismantled the entire content moderation structure, which he saw as a censorship hub. As a result, videos of child pornography and shocking images of people being beaten and killed began to circulate on the network.

Musk defines himself as an “absolutist of free speech,” but his defense of this principle is selective, as Character Limit demonstrates. In Brazil, X, now suspended, clashed with the Supreme Federal Court (these very recent events are not mentioned in the book). However, in countries like Turkey and India, the network made extensive concessions to government censorship.

Musk does, however, defend the expression of ideas he agrees with – and has endorsed dangerous ideas on the network where he is the owner and sovereign. He even left a favorable comment on a post propagating an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

The proliferation of extremists on X, encouraged by Musk, drives away the network’s main source of revenue. Major advertisers, such as Apple and Disney, abandoned X because they do not want to see their brand associated with racist or neo-Nazi posts.

As Kate Conger and Ryan Mac report, Musk believed that managing Twitter would be easier than producing electric cars or putting rockets into orbit. But the problems of a social network are of a different nature. There is no engineering capable of determining, for example, where the line between content moderation and censorship lies.

X’s vocation, Musk insists, is to be “the global town square”. On the surface, this is a democratic ambition. But pay attention to the definite article: Musk isn’t offering a square to the world; he wants to own the global square.

And he demands to be heard in that unique square: after firing the engineer who contradicted him, a new code was inserted into Twitter’s algorithm to always recommend Elon Musk’s posts to users.


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