SIO437: Zoë Schiffer on Elon Musk's Twitter Takeover

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:16 Thomas: And welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 437. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and got a fun one today. I'll be speaking with Zoe Schiffer, whose new book is called "Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter." Pretty sure we all saw what happened a year and a half ago, and for one, was already excited to read the book as it was happening. And fortunately, Zoe Schiffer has written the book with what the F exactly happened when Elon Musk took over Twitter. Firings, the not paying people, the terrible jokes, the thinking he's a business genius constantly, and maybe perhaps not being a business genious. Much interesting stuff to talk about, can't wait to get to it. But before we do, I'll say please support the show on patreon.com/seriouspod. You make episodes like this happen, and you don't have to hear the stupid ads, one of which is coming right now. So you don't want to hear that. patreon.com/seriouspod, skip this ad, that's coming right now. Thank you so much for supporting the show. Zoe, thanks so much for joining us today.

0:01:18 Zoe: Thank you so much for having me.

0:01:20 Thomas: Book, "Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter," is something that, I'm not even joking, when this was happening, like, gosh, I can't believe it's already been, wow, almost two years. When it was happening, I was like already wanting the book on it, you know? It's just like, someone please already, I just like, I'm nowhere near this, can I write the book? Somebody's got to write the a book on it. Then I realized I'm not an author, so I'm glad you did, you

0:01:41 Zoe: Yeah, that was happening I think two months in I started getting questions from my agent like what do you think about a book? And I was like, this is like just unfolding. I don't know and then by the time I wanted to write the book I was, like, oh there have been five other books that were sold on this topic.

0:01:46 Thomas: Oh. Man.

0:01:54 Zoe: Like I'm very late to the game.

0:01:55 Thomas: Okay. Well, we'll say yours Is the best, I haven't even caught the other ones, I've been too busy, but was such a wild story, and another thing about today's world is that there's so many things that are crazy, and like that I want to read the book on, that, like, it's. So it's been a year and a half-ish, and it already, I forget like how many crazy things were involved in this. So I'm so excited to get back into it.

0:01:57 Zoe: Yeah.

0:02:18 Zoe: Yeah. It's wild.

0:02:19 Thomas: If you don't mind, before we get into it, can we talk a bit about your background, introduce yourself, let kind of how you got into this.

0:02:25 Zoe: For sure. So I had kind of a circuitous route to getting into journalism in the first place. I don't know how far back you want me to go, but I started out my career working in the the tech industry as a writer, as a kind of content writer. Somewhat unhappily, I really wanted to be an investigative reporter, but had kind of heard that the industry was falling apart. And so I spent a few years working in tech and then finally switched over. And really my focus since I started doing full-time journalism has been the people in the industry. It's like the stories of humans are what interests me. And often it's the people with the least amount of power at these organizations that I think have the most interesting stories, because Silicon Valley is rife with kind of high level, beautiful values on what these companies supposedly stand for. But I think so often it's the user and the employee, the security guard, the barista who like really see whether those values play out on the ground.

0:03:12 Thomas: Yeah. I think Twitter would have been better off with the barista owning when Moss took over. That's my personal opinion.

0:03:28 Zoe: I think there's a lot of of people who agree with you.

0:03:31 Thomas: You have a connection like in particular to Twitter, or was it like this was your beat and this was a great kind opportunity to write about it?

0:03:38 Zoe: I was a tech reporter largely because I lived, I went to undergrad and graduate school in the Bay Area, and tech was kind of the thing to write about if you were there. And so I've always said, like, I'm not a very natural tech reporter because I don't particularly care about kind of gadgets and the latest technology, but the people who work in tech are fascinating. And so when Elon Musk in April of 2022 first said he was going to buy the the company, it was like the Super Bowl for tech reporters. Everyone was like, this is the story of the moment.

And we all wanted to get in on it. And it actually took a few months for me to source up and be able to start producing scoops on was going on inside the company. And then it was kind of like a landslide. It was like every morning for months, I was waking up and my phone was blowing up with people telling me, this crazy thing happened. He sent this email in the middle of the night, here's some documents that show like this terrible thing. And so it just kind of became relentless in a positive way for me,

0:04:36 Zoe: Although I think the external effects were pretty negative for everyone.

0:04:09 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my God. Yes. For you. Yeah, I was going to say. I

0:04:41 Zoe: So yeah, I think like so many reporters, I've had a really tortured relationship with Twitter from the outset. It's kind of, it was something that we were basically required to use for work, as you know. And, you as a woman on the internet, it always felt kind of dangerous and unsafe. I mean, being a reporter who wrote for the internet, it really did feel like your goal every single day was to see your article go viral, and then it would, and that was like the worst thing in the world because suddenly there was just like a tsunami of attention, and it was really hard to tell kind of what, where the conversation was going. It would start out really positive and people were impressed. And then all of a sudden, you'd be like, hit with a barrage of hate. And so over

0:04:41 Thomas: Love Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:05:24 Zoe: Time, my Twitter presence, you can kind of track it became very, like, I had no personality. I was like, all I'm going to do is break news. I'm not going to talk about my kids. I're not going to say anything about my life, because it just felt like it was getting increasingly toxic, particularly when Elon Musk came on the scene.

0:05:41 Thomas: Yeah. Can definitely relate somewhat to that. It's I feel like everybody who has any sort of public following has gone through that evolution. Or there's the people who seem to just do you know, they don't care. They're just like, it doesn't affect them or something. But if you're at all sensitive in any way, it's really hard to have any following and then see what just goes on there every day.

0:06:00 Zoe: Yeah.

0:06:00 Thomas: But I love this idea of the tech reporter that's like not really into tech. Like You have your like, your Nokia flip phone still or whatever, you know. No, it's two different things. You have your Nokia phone still, and you're like, but it's great because honestly, I feel like a lot of where Silicon Valley has gotten into trouble has been like being too enamored with this crap. You

0:06:19 Zoe: I go back and forth on this, because I work closely with Casey Newton, who's a well -known tech reporter, and he really does love tech. He gets really excited about the latest productivity app and he's always getting the newest gadget. And think in some ways it does make him a really good reporter because he's able to tell lots of different types of stories. It's like, look at this new thing that OpenAI is building. And then also look at weird crypto scam. He can run the gamut. Whereas I feel like Like I get a little bit stuck in this one type of like, look at this horrible thing that's happened and here's all the drama behind it type story, which I think at this point in my career, I honestly am trying to shift. But yeah, I mean, I think focusing on people like it does kind of force you to tell stories that have real stakes and real impact. And that has always been a rewarding part of my job. Yeah.

0:06:53 Thomas: Right.

