EXTREMELY HARDCORE

An egomaniac takes charge.

Drawing on interviews with more than 60 employees, internal documents, court filings, and congressional testimony, journalist Schiffer, managing editor of the investigative tech newsletter Platformer, makes her book debut with a sharp, gossipy account of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Not a biography of the volatile entrepreneur, Schiffer’s investigation looks at the effect of Musk’s takeover on the social media site itself and on the company’s thousands of employees. As the author recounts, Musk wavered in his decision to buy Twitter, beginning in January 2022, when he began accumulating shares; a few months later, he joined the board and made an offer to purchase the business. Suits and countersuits slowed the process, which finally ended in the fall of that year, when Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. Chaos ensued. Intent on cutting costs, Musk instituted massive layoffs, including engineers, content managers, and root password holders. “Without the root password,” Schiffer notes incredulously, “the company didn’t have administrative access to its own machines.” Musk insisted that his demands be fulfilled immediately by a diminished number of full-time and contract employees. His product ideas “weren’t bad,” Schiffer writes, “but they were all over the map. In addition to relaunching Twitter Blue, he was exploring a payments platform, long-form video, long-form tweets, and encrypted direct messages.” Layoffs weakened morale, and advertising revenue dropped, resulting from racist, antisemitic, and homophobic posts. Schiffer cites tweets from disgruntled employees: “Everything happening on Twitter now,” one remarked, “is a lot easier to understand if you’ve ever had a younger sibling that invented a game and added a new rule every time they started losing.” “Since he was a child,” Schiffer writes, “Musk had harbored a belief that he was destined to have a great impact on the world.” As this account shows, that impact could be disastrous.

A well-researched report on Twitter's calamitous year.