Twitter Goes X

A post in 2010, which would be picked up by thousands of press outlets and blogs worldwide, gleefully announced that Twitter, the four-year-old social network, reached 165 million registered users. Five paragraphs down, the post stated that its CEO, Evan Williams, was stepping down voluntarily. “I have decided to ask our COO, Dick Costolo, to become Twitter’s CEO,” said the post allegedly writ-ten by Williams. However, that was not entirely true. Williams wanted to keep his position as CEO of the organisation he helped create, but he had no choice. He was forced out of the organisation in a malicious, bloody boardroom coup carried out by people he had hired, some of whom had once been his closest friends.

Twitter was an organisation that Facebook considered a major rival. It was a social media platform that many democrats praised as exemplary and a tool that Barack Obama leveraged to become president of the U.S.A. However, few knew what was happening behind the scenes: friends turned enemies, backstabbing secret meetings, and one co-founder ousting another, only to be ousted in return.

Twitter’s founders originally consisted of Noah Glass, Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, and Biz Stone. Williams and Glass had built an organisation, Odeo, which was meant to be a podcasting platform. However, when Apple announced that its iTunes built into every iPod would have a podcasting platform, Odeo was no longer relevant. Dorsey came up with the idea of building a platform where people may publish their life activities. Noah loved the idea; hence, they began working on it. In February 2006, this idea turned into a business venture and replaced Odeo. Glass came up with the name “Twttr”, which was later changed to “Twitter”. Even though Dorsey came up with the idea, no one was more passionate about the project than Glass, who drove the vision and pushed the idea forward. He poured all of his energy and time into Twitter. However, as the idea of Twitter grew, differences between Williams and Glass began to arise.

Williams, its CEO and investor of their organisation, was torn over what to do about Glass’s outbursts and media hijacking. Dorsey sensed an opportunity to help him decide. One afternoon, Dorsey asked Williams to speak privately and not to tell Noah about their conversation. He confessed that Noah was interfering with Twitter, that he could not work with him anymore, and that he thought about quitting. Then, Dorsey threw the gauntlet: “If Noah stays, I’m going to leave. I can’t work with him anymore.” Dorsey was by then a valuable asset for Twitter, so the conversation was a checkmate: get rid of Glass or lose Twitter’s potential. With no other options and with the board’s approval, Williams dismissed Glass from Twitter. In hindsight, there was a power shift when Glass agreed to make Williams the CEO and investor in exchange for the early investment in their organisation when it was still a podcasting start-up with the name Odeo. The power Glass handed to his friend was used against him. Dorsey did not mention that he had handed Williams the gun with which the final shot was fired. Of course, one may argue who is the worst: the one who pays for the sin or the one who sins for the pay? In Twitter’s political game, the answer was both.

Soon after Glass was ousted by two individuals who allied against him, a new rival started between them: Williams versus Dorsey. At the beginning of Twitter, Williams was the CEO, but Dorsey made a significant contribution, including the original idea, which turned into a business venture. To complicate matters, Biz and employee Jason Goldman also played an essential part in forming Twitter, so they wanted recognition. Williams yielded his CEO position to Dorsey and offered him the co-founder title, along with Biz, whereas Goldman was appointed vice president of product. Yet, given his financial investment, Williams retained a seventy per cent stake in Twitter. Jack received a twenty per cent stake, Biz and Goldman received around three per cent each, and the rest was split among the current software engineers and new hires. While this seemed like a wise move to maintain harmony and keep the business politics at bay, it did not last long.

Dorsey was the CEO of Twitter and, therefore, the leader, at least on paper, but Williams maintained a de facto leadership because he owned the majority stake. It did not take much to realise that Williams constantly undermined Dorsey. Their relationship was deteriorating. On the one hand, when Dorsey accepted the position of CEO, he seemed to have eaten more than he could chew. Twitter was turned into chaos, and Williams was growing impatient.

On the other hand, Williams was plotting to remove him from the position. They had started as employer and employee, with Dorsey under Williams, then became co-founders and friends as they started Twitter together. Then, the roles of employer and employee switched as Dorsey became the CEO while Williams was under him, albeit the organisation's lead investor and board chairperson was technically an employee reporting to Dorsey. They became two people at odds with each other.

Then, Dorsey made a bizarre move. Twitter acquired a small organisation, and he asked its leader to lead Twitter’s technical team. It made no sense to appoint a fresh insider to run the business. It was the final straw to lose his position. Williams plotted a coup with two other board members, and they decided to remove Dorsey as CEO, and Williams would take his place.

When Williams took Dorsey’s CEO position, he tried restoring Twitter, but the business politics intensity did not stop there. In 2009, as Dorsey set off in search of what to do next, he was sure about one thing: he was determined not to follow in the footsteps of Noah Glass, who disappeared quietly after he was ousted.

First, he befriended one of Twitter’s latest investors and board members, Peter Fenton, who swore to help him. On the one hand, Dorsey used the media to declare himself as the sole creator of Twitter, thus provoking Williams and entrapping him into his manoeuvre when he retaliated: to play the victim card with Fenton. On the other hand, he gossiped and held secret meetings with several employees whenever Williams neglected them. These secret meetings had one purpose: encouraging these employees to express their complaints and concerns to the board, thus tarnishing Williams’ reputation.