0:07:13 Thomas: Should you begin the story, uh, get people excited about your book, "Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter"? Oh.

0:07:20 Zoe: So, I mean, I start the book even before Elon Musk had decided to buy the company. And really, there's this moment when Jack Dorsey, who was the former CEO of Twitter, decides to step down, and he kind of sees Elon Musk as the one person who can save this company. Both of these men, very wealthy, very influential, feel like Twitter has slid in a bad direction. Dorsey thinks that it's because it's a public company and it's beholden to Wall Street, and it has to make bad decisions because of that. Elon Musk famously believes that it has been overrun with the woke mind virus. What is the woke mind virus? It's very ambiguous. We're still not sure, but basically that it is overrun by censorious liberals who want to limit speech. And he, in January of '22, has about $10 billion burning a hole in his pocket. And this is such an interesting moment because I think that if Elon Musk had stopped in January of '22, he his reputation would have been sterling.

0:08:24 Thomas: God, yeah, yeah.

0:08:24 Zoe: Like there were, yeah, there were whispers in Silicon Valley that, you know, Tesla employees were upset about this or that, or they weren't treated particularly really well, but really Elon Musk was seen as a visionary, a genius, he was the richest man in the world, he was Time Person of the Year, like He was on top of it, but

0:08:40 Thomas: God. Him, okay, him and J.K. Rowling need to go to the same school of just shut the fuck up and preserve your entire legacy, you know, what I mean?

0:08:44 Zoe: I Know, it's So I'm Just like you Don't Have To Do this. We actually have to be on the internet. Like, you could lock off. I

0:08:53 Thomas: Yeah. You could just never go on again, and you would still have a bazillion dollars. I will go on the record, I know everyone likes to retcon this, but I'm on the record on podcasts of hating this guy for a long time. I don't know your feelings, but I've not been a fan of Elon. And uh, it's fun when people just confirm, you're like, at first I was like, am I wrong? Do I hate him for reasons that that are just like, I don't like super arrogant dudes that don't actually seem that smart to me. And then it's like, no, confirmed it every day, times 11, you know, like just keeps confirming it over and over. But yeah, he, I do remember though, like he could have just shut up and had such a good reputation at that time, still, broadly speaking.

0:08:59 Zoe: Know Yeah.

0:09:33 Zoe: Yeah, he really does have this quality of like, he cannot leave well enough alone. He doesn't like it when things are calm and peaceful. Like he says, it makes him anxious. And so he has to sell a bunch of Tesla stock, or doesn't have to, but he decides to for kind of various tax reasons that we don't need to get into. And so he's got $10 billion burning a hole in his pocket. And he's like, what should I do with it? What do I like? What am I interested in?

0:09:58 Thomas: Relatable.

0:09:58 Zoe: Well, I'm completely addicted to Twitter. Yeah. So I'll start buying up Twitter stock. And it really, from all of the reporting I've done and everyone I've talked to, it seems like he doesn't have a plan at the beginning. He's just kind of like, let me buy up this stock and see what happens. And he's talking to those close to him about building a Twitter competitor on the blockchain. Or maybe he's going to just sit on the board.

And his brother Kimball famously is like, you're going to hate being on a board. You don't actually have power when you're on a board. But he's not committed to just taking over the company at first. And so a few months later, he's bought up so much stock that suddenly he's Twitter's largest shareholder. At this point, there's an interim CEO, this man Parag Agarwal, who's a very soft spoken. He's kind of the opposite of Elon Musk in many, many ways.

He's technically very savvy, but he kind of walks around the office in a t -shirt and jeans. He's a little slouched over. He doesn't like the spotlight at all. And all of a sudden, he finds out that a few months into taking over his dream job as Twitter CEO, Elon Musk is his largest shareholder. And now he has to kind of go to battle with him in order to save the company or sell the company. It becomes this very contentious fight from the beginning, beginning.

0:09:58 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:11:15 Thomas: Wasn't there a lawsuit over like, hey, you're kind of slyly buying these shares in ways that, you up, or was that more when he purchased it in the Tesla stuff? Was there a lawsuit over him buying shares kind of in secret, or am I misremembering? Oh.

0:11:19 Zoe: Yeah, there Has been since, yeah, um, I don't think it started right away because again he was like, he was doing it in secret, but yeah, I mean, once you hit a certain threshold, I forget what it is, like five percent of the company's, um, stock, um, you do have to disclose, you, I think you have like 11 days to disclose to the SEC that you've purchased all these shares, and Elon waited an extra, I'm forgetting what it was, like a week or so, to purchase the shares, meaning that as soon as the news became public, the stock price of Twitter just shot up. So he was able to continue buying shares at this lower price.

0:11:30 Thomas: Okay. Right. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

0:11:59 Zoe: And obviously, Twitter shareholders were not pleased about that. With Elon, I write in the book, it's always hard to tell what is a savvy business strategy. Rules don't apply to me, and I'm going to get away with it attitude. And what is just like, he's bad at paperwork because he's building rockets and trying to get us to Mars, and he doesn't seem to give a shit about that, but um, I think shareholders believe that that it was a tactic.

0:12:11 Thomas: Yeah.

0:12:22 Thomas: When, when you have that many billions of dollars, boy, there's a whole lot of room for like, eh, just not gonna fill this out because oftentimes the fee is like, you know, a few thousand dollars, it's like, what difference does that make? He probably saves so much more in under, know, buying undervalued Twitter stock, because people would, would have wanted to know, you, that, they're, they're not just selling a little bit of stock. They might be potentially selling to somebody who's trying to buy the whole company or buy enough of a controlling share of the company. It makes a major difference. It's why we have these regulations. And then, but we have like very little ability to actually enforce them. It's like meaningless amount of enforcement sometimes, but anyway, separate story.

0:12:29 Zoe: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, with Elon in particular, I feel like he does have kind of a too big to fail thing going on where Um, it just, our laws and rules are not set up to hold someone as rich as Elon Musk accountable, and we see again and again that even the heaviest fine that he's gotten from the SEC was what, what, $20 million? It's devastating to any normal person, but to Elon, who's Worth $200 billion, yeah, he's like, okay, I'm sure he doesn't want to pay it, but it's not going to hurt his overall wealth. And so I think that although we do now have thousands of arbitration claims from former employees and tons of lawsuits for a few hundred million dollars here and there, the sum total of it, it's hard to see it impacting him in any real way.

0:13:03 Thomas: Yeah.

0:13:18 Thomas: Pocket change for him. Yeah.

0:13:39 Thomas: Oh, I was going to say, I mean, if you piss off enough people by being bad enough at what you're doing. Like maybe eventually just an aggregate, you know, enough of those lawsuits. Okay. Okay. So back to the story though. Let's pick up. So he's buying up the stock. And at this point you're saying he doesn't really know what he wants to do. It just feels like he wants to do something or have some sort of control or say over things.

