Elon Musk’s Takeover

The end of October marked two years since Elon Musk walked through Twitter’s doors as its new owner. From the months just before Musk’s takeover to the present, Musk has taken us on a roller-coaster ride of sorts, frequently claiming to make decisions in the name of free speech, while in fact advancing his own power, often to the cheers of those on the right.

Two new books, Kate Conger and Ryan Mac’s “Character Limit” and Ben Mezrich’s “Breaking Twitter,” provide even those of us who have followed every twist and turn of the Musk/Twitter saga with new stories—and perspectives—of what unfolded and why, each in a distinctive way. Through Musk’s story, they give readers an important perspective on how tech CEOs have started to change our information environment, in part by making political bets to further their business interests. Musk’s purchase of Twitter and his cozying up to Donald Trump offer a picture of a modern-day media baron who used this acquisition to catapult himself into the world of politics in hopes that if Trump won, it will help his many businesses. These books tell the story of how that came to be.

“Character Limit” offers a longer and more detailed account than “Breaking Twitter.” Conger and Mac start their story with Musk’s history of posting on the platform. Then they turn to his indecision about joining the board, his buying the company, his attempt to back out of the purchase, and, finally, his transformation of the platform into something very different from the old Twitter—a new platform called X. By and large, Conger and Mac take a journalistic, matter-of-fact approach to recounting what happened.

Mezrich’s book, by contrast, is written for Hollywood. Having had two earlier books used as the basis for screenplays, Mezrich characteristically tells the Musk/Twitter story through a cinematic lens. He spends more time painting pictures of the rooms where things happened and speculating about the thoughts and emotions of the characters in the drama than he does simply describing their actions. 

Documenting a story as it continues to unfold is a challenging task, especially when you are not the first to report on the saga. Kurt Wagner, Zoë Schiffer, and Walter Isaacson all published accounts of parts of the story before the latest two contributions appeared.

Wagner covers much more of Twitter’s history in “Battle for the Bird.” That was always supposed to be the focus of his book, and the Musk portion of the drama unfolded as Wagner worked on it, so he covers Musk only toward the end of his account. Schiffer’s “Extremely Hardcore,” provides a first draft of the early history of the Musk era at Twitter, but her book appeared before some of the more recent developments that Conger and Mac describe. Isaacson’s biography presents an in-depth look at Musk, the man.

These earlier accounts make Conger and Mac’s book a second draft of the history of Musk at Twitter/X, including coverage of more of the story after October 2023, which is when Schiffer’s account ends. Conger and Mac break their version of the drama into three acts:

• Act I: Before Musk makes an offer
• Act II: Musk trying to get out of buying the platform
• Act III: Musk turning Twitter into X

The book’s introduction begins with two anecdotes that foreshadow central themes. In the first, a data scientist delays his quitting by a day so that he can tell Musk what he really feels about the billionaire’s dictatorial running of the platform. The second starts with Musk’s April 14, 2022, tweet suggesting that people were trying to thwart him as the takeover unfolded. Once Musk achieved more complete control, his rapid series of controversial decisions made clear that Musk was using Twitter not to demonstrate his prowess as a tech innovator, but to serve his own political and economic interests. In just a short while, Conger and Mac write, “What was once called the digital town square is becoming Musk’s mirror.”

Act I gives us more insight into how Jack Dorsey, one of Twitter’s creators and CEO, courted Musk and supported his takeover. Conger and Mac set the stage with a brief overview of the content moderation and political speech challenges Dorsey and the company went through during and after the 2016 election. Dorsey’s part in Musk’s rise, as someone who coordinated with Musk throughout the takeover process, is a vital part of this story that tends to get drowned out by whatever publicity-grabbing stunt Musk has undertaken lately. Dorsey had great remorse about how Twitter had evolved, and Conger and Mac outline how Dorsey thought Musk was the one to fix it all.

In Act II, Conger and Mac do an excellent job of exploring the challenges that leaders such as Parag Agrawal (the CEO right before Musk), Bret Taylor (Twitter’s board chair at the time of the takeover), and Vijaya Gadde (Twitter’s general counsel) had in shepherding the sale through despite the qualms they had about Musk’s taking over. These are stories that couldn’t be printed when they were still at the company and provide much needed context for the chaos happening both on Musk’s side of the purchase and inside the company just trying to keep things moving while knowing they would be fired as soon as he took over.