Meanwhile, Fenton encouraged Williams to appoint a mentor to help him run the organisation and also chose one for him: Bill Campbell. There was nothing wrong with encouraging a mentor, but Campbell was secretly on Fenton’s side, undermining William’s position and keeping Fenton two steps ahead of Williams. Indeed, Williams was blindsided; he was too busy redesigning Twitter, and if there was the slightest doubt about his leadership, Campbell would constantly praise him and give positive feedback. When Dorsey’s coup was finalised and ready to strike a deadly blow, Williams realised what had happened, but it was too late. As his lawyers advised him, there was nothing else to do other than resign from the CEO role. However, that was not enough. Presuming that he was switching with Costolo, who was Twitter’s Chief Product Officer, Fenton manoeuvres into positioning him as an advisor. This was just a decor because Williams was powerless. He had no practical role and eventually stepped away from Twitter.

Twitter’s story of betrayals and sabotage did not stop when Williams was eliminated. It took far more years to settle down, with Dorsey taking over Costolo until Elon Musk eventually took Twitter via a hostile takeover. Musk also changed Twitter’s name to X, thus leaving no traces of its origin.

Elon Musk first used Twitter soon after it was launched in 2006 and eventually became an avid user who wrote thousands of tweets. However, Musk was no ordinary user. His tweets were often controversial, and by early 2022, he had a swelling concern with the dangers of the “woke-mind virus” that he believed was infecting America. It was a term coined by Musk to explain that Twitter was creating a very divisive political atmosphere which amplified racism, sexism, and all forms of “isms” while claiming to do the opposite.

Surely, Twitter was gaining a reputation for siding with left-wing politics, especially the Democratic party. For example, when Barack Obama organised a live-streamed event on Twitter in 2011 to take questions from the audience on economic themes, co-founder Jack Dorsey agreed to be its moderator. It also caused the cancel culture to emerge since whoever exposed different views was censored or removed. For example, Musk disdained Donald Trump, but he felt it was absurd for Twitter to ban a former president’s account permanently, and he became increasingly riled up by complaints from those who were suppressed from Twitter, especially the Republicans, who opposed the Democrats.

Musk’s view of free speech was that the more there was, the better it would be for democracy. At one point in March, he conducted a poll on Twitter: “Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?” When more than seventy per cent disagreed, he asked, “Is a new platform needed?”

In early 2022, Musk also started buying Twitter shares, and in late March, he had some private conversations with a few Twitter board members who urged him to become more involved with the organisation. One night, Musk called Twitter’s CEO, Parag Agrawal, and the two decided to meet secretly for dinner. At their meeting, Agrawal told him that Dorsey wanted Musk to join the board, so he urged Musk to do so.

The Twitter board sent him an official offer to join two days later. However, the agreement was based on what Twitter had used two years earlier when it agreed to put two other investors on the board. It consisted of provisions that would bar Musk from making public statements and presumably tweets critical to Twitter. It was “the ultimate irony,” he said, for an organisation that was supposed to be “the public square” to try to restrict his freedom of speech. He refused, so within a few hours, the board sent a very friendly revised agreement where the major restriction was that he could not purchase more than 14.9 per cent of Twitter stock. In other words, if he joins the board, Twitter becomes protected from Musk’s possible takeover.

After Musk disclosed that he owned about nine per cent of Twitter stock, Agrawal declared that he was excited to share that Twitter was appointing Musk to its board. If showing excitement was not enough to show how fake he was, Agrawal writes that Musk was “both a passionate believer and intense critic of the service, which is exactly what we needed.” Musk responded with a carefully scripted tweet, “Looking forward to working with Parag & Twitter board to make significant improvements to Twitter in coming months!”

However, Musk soon grew frustrated by his talks with members of Twitter’s board. He realised he could not change Twitter by cooperating with them because they would listen to anything he said but take no action afterwards. “I began to believe that Twitter was heading off a cliff and that I couldn’t save it by just being a board member,” he said. “So, I thought, maybe I should just buy it, take it private, and fix it.” Musk had already accepted the friendly agreement to join Twitter’s board, but nothing was formal. “I was being rope-a-doped,” he realised. “They would listen, nod, and then not do anything.” Thus, he decided not to join the board and instead to purchase Twitter to become its owner. As the article Sources of Power explains, ownership is a key power source. Since the board did not want to sell Twitter, it was the beginning of a hostile takeover.

Musk’s preparation for a hostile takeover was not plain sailing. While he needed to bring some investors on board, he had second thoughts about the acquisitions because Twitter had many fake user accounts. Besides, Twitter’s board unanimously approved a plan allowing existing shareholders to buy stocks at a substantial discount to dilute the holdings of new investors. The method, addressed as a poison pill in the article Anti-Takeover Tactics, suggests Twitter will fight Musk to prevent a hostile takeover. The poison pill would go into effect if a shareholder were to acquire more than 15 per cent of the organisation and expire in April 2023. Indeed, there were moments when Musk had second thoughts, and Twitter even sued him for failing to honour the acquisition. Eventually, Musk proceeded with the acquisition with the original price of $44 billion.