0:13:48 Zoe: Yeah.

0:14:00 Zoe: Wants to influence the company and And he's not sure the best way to do that. Is it to build a blockchain version of Twitter, whatever that means? Is it by the company and take it private as he eventually does?

0:14:08 Thomas: What is, what does, does anyone know what that means? Is that, look, okay. I know you said you're not like super into tech, what does that even mean, what version of Twitter, what the

0:14:13 Zoe: No. Mean, I I can only tell you his explanations for it. He was simultaneously talking about how annoying crypto spam was on the platform and then being like, we're going to build a blockchain vision of Twitter and people will be able to buy and sell a little bit of Dogecoin in order to tweet. It was just like totally incoherent and really hard to tell how it was going to work out, eventually he's like, oh actually if we do this, because Twitter is so massive only big players will be able to like participate in the blockchain, and so then it kind of like defeats the whole purpose, and yeah

0:14:35 Thomas: Okay oh boy he he accidentally recreated the Citizens United, like just, oh yeah, whoops if we let money determine speech then

0:14:53 Zoe: Yeah, eventually he sends this text to one of his associates and just says, blockchain Twitter isn't possible, and you can kind of like, here, the like violin in the background, like he's so sad. It's like 10 days of him obsessing over this and then it's not going to be a thing. But basically what happens is that Parag Agarwal, the CEO of Twitter for this very short time, learns that Elon Musk is now his largest shareholder. And there's this mad scramble within Twitter, within like the board of directors and the senior executives to figure out like, what does he want? So Parag, Brett Taylor, who's the the head of the board, and Elon, they meet for this kind of dinner meeting at an Airbnb in the South Bay near San Francisco.

And their goal with this meeting is to suss out like, what does Elon want? And by all accounts, the meeting goes pretty well. It's cordial. It is fun. Elon is overflowing with ideas on how to make Twitter better. He wants to remove permanent bans, make it so that anyone basically can come back to the platform even if they are suspended for a little while. He wants to rid the platform of bots. He wants to get rid of all of the crypto spam. And Parag is like, okay, yeah, these aren't like horrible ideas. That's nice. He wants to add an edit button, which Twitter had already been working on. So Parag at

0:15:29 Thomas: My god right

0:16:05 Zoe: This point is like he's playing.

0:16:05 Thomas: But like this is such don't you feel like it's such a case of where, again, when you're the richest man in the world and everyone probably goes around saying yes to you all the time, imagine telling the CEO of the company, hey, you should get rid of bots, like yeah, you don't think he knows that they shouldn't have bots, like they're probably trying to not have, but it's just a like that that, I just noticed it early on in this process when he talked about, you kind of, the basic, he did like a freshman in college philosophy speech about free, you know, like he was just like, oh, it really, it's it's the speech that you don't want to hear that. And you're just like. Dude, you don't think anyone else here has thought of this? Like, it's, do you get that impression that he really thinks these are all original ideas that no one's thought of or something? Something

0:16:23 Zoe: Right. 100%. Right.

0:16:42 Zoe: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I think that the single biggest difference between Elon today and the Elon that was building SpaceX from Tesla is that he has far fewer people around him who will tell him the truth. And I actually think that that's a really dangerous position to be in because yeah, you're exactly spot on. Like Twitter employees, you know, the company was far from perfect. Like it had always lagged behind its competitors in the tech industry in terms of revenue and growth. But what it had was, that it was a ton of employees who were incredibly passionate about the product and had spent years and hours and hours of their life thinking really deeply about these issues. They had tried a lot of the things that Elon suggested and then walked away from them for various practical reasons.

0:16:57 Thomas: Yeah yeah mm -hmm right yeah

0:17:29 Zoe: And what we were seeing was Elon suggesting things that had already been done or walked away from for various kind of safety reasons. And eventually, he does take over the company and starts putting a lot of these things in place and the business has suffered as a result. So there's a reason for that. But not to skip too far ahead.

0:17:45 Zoe: Yes, like in this initial meeting, he's telling Parag his like wish list of product changes. Parag is playing nice. And then over the next few days, things start to fall apart really fast. And here's what happens. Elon goes from suggesting little product changes, which Parag is amenable to, to trying to pressure Parag Agarwal to get rid of his head of legal and policy, this woman named Vijaya Gadde, who was a very well-respected lawyer inside the company. And what she had done over the years was really fight for free speech on Twitter. When Twitter was banned in Turkey because the government had asked Twitter to take down various posts and Twitter had refused to do so, Vijaya Gadde actually led the court case to get the ban overturned and get Twitter reinstated rather than just caving to this government and exactly what it wanted. And these kinds of things played out again and again. And she had a really good reputation. Internally, she had a really strong relationship with Parag Agarwal. So this is kind of the breaking point.

0:17:43 Thomas: Sure yeah, sorry hmm but you would think that would be somebody who he would like, like free speechy person, what do you know, like, yeah okay

0:18:56 Zoe: No, Elon Musk identified Vijaya Gadde because she was involved in the Trump ban as what he called the chief censor of Twitter. So for whatever reason, because of people he was was talking to or because he had extrapolated from this one decision, which actually Jack Dorsey had signed off on. But he'd kind of blamed it all on this one woman. And I think it's worth pointing out, the highest profile woman of color at the company at that point. And he really felt like she was to blame for all of it. And so he wants her out immediately. And Parag says no, he's not going to fire her. At this point, Elon gets very nasty very fast. We can see him texting Parag saying like, what did you even get done this week, and threatening to take the company private, which he eventually follows through on with this offer to take the company private at $54.20 a share yeah

0:19:04 Thomas: Yeah 420, so funny, amazing, great, and it's just that simple, like the fact that he couldn't do, know, influence him to fire this person and it just quickly, you know, it does seem like he's this impatient child that like the minute he can't get his way he throws a fit, and I guess when you have a gajillion dollars, like, yeah man, I guess you can do that, like you can throw a bunch of fits and you do tend to get your way a bunch, yeah

0:20:14 Zoe: I mean, okay, I I skipped over something crucial, which is the night of the dinner meeting, when, when, and Brett Taylor are trying to suss out Elon's intentions, which are a lot of like minute product changes that they'd already thought about, out and or been working on, largely what they want from him is to join the board of directors, because that's a way to get him involved but kind of have him essentially not take over the company. And at first Elon is amenable to that, he agrees, um, then he starts pressuring Parag to fire Vijay Agade, and at that point when Parag says absolutely not, what happens is he's talking to his brother and his friends about this, and his brother has been saying the whole time, like, you're not a board of directors kind of dude, Elon. You want way more control than that. You don't want to just nod and shake your head and give advice.

