BATTLE FOR THE BIRD

A blow-by-blow account of the struggle for Twitter.

Jack Dorsey, writes Bloomberg tech reporter Wagner, was a reluctant capitalist when it came to his creation. First online in 2006, Twitter took years to grow to scale, and when Elon Musk bought it for $44 billion in 2022, it was still well behind Facebook, valued at a dozen times more, and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, worth $1.5 trillion. “Influence, it turns out,” Wagner writes understatedly, “does not always equate to value.” Dorsey, too late, lamented that Twitter should have been a platform rather than a program, but ironically, one of the engines of its growth was Donald Trump, a master of the (albeit misspelled and ungrammatical) 140-word zinger. The story of Twitter, writes Wagner, “is one of deception, bad decisions, and misguided trust…of hubris and resentment and naïveté,” and a cluster of those bad decisions concerning Trump, who was for a long time cosseted before finally being unplugged for numerous violations of policy. Question one, in Dorsey’s mind, was whether those standards impinged on free speech, on which he was a fundamentalist; when Musk stepped in, he applied some of the same fundamentalism, but mostly by reinstating provocative trolls like Alex Jones, who also “violated Twitter’s policy against inciting people to violence,” and Trump himself. Russian bots seem to have enjoyed free speech, too, for thousands of them scampered through Twitter, seeding disinformation and plugging Trump’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. Musk’s own fomenting of conspiracy theories and infantile outbursts and antics “meant that X’s business got crushed.” Twitter is no more, of course, while the X brand is tanking, even as Dorsey muses about creating “something to avoid that ever happening again.”

Solid business and tech journalism about how a public good became a nuisance in the hands of a reckless billionaire.