In the days leading up to his takeover of Twitter in October 2022, Musk visited its headquarters to poke around and prepare for the official closing of the deal. Agrawal greeted him. “I have a lot of optimism,” he said as he awaited Musk’s entrance. “Elon can inspire people to do things bigger than themselves.” Then, Musk burst in, carrying a sink and laughing. It was one of those visual puns that amused him. “Let that sink in,” he exclaimed. The pun echoed his plans to make changes to Twitter. Musk and Agrawal would be manoeuvring like gladiators the next night, but both feigned casual collegiality at that moment.

When Musk took over Twitter, he removed Agrawal as CEO and fired him. He changed Twitter’s name to “X,” returned Trump’s account, and allowed the users to experience a balanced platform with freedom of speech.

Even before acquiring Twitter, when Elon Musk visited its headquarters, one could smell a culture clash brewing as if a hardscrabble cowboy had worked into a Starbucks outlet. The issue was not merely the facilities. Between Twitter and Musk was a radical divergence in outlook that reflected two different mindsets about the American workplace. Twitter prided itself on being a friendly place where coddling was considered a virtue. The organisation had instituted a permanent work-from-home option and allowed a mental “day of rest” each month. One commonly used buzzword at the organisation was “psychological safety.” Musk let loose a bitter laugh when he heard this buzzword. He considered it the enemy of urgency, progress, and orbital velocity. His preferred buzzword was “hardcore.” He believed that discomfort was a good thing. It was a weapon against the scourge of complacency. Vacations, flower-smelling, work-life balance, and “mental rest” days were not his thing. To prove his point, he visited the headquarters with a sink in his hand, as a pun intended to say, “Let that sink in.”

After finalising the acquisition to take over Twitter, Musk invited the so-called Three Musketeers. The first two were his cousins, James and Andrew Musk. They were both software engineers and loyal to Musk. The third one was their friend Ross Nordeen. Their first mission was to form an analysis unit that would assess the code-writing skills, productivity, and attitudes of more than two thousand Twitter software engineers and decide which of them, if any, should stay. Musk planned to lay off most of Twitter’s software engineers and retain excellent, trustworthy, and driven ones.

The first round of their mission was to scour the code base and weed out those who did not meet Musk’s productivity bar. About half of Twitter’s employees worldwide and nearly 90 per cent of some infrastructure teams were laid off. Musk also laid off most of the human resources managers. Some of his employees, including lawyer Alex Spiro, who assisted in the acquisition, urged caution. Downsizing Twitter to the bone risked a system failure if anyone got sick or resigned. However, Musk’s rationale was not only for financial reasons but also because he wanted a hardcore and fanatic work culture.

Their second mission round was to identify whether whoever left was trustworthy. The Three Musketeers and their team started reviewing Slack’s public messages and social media postings of Twitter employees, focusing on those with high access to the software stack. They searched for keywords, including “Elon.” Those who were untrustworthy, specifically those who were not loyal to Musk, were fired.

Another part of the second round of their mission was to identify the driven ones. Ross and James spent some time thinking of ways to determine which employees were driven or not. Then they saw a post that someone made on Slack, which inspired them to devise a self-selection approach: “Please, let me go with severance, and I will leave.” The idea was to allow Twitter’s employees to opt out of Musk’s hardcore culture. Ross engineered a simple form with a button that employees could click to say they wanted to leave on good terms and receive a three-month severance.

Musk further modified their idea by making an opt-in instead of an opt-out. “We want people who declare they are hardcore,” he explained. Hence, whoever stayed refused the severance and made a declaration, whereas those who did not were automatically fired. Musk shifted a suicide-based opportunity to get rewarded into an opportunity to betray the old Twitter and save yourself. Surprisingly enough, 2,492 of the approximately 3,600 remaining employees decided to stay. When the second round was over, the remaining software engineers sent samples of code they had recently written and five hundred were laid off. When the mission was completed, around seventy-five per cent of Twitter’s workforce was terminated.

Downsizing was not Musk’s only mission. He also removed Twitter’s policy, originally announced by the co-founder Jack Dorsey early in the COVID-19 pandemic and reaffirmed by former CEO Parag Agrawal in 2022, that employees could work at home forever. “Remote work is no longer allowed,” he declared. “Starting tomorrow, everyone is required to be in the office for a minimum of 40 hours per week.”

When the bloodshed was over, Musk announced that Twitter would, from there on, be led by software engineers rather than designers and product managers. It was a subtle shift that reflected his belief that Twitter should be, at its core, a software engineering organisation led by people with a feel for coding rather than a media and consumer-product organisation led by people with a feel for human relationships and desires.

Musk had wrought one of the most significant shifts in organisational culture. Twitter had gone from being among the workplace investing in “psychological safety” and leaning toward a left-political ideology into a hard-driven environment where the employees fit better in “psychological danger” rather than comfort. Twitter not only survived but also began its journey for innovation by driven software engineers, who added features faster than ever.