0:21:00 Thomas: You're more of a fascist dictatorship guy, you know, I'm just getting that vibe from you.

0:21:03 Zoe: He wanted his thumb on the scales. And so I think his brother rightly thought this isn't going to work out. And when Parag says no to firing Vijaya Gadde, Elon's like, you're right. I need to be way more involved. And so he offers to take the company private. We look back now and $54.20 a share very quickly looked like an overly generous offer because the markets were about to tank. But at the time, Twitter's stock had been $68 a share months back. And so it wasn't completely clear that this was the best offer they'd ever get. But the board does their due diligence.

They have meetings with their bankers. And the bankers essentially say like, look, it's very unlikely that you're going to get the stock here on your own or get another buyer. And so this might be kind of the best offer. And and so eventually, a week or so, Twitter accepts the offer. Now, what happens right after that? Russia's invading Ukraine. There's a lot of instability at the global level. And markets tank, and so all of a sudden this offer that had seemed fine at the beginning looks like incredibly generous, and Elon Musk starts texting his associates again and saying like, oh, I don't know about this

0:21:07 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

0:22:14 Zoe: Whole like Twitter deal, I just signed this airtight offer agreement, I actually think that if like World War III is about to break out I might not want to buy the company. And um,

0:22:23 Thomas: Well. And it's funny, like, look, I will, as much as this was an incredibly stupid decision all around many times over for Elon, he also did get a bit unlucky. Lucky. Now, I would think the richest man in the world, you know, I think you're supposed to be able to somewhat predict kind of market trends or something, but he got a bit unlucky because by my memory, and let me know if, if this you seems right, there was a of a tech bubble from COVID as well, where like all the tech companies seem to be overpriced. You know, their shares seem to be pretty overprices because they just did unbelievably good in the wake of COVID and everything being virtual, et cetera, et cetera. And it really did seem like they were were primed to kind of tank and maybe, maybe the, yeah, maybe the Ukraine, Russia thing was part of it, but it also just seemed like a bit of a bubble and it happened to pop.

It seems to me like right after he had made this like ironclad, can't get out of it, offer that I don't think. And I remember, again, was on Opening Arguments at the time, reporting kind of on the legal components of it.

And as I'm sure you remember, like, nobody really knew, I, like, your average person following the news, I don't think people knew how big of a deal it was, like precisely how this offer went, like he, he really was committed, and for the longest time everyone was like, well, you could just get out of it because it's massively overpriced.

0:22:48 Zoe: Yeah. No.

0:23:38 Zoe: Yeah.

0:23:38 Thomas: And then as we all know, that one didn't end up being the case.

0:23:39 Zoe: No. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, yeah, so I guess just to back up a little bit, like even before Elon came on the scene, Parag Agrawal and his CFO had started planning for layoffs precisely because of the issue you're talking about, like, the tech industry had essentially seen enormous growth during COVID, particularly companies like Twitter that that relied on digital ads for a lot of their revenue. And a lot of these companies thought like the pandemic fueled boom was going to last forever.

0:24:11 Thomas: Oh.

0:24:11 Zoe: And when it became clear that it wasn't, they really needed to cut costs. A lot of them, Twitter included, had ballooned their headcount, they had hired just a ton of people. And all of a sudden, it was like, oh, no, we really need to, the ads market looks like it's going to contract a little bit, you know, the ad market is cyclical, it'll come back eventually. But we need to do the responsible thing and cut costs.

And so Twitter had actually started planning for, I believe it was a 16% layoff. They were going to cut 16% of the company almost to the day that Elon offered to take it private. And they were about to spread news about this. And all of a sudden, it's like, oh, whoa, whoa, Elon Musk might own us outright, let's not make any sudden changes.

And so, yeah, there was a bit of unfortunate timing for Elon in that he makes the offer, the market tanks like right after that. And all of a sudden he's signed this airtight purchase agreement. It gives him very little wiggle room to get out of it. There is kind of misinformation going around at the time because there was this clause in the agreement that said, um, he, you could walk away under these very specific conditions and pay a billion dollar, you know, walk away fee essentially.

0:25:20 Zoe: Um, those conditions were very, very limited, it was like if Twitter had participated in like outright fraud essentially. And this becomes very important because as soon as the markets tank, Musk starts to try and get out of the agreement by essentially saying that Twitter had been lying about number of bots on the platform. And he actually sues the company to get out of the argument. Twitter sues him right back. And it becomes this kind of cat and mouse game where his lawyers and bankers are asking Twitter for enormous amounts of data, like show us the numbers and prove

0:25:19 Thomas: Yeah, we covered this. Mm -hmm.

0:25:38 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Right, but it's an

0:25:56 Zoe: Essentially that

0:25:56 Thomas: Incredibly overconfident stupid cat and then mice that actually kind of know what they're doing.

0:25:56 Zoe: Yeah. And Twitter, like, tried to play ball, like they would send him all this information and they would seemingly like ignore it and then just ask for new information. And it was like months and months of this like protracted fight, because, you know, I think all of us believed, and and it looked, it looks very apparent in hindsight, that the whole bot argument was a smokescreen. He just didn't want to pay 54.20 a share, which like valid I

0:26:03 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Do you get the sense that he knew he was stuck or not? Because I get the sense that I'm not sure how much he pays attention to all the legal, you know, dottings of I's and crossings of T's. Like, I'm Not sure he realized, like, how stuck he was.

0:26:40 Zoe: Don't think. First, I mean, his bankers were trying to be like, it doesn't look great, there are very few ways for us to get out of it. But then things would kind of happen. In July or August, former senior executive at Twitter who Parag had fired, this hacker named Mudge, filed a whistleblower complaint about all of these kind of failings and supposed lies that Twitter had told over the years. This looks like maybe this is the thing that will allow Elon Musk to get out of the deal, but I think by the end of summer the bankers, the lawyers, have really convinced him that like, if this case actually goes to trial in Delaware, you will be forced to buy the company. And at that point Elon says like, okay, fine, if I'm going to have to end up buying it, then I want to do it on my terms. And And so he decides to go forward with the deal on the original terms of the agreement.

0:27:36 Thomas: He's like, I want to be able to do an extremely elaborate, unfunny sync pun if I'm going to do this.

0:27:43 Zoe: Yeah, that and I mean, yeah, there's so much shenanigans that happened like that afternoon in particular. In my book, I detail that like, yeah. He walks in with the sink. There's like this scramble to close all the paperwork that early because he knows that Parag Agarwal, the current CEO, is going to reside and he wants to be able to fire him for cause so he doesn't have to pay severance. And so they're scrambling to get everything together. And actually, the afternoon of deal close, I report in my book, Elon's side realizes that they're short half a billion dollars. And they go to Twitter and say, hey, would you guys loan us the money? Because it's basically our money. And Twitter was like, no, that's not how that works. It's straight up not your money right now. So you go find it somewhere else. And it's Elon Musk. So he does find it. Someone wires it.

0:27:43 Thomas: Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah.

0:28:29 Zoe: He gets the money together. And the deal goes through. Yeah.

0:28:32 Thomas: He end up firing the CEO?

0:28:34 Zoe: He fired him and most of the executive team for cause, so again, like the definition of a for-cause firing means like the executives have engaged in fraud that makes it so that Elon Musk does not have to pay out their severance now. Like It

0:28:50 Thomas: Fraud? It has to be fraud? It can't just be like, I wasn't sure when you said four casas, I was like, oh, does that just mean like if you're doing a bad job or whatever, but it specifically has to be like that level of wrongdoing?

0:29:01 Zoe: Has to be, I need to, I would need a lawyer to actually like look at the, um, but the the requirement is really high, it's not just you were were doing a bad job. And I think by all accounts, they weren't doing a bad job, like they were doing a good job. But I think really it's, like you did something, you did something really serious, and you essentially like broke the rules in some way. And, you know, now there's this whole legal fight playing out where the executives are arguing that they, you know, in fact, were not fired for cause. I think their lawsuit is like for cause doesn't mean like carrying out board approved business decisions that Elon Musk dislikes. Like that's, that's not part of the the definition.

0:29:09 Thomas: Okay. Right. Yeah.

0:29:36 Zoe: But he is still trying to avoid paying, you know, millions of dollars in severance.

0:29:39 Thomas: It's like when Republicans impeach Mayorkas, it's like, you can't just impeach a guy for doing the job, but whatever. Okay. I feel like there's some commonality there, but. Not going to have time, nor should you go through your entire book and people should check it out. Of course, again, extremely hardcore. But I got to imagine he's racked up a absolute, to use a technical term, shitload of lawsuits of these employees that shouldn't have been fired or let go. Go. About some of that. I mean, cause that was just a bloodbath, right?

0:29:48 Zoe: Yeah. Yeah. So about a week after Elon Musk buys the company, he lays off half the workforce. I mean, so in buying the company he has strapped Twitter with $13 billion in bank debt. The interest alone on that debt come January is going to be $150 billion. And so there's a big rush to kind of cut costs as quickly as possible and headcount is a major cost and so he know the mandate is essentially get rid of anyone who's not like completely critical as quickly as possible um of the kind of consequences that to the stability of the platform and no have a ton of reporting on this in my book in terms of how the layoffs actually went down, because it was this incredibly stressful time at the company, as you can can imagine employees had no idea what was going on.

Managers were being handed lists of hundreds of people's names and being like, write a sentence for everyone you want to keep and why they're critical. And so literally you had managers the night of, they had 24 hours to pull this off, arguing like with each other around like, well, this person's going through cancer treatment,

0:30:43 Thomas: Am Oh

0:31:09 Zoe: So we can't cut that. Well, that person's on maternity leave, so we Can't Cut That. I mean, someone described it to me as Schindler's List. It felt like this horrible rush and an impossible possible situation to do humanely and do it well. And it really was for Elon, just like a pure kind of money play, a question of how much money he could save. So yeah.

0:31:09 Thomas: My God. Oh, geez. Wow. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And look, we all love to hate the stereotype of a Silicon Valley tech worker, but like those are real people. Like that's people who, you know, maybe some people who really love the company wanted to work there. Maybe people who really needed the job. You know, as you say, people going through cancer treatment and to treat them all like,

0:31:45 Zoe: Or people who are on visas, like, yeah, I mean, yeah.

0:31:47 Thomas: Oh, yeah. Gosh, didn't think about that. Yeah, there's probably so many, I'm sure, stories that you reported on of, like, it's just such a shitty way to do things. Now, what they getting any, severance at all? What was that situation?

0:32:00 Zoe: No. The So, reason, I means, so just to back up a little bit, like he actually wanted to cut them before this kind of November, I think it was November 1st, there was was some stock cliff where employees had to be paid out for vested shares. And so Elon was going to owe them a bunch of money. And at first, he's like, I don't want to pay that. And the legal team, all of the executives who are remaining are like, oh, no, you absolutely have to pay that. A huge reason that employees have stuck around is because we said again and again as these legal fights were playing out over the summer that your employment agreement says that that if you stick it out, your shares will continue to

0:32:03 Thomas: Situation. Hmm. Wow.

0:32:36 Thomas: Geez.

0:32:37 Zoe: Vest at this specific rate. It'll be okay for you financially, even if you do get cut, because that seemed very likely. And so eventually, they convince him that he has to pay them out on November 1st. But then a few days later, he's like, okay, time's up. We have to cut as many people as possible. Andso employees are at the office on the evening, around 5pm, early November, and their phones start pinging and and people are getting this email that says your role at Twitter. And there's kind of this like low buzz of anxiety and chitchat. All of a sudden, security sweeps through the building. Everyone has to get out. And it's clear that the next morning, very early, they're all going to get an email that says whether or not they have a job. The next morning they wake up and it's kind of this game of like looking on Slack, who's deactivated, who still has an email address that I can ping. Did get the email? Did you not?

And it's clear from the jump that Elon Musk has fired or laid off a ton of employees, but also a ton of engineers, a ton of people who were in these very critical roles in terms of managing Twitter's tech stack. And it is kind of chaos internally as people are like, do we have enough people to run our privacy programs? Do we have enough people to keep the platform stable and online if event happens? And almost immediately, they start having to ping people and ask them to come back to the company

0:33:12 Thomas: Yeah. God.

0:34:01 Zoe: Because they realize that they've fired or laid off way too many people. And so, yeah, it's just complete chaos from the beginning.

0:34:06 Thomas: These and. The really we all witnessed it break several different ways, right? I mean, like, it You can't just get rid of a bunch of vital people even if you said if something were to happen. I mean, even just the day-to-day of a massive kind platform like that takes some doing, you know, like it's this idea that you could just do do that disruptive thing and carry on like it was fine is, uh, seems, seems a bit off to me.

0:34:15 Zoe: Yeah.

0:34:35 Zoe: I mean, there was a misperception on both sides because I think the people who at this point are kind of waiting for Elon Musk to fail are like, this is the end of Twitter. And I remember in media, Twitter in particular, we kind of had this evening where everyone was like saying goodbye really dramatically. And I was like, I don't know, you guys, like I've worked in tech, there's a lot of work that goes into keeping these platforms stable in the event that like a ton of people start sharing the same video all at once or you asking for refunds or whatever, like they are robust to a certain level. And I think Twitter was always going to if it was going going to decline. It was going to happen slowly and over time where it got buggier and glitchier and there were little blackouts here and there. It wasn't just going to be like a big bang where all of a sudden we couldn't go to twitter.com.

0:34:44 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. Oh

0:35:16 Zoe: So I think, oh

0:35:17 Thomas: Yeah. No, I didn't mean for good, but there were plenty of interruptions where we couldn't go to Twitter.

0:35:20 Zoe: Yeah, yeah, and we started seeing that immediately. Like people couldn't share links or they couldn't show photos. So, I think yeah, it was like there was truth to it and also like it was

0:35:22 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Right. No, but you're right. There were the people who were like, well, this place is done. And that, that was a little silly. Like, yeah. Okay. It's still worth gazillions of dollars. They're not going to just be like, oh, well it's not working. So I guess just cancel it. Just turn the whole thing off.

0:35:31 Zoe: Yeah, just pull the Plug. But I think, I mean, at that point, like after the November 4th layoffs when half the company is gone and they have to ask people to come back, everyone kind of thought like, okay, we like made it through the big round of layoffs and like things, now we'll start trying to focus on stability. But in fact, we see something else happening. We see Elon Musk, you know, prowling the Twitter office in San Francisco, getting increasingly more paranoid about who his employees are and how they're going to try and sabotage him.

And he starts asking his lieutenants, Twitter employees call them the goons, to hunt through Slack and look for people who've criticized him and fire them on the spot. And so more layoffs start to happen where anyone who said something mildly critical of Elon, including when he shares what he thinks is his technical knowledge about the platform and they try and gently correct him, those people are just out the door immediately. And then we see a whole round of lawsuits from them in terms of saying that they were fired in retaliation. And we do eventually see the NLRB, the National Labor Relations Board, actually side with some of these employees and say that firings were illegal.

0:35:41 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah.

0:36:47 Thomas: You would hope. Has he not read a single book? Like, where in anywhere, either history or literary history, where and anywhere is it like, and then the big fascist guy fired everyone who disagreed with him, and he lived happily ever after. It was all great. Everyone was like, that was awesome, dude. You're amazing. Like, what? I don't understand.

0:37:07 Zoe: So interesting, because, you starting really in December, so he's owned the company for just a couple months, we really start to see two versions of reality coalesce. There's like Elon Musk's version of reality, where Twitter was overrun with people who didn't defend free speech, supposedly, didn't want to work particularly hard, didn't want to be what he calls hardcore. And then, you Know, everyone online who's criticizing him, because they're are brainwashed by the mainstream media and all of that.

0:37:35 Zoe: And then We have basically the rest of the world who thinks that Elon Musk is acting like a dictator. He's actually making really unsound business decisions. And in fact, he doesn't seem to defend free speech because he's firing anyone who's ever criticized him and banning them from Twitter. And those two sides don't talk to each other. I think we see similar dynamics play out a lot in the media and tech industry, where each side sees itself as, if not the underdog, like fighting for the underdogs. And so there's a lot of righteousness on both sides, and I think very little dialogue. And I think that's only hardened over time. I mean, there's reason that people compare Elon Musk so often these days to Trump, because I

0:37:35 Thomas: Yeah, of course.

0:38:17 Thomas: Yeah.

0:38:17 Zoe: Think he does have kind of a Trump-like quality in terms of like Teflon and criticism just sliding off of him in some ways. Because I think the people people who at this point do not like him have ample reason to think that, and they're talking to a lot of other people who agree with him. And then his fans are very hardened in their belief on his genius, and, you know, they're kind into his vision of being kind of a free speech advocate.

0:38:46 Thomas: Yeah, it do you feel like that has survived? Because I feel like Trump, in some ways, Trump's allowed to skate by for longer because I feel like it's harder maybe for, like, to point to the MAGA people and be like, see this, this, and this, because they just be like fake news. Whereas with Elon Musk, like it feels like it is a lot easier to be like, look at what's happened to Twitter, like, look at the value of it, look at every, you know, like all this stuff. It feels to me, and this is totally anecdotal so I could be wrong, but like, it feels to me that his sort of hero worship fell off a not, you know, not, not like 100%, obviously, but it feels like it fell off quite a bit. Do you have a perception of that?

0:39:26 Zoe: I don't think it fell off as much as it just shifted. Like I think he's become much more of a right wing figure, much more vocally right wing in his leanings. And I think his fan base has shifted accordingly. I mean, I think when you look at the Tesla fan base, like those people are still defending him basically no matter what he does. And that's because they have money tied up in his success. And in Tesla in particular, like the stock price has always kind of outpaced the business fundamentals. And so there's a huge incentive to keep talking like up the genius of Elon and the mythology of Elon.

0:40:00 Zoe: But and I would also say that Elon's supporters and Elon himself have a very different perception of why the business is struggling than you

0:39:32 Thomas: Uh Okay Yeah Yeah I'll Sure

0:40:09 Zoe: And I do, I think you know, from all of my reporting and everything that went into the book, have a very firm belief at this point that it's because he made business decisions that were not grounded in reality. And I think they've really hurt the business again and again. There were a lot of unforced errors.

0:40:27 Thomas: I Went to business school, that's, um, things. That's actually not a joke. I did go to business school, but like, yeah, no making decisions not based on reality. It's like, you know, chapter one of business.

0:40:31 Zoe: Yeah. I haven't gone to business school, but it seems intuitive to me that that's a bad thing.

0:40:41 Thomas: Yeah. You know, as an expert, I'll say it's pretty intuitive. You can figure that part out yourself.

0:40:45 Zoe: Yeah, exactly. If but you talk to Elon and those who support him, they will say advertisers and the media tanked the business because they hate free speech. And and I really think that they, that he at least believes, that he thinks that this is kind of a concerted effort on the part of advocacy groups, advertisers, and the mainstream press to Twitter's revenue, to hurt X's revenue at this point.

0:41:13 Thomas: Right. And we all know that if as a CEO or a business owner, your revenue tanks, but you have a good excuse for how it's just because people are out to get you, then it's fine. Like you, then it's like, oh, okay. I didn't know he had a good excuse for why he tanked this company. That's a different story. Like, yeah, it's privately owned now.

0:41:29 Zoe: Yeah, well, luckily, when you have a private company

0:41:31 Thomas: Yeah, exactly. He can just stay in forever. If he were any other CEO of a public company, I have to imagine, unless it was, you know, he had, I don't know, somehow gain control of the board or something in a way, like politically, you would be out on your ass because you don't get to just say, well, yes, the business is doing badly, but it's because of this conspiracy against me. I just remembered, gosh, there's so much with this guy. I just remembered that interview he did semi, you know, a few months back. I listened to the whole thing, it was insane. I'm sure it's hard to know which one I'm talking about at this point, but the one where he was like, if they want to ruin the company, let them do it, it'll be their

0:41:31 Zoe: That yeah, yeah, oh, I thought

0:42:06 Thomas: Fault or something. What was that? Oh my gosh.

0:42:09 Zoe: You, you were going to say. Yeah. I was going to say, yeah, if you're, you know, I didn't go to business school, but I have to imagine that the moment when you tell advertisers to go fuck themselves and you're running a company that is 90, 90% based on advertising revenue, you are, you're out the door. But

0:42:26 Thomas: It's a weird move to be like, well, it's just gonna, going to hurt you in the end because earth will, he's even said earth, didn't he, earth will know that you killed the company. Remember that, it's like, dude it's your company

0:42:35 Zoe: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the very telling, I think one of the most telling things he's said, and I'm going to paraphrase because I don't remember the exact language he used, but it was something like, you know, if I have to choose between not saying something to like protect the business and then like exercising his free speech rights and like saying whatever he wants to when he wants, you, he'll always choose saying whatever he wants too when he comes to, and I really think that is his attitude. Like, he has genuinely low impulse control, and I know for Elon Musk fans I can tell, like, sound like I'm just shitting on him. But, like, it's so apparent that he acts on a whim and he says whatever comes to his mind in the moment, consequences be damned. And unfortunately for him, the consequences oftentimes are the bottom line of X.

0:42:54 Thomas: Yeah yeah Absolutely, and the other Trump comparison is, I love the genius business acumen that Trump and Elon Musk had, which is, well, what if we just don't pay this, you know, like, wow, business, business genius. What if we don't pay our rent? What if we don't pay these people? What if we don't pay? Like, yeah, that's not business genius. You're just an asshole. Like, I don't think that's like some keen acumen.

0:43:43 Zoe: Yeah, no, I mean, yeah.

0:43:45 Thomas: And he did not pay a bunch of stuff, right? Or I don'T know if it was successful, but it seemed like that was his main tactic early on.

0:43:52 Zoe: Yeah, I mean he would tell employees in the office, like we're going to sign contracts moving forward. The only place that makes us sign anything at Tesla is the DMV and, like no other place is going to get a contract. And if you had a contract already in place, try and negotiate it down by this 75 % or whatever. And yeah, I mean, there's a whole chapter in the book about how he deals with the real estate executives at the company who are essentially like, here's what all of the real estate costs and all of our lease agreements and all OF that. And he's like, oh, yeah, we're just not going to pay those. And they're like, oh, well, no, wait, whoa, whoa. We do have to pay them. And like, if we don't pay them, we're like literally never going to be able to get office space ever again. And he was like, San Francisco, I think his lawyer says like San Francisco is such a shithole. Like, why should we have to pay rent there? And they're like, well, it's just like, it's not really how that works. So sorry. But um, yeah.

0:44:06 Thomas: What?

0:44:24 Thomas: Yeah.

0:44:43 Thomas: Yeah, that's why all the real estate is so cheap in San Francisco. Nobody wants to live there or do anything there.

0:44:48 Zoe: Oh, my God. I know. But that was kind of like one of the big questions. Like I went into the book with some open questions and one of them was like, is Elon Musk a technical genius? Because you had everyone, you know, I talked to Walter Isaacson a lot and his had followed him around for two years, like really, really believed that Elon Musk in terms of like hardware engineering, building cars and rockets is a genius for sure. And then you had people at Twitter who were sitting in these technical meetings with him being like, he does not know what he is talking about.

0:44:51 Thomas: Oh, boy. Gosh. Hmm. Yeah.

0:45:23 Zoe: His ideas about software are dated from the 90s. He's coding in C++. These are just so archaic. And I was like, well, which one of those is true? It's hard to say. But I think the point that I came to was that he, Elon Musk, I think is genuinely good at like certain kind of like hardware engineering. And I think also he's had a pretty good intuition in the past, but I don't think that he has a good sense of people. And I think on a technical level, like his software skills aren't particularly modern or well-suited to a platform like Twitter, at least from what engineers at the company have told me. I think his intuition, that front, you know, for a company that is all about human interaction, you're either interacting with a user or with an advertiser or with, you know, someone on the platform, like doesn't have a good intuition for that type of business. And I think, um, his impulses have led him astray again and again.

0:46:17 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. That all seems right. Obviously you're the one who wrote the book, but that all sounds Right. And it's like, it's one thing when you want to, you fast and break everything when it comes to like, okay, if your goal is to get an electric car going or a rocket into space, you, you know, I guess there's some amount of that maybe that could make sense where it's like if in the end you get the second rocket up, then you can be like, see, I did it.

But like if part of your company, that doesn't apply to a social media platform, like you can't just beat people into liking your thing. You know? It's a whole different business. So, like, my not obviously having anywhere near the expertise that you have on this, but my impression from a distance has been, sure, you might have some genius somewhere, but the minute you have gone to the point where you think your genius applies in every domain, then you're kind of lost.

Like you're effectively, you're not like, you may even lose your ability to be good at your domain because once you're not constrained by that reality, like how could you possibly reliably do well anywhere? Because once you hear the word no, you're not going to know if that's a no that, okay, actually that is a no that you should listen to or not. Like he has no sense of that. It seems to me.

0:46:21 Zoe: Yeah.

0:47:29 Zoe: I mean, I I write about this extensively in the book, which is that his posture immediately and coming into Twitter is truly like all of these people are idiots. And I don't want to listen to what they have to say. And I want to fire as many of them as I can as quickly as possible. And I think when you come into the room, and that is your posture and your assumption, you don't know what to do. And you don't want to learn. And I think that that can be really dangerous. You're going to repeat a lot of the mistakes that these people already made and learned from in the past.

0:47:40 Thomas: Yeah.

0:47:57 Thomas: It's literally their jobs, like you're coming in and be like, these are, it's One thing to be like okay, a company could be making some wrong decisions, but I would think like if someone plopped me in the head of anything like this, I would be like I'm not qualified to do this, but if I had to, I'd be like okay, I better take like a month and just everybody in the company who knows everything, please just do school for me for like a month and teach me everything possible, to go in there and just be like I, a person who is a billionaire who made some cars and rockets, know everything about this, you all who whose lives and jobs every day is this company, you have nothing to offer me, so get lost, like it's just, there's no way that works, I'm sorry, like it's just not gonna work.

0:48:01 Zoe: Yeah.

0:48:37 Zoe: Yeah. I mean, I feel like every leader that I have come to respect and worked with has come in with that exact stance. Like I'm going to use the first couple months to just like listen and learn. Even if you feel like the previous management didn't do the best job or the business is struggling, like you have to assume That the people there have something to teach you. But he absolutely did not assume that. In fact he brings over engineers from Tesla and SpaceX and has them immediately root through the code and be like what code sucks and who wrote it and let's get rid of them, like immediately.

0:48:54 Thomas: Yeah.

0:49:09 Zoe: And like these are like people who build rockets and cars, like they're not, they don't have experience running a global social platform, but his assumption is like whoever, you know, is here is dumb and needs to leave, and whoever I'm bringing over is inherently smarter and must know more.

0:49:24 Thomas: That Was one, and sorry to keep you, but uh, that was one of those things where, um, I've done some coding, I'm nowhere near any sort of expertise, but I, you know, I'm on Reddit with, with some of those subreddits where people talk about that kind of... And that was one thing that I guess led to my opinion that his hero status had dropped. And I think you're right that maybe shifting is a better word for it. But because so many of his worshipers, it seemed to me, were tech people, I feel like they could not escape the fact that he was saying these things about coding and how to run that part of the business that were just dumb. Like there's no way you can change that story. And a bunch of these bros who were into him were like, oh my God, I'm sorry. That's so stupid.

0:49:59 Zoe: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think his overall reputation has declined, and and it's gotten more fringe. Um, you know, it's really interesting, like every time I've done an interview or a book talk publicly, like there's always one person in the audience who will, you know, raise their hand and be like, well, but what about Tesla and SpaceX, like these are incredible companies that are doing such good things for the world, and they're solving really hard technical problems. And so I think like there is enough to point to if you want to still believe that Elon Musk is A genius where you can kind of like pin your hopes on that and ignore the whole Twitter and X of it all.

0:50:14 Thomas: Hmm.

0:50:40 Thomas: We haven't talked about him renaming it to X. What a brilliant decision. I try to Google. Sometimes I'm like, oh, I need to search for someone on Twitter or a tweet, I remember. And then like, wait, okay, I'll search X. And you just can't even search. It's so stupid. Okay. We could go on forever. Hey, do you want to maybe give folks a teaser for something, maybe a little more incentive to buy the book Extremely Hardcore? What's a story in there that you could tease people that they should go check out in the book?

0:50:44 Zoe: Oh my God. I know.

0:51:10 Zoe: There's so much in there. I mean, I guess just to like give people a little frame, like I tell the story of the acquisition. I talked to 60 people for the book specifically and well over 100 in total. But I tell the story really through the point of view of these four employees, Two of whom buy into Elon Musk's vision and really want him to succeed and get very close to him as a result of that. And two of them are very hesitant about his leadership and wary of the decisions that he's making. But it's worth just saying from the beginning that this is a story about people and it's not just about people who hate Elon Musk.

0:51:27 Thomas: Book. I

0:51:48 Zoe: I really did do a ton of work to look at the people who loved what he had to say about how to change Twitter and turbocharge its potential and really wanted him to be successful and wanted to be part of that success. On the scoopy front, there's a whole section of the book that goes into you, Elon Musk's decision in December of 22 to shut down a data center in Sacramento. This was like one of his pet projects. Was that power in California

0:51:48 Thomas: Don't even think

0:52:20 Zoe: Was too expensive Oh my

0:52:20 Thomas: I heard about this. I'm in Sacramento. I didn't even know this. What?

0:52:22 Zoe: God yeah Okay, so he's, he's really hung up on the fact that like they're spending way too much money at this data center because power in California is really expensive and Twitter employees are kind of saying like, well, we should open a new one then, like it's good to have four of these so the platform stays pretty stable. And he's like, I don't want to have for, I want to just have two. Like Tesla only has one. Why do we need so many.

And is he actually on Christmas Eve on his private jet with his cousins who now work at the company and a few other people, and they are kind of explaining that like someone at Twitter has told them like it is going to take about six months to shut down the data center. And he was like, this is such bullshit, we could do it tonight. And then he's like, we should do it tonight, and he turns around the jet, lands in Sacramento, takes them all to the data center. The security guard person who's there is like trying to explain that like, oh, you know, to like lift up these floor panels that you're gonna need like a contractor, and he just asks his security guard for his pocket knife and like leans

0:52:24 Thomas: Oh my God. Oh

0:53:17 Zoe: Down and starts ripping up the floor panels. And then over the next few days, they do transfer a lot of the servers, put them in Teslas, and start shipping them up to Portland, to another data center, essentially. And, you know, this is, again, a moment where we see two versions of reality. Elon Musk is tweeting like, ha ha ha, we shut down the data center, look, the platform is still online. And all of his supporters are like, what did you do?

0:53:17 Thomas: My god.

0:53:40 Thomas: Yeah.

0:53:40 Zoe: And then four days later, we see this massive blackout. Twitter goes down. And it's like, and then after that, I mean, the bugs and the glitches just just reach kind of a boiling point because the platform is really unstable and they didn't like do the transfer correctly. They didn't even wipe the machines, which, you know, not to get into the legal and policy framework of it all, but like Twitter is under an FTC consent order. Like there's a lot of regulations around how you can move servers that contain a lot of people's private information on them. They just absolutely did not do that. And so, we had employees who were kind of like working throughout Christmas, thought they'd gonna get a little break after like working their asses off for months, and in fact are being called to Sacramento to like partake in this harebrained project that Elon Musk has come up with last minute.

And to him it's, it's a show of like how hardcore they are, how efficient the new version of Twitter is, um, who his kind of like true believers are at the company. And to everyone else it's like, wow, he just really, um, so much stability and functionality for the platform for him, all because he didn't want to pay. Yes.

0:53:51 Thomas: Right. Right?

0:54:41 Thomas: What a story. Zoe Schiffer, thanks so much for coming on. The book is extremely hardcore inside Elon Musk's Twitter. Is there anywhere else you want to point people besides buying the book to follow you or what you're doing?

0:54:52 Zoe: Um, I'm on Threads now and my handle is really embarrassing, but it's at reporter Zoe, so follow me there, I'm no longer posting on X. So yeah

0:55:00 Thomas: Oh, wow. Okay. And you had a shitload of followers. That would be an interesting thing to talk about someday, but there you go. Thanks Thanks so much. This was a pleasure.

0:55:01 Zoe: Yeah yeah I mean, I feel strongly about it so yeah thank

0:55:11 Thomas: All

0:55:11 Zoe: You so much for having me.