Conger and Mac’s writing is quick to read as they review everything from Agrawal’s trying to keep the company afloat while Musk accused him of not doing any work, Musk’s trying to make massive changes to the platform—such as allowing anyone to buy a blue verification check mark mere days before the U.S. midterm elections—to advertisers leaving the platform in droves.

Act III starts with Musk’s wanting to do code reviews and planning the first round of layoffs. Conger and Mac go through the efforts to make people pay for verification, the midterm elections, and the onboarding of Linda Yaccarino as CEO.

The book ends with a fitting epilogue: the rekindling of Musk’s relationship with Donald Trump that began when the two met in Florida in March. Conger and Mac suggest that the two men needed one another and that Musk saw Trump as a better alternative than Biden at the time. That meeting of course led to Musk’s eventually endorsing the former president, spending nearly $200 million backing his campaign, and even going on the road in person to help him win.

While Conger and Mac do an excellent job of outlining company leaders’ challenges, they could have better captured the trauma and emotional toll that Musk put so many people through. Perhaps this is my bias as a former tech employee who went through her own stresses at Facebook, now Meta, but these are more than just jobs. The type of fast-paced change, pressure, and verbal abuse employees may suffer day after day changes a person.

People do what they can to survive. They make decisions in bad mental states. They’re attacked for doing their jobs, as Yoel Roth, the head of trust and safety at Twitter, was by both the Trump administration and Musk himself, which led Roth to flee his home. 

Conger and Mac cover these stories in the book, but their account feels too sterile. They fail to convey to the reader how bad Musk made it for some people.

Mezrich’s book, by contrast, often focuses on people and their emotions, but in a Hollywood script version. Mezrich makes this clear on page one when he says the book is a “dramatic narrative” about Musk’s takeover. He says he recreated scenes and imagined dialogue, employing elements of satire and creating composite characters.

None of this materially changes Mezrich’s version of the story, but it does mean that if you are looking for a definitive account of what happened, “Character Limit”is the better choice. 

Like Conger and Mac, Mezrich opens with an employee story. His is about Esther Crawford, Twitter’s director of product management, who went viral after posting a picture of her sleeping at the office in February 2023. She’s working late in the bunker, trying to keep Musk from making a decision to declare war on Apple for their fee structure that would end in disaster. Mezrich notes that Crawford quickly learned Musk “wasn’t driven by facts or expertise, but by instincts and intuition.”

Mezrich then takes us on a journey through the eyes of numerous employees. Mark Ramsey, who was an early employee, thought that by 2020 the company’s internal culture had gone too soft and lost its way. Jessica Kittery in New York had advertisers wanting to know from the day it briefly looked like Musk would be joining the board what he might want to change. We hear more of everything Roth went through, from the Hunter Biden laptop controversy to Kellyanne Conway calling him out on television as the person at Twitter deciding what content was allowed or not, to Musk making false salacious accusations about Roth that led to his having to flee his home.

Crawford makes appearances throughout, and one story that Mezrich has in “Breaking Twitter”that Conger and Mac don’t have in “Character Limit” is an altercation Crawford had with Jay Sullivan—a product leader at the company—in late October 2022. Crawford had taken her shot at talking to Musk one on one, and Sullivan was furious she had gone around the “process” he and other leaders had created. Mezrich presents the moment as one in which Crawford realized that old guard leaders such as Sullivan weren’t relevant anymore and that if she wanted to survive, she needed to align herself with Musk and his crew. Yet her story ends like so many people’s at Twitter did—being fired by Musk. Crawford says she didn’t hate Musk after that but did think he was “maybe the saddest, loneliest man she’d ever met.”

Mezrich ends his book saying “Elon had broken Twitter, and that in turn, Twitter had broken Elon”—by tarnishing his reputation as a business leader. Musk was no longer the lauded innovator and businessman who sent rockets into space and revolutionized electric cars. As Mezrich points out, “Twitter wasn’t SpaceX, and the Twitter platform wasn’t some rocket you could toy with, tinker with, maybe blow up. Twitter was built around people.” And that is a very different type of business for someone like Musk to run.

Conger and Mac end theirs with a pointed and telling observation: “Musk may have convinced himself he bought Twitter to protect the global town square or build the world’s most important app. But the truth was much simpler. … He had bought it for himself.”

Conger and Mac’s and Mezrich’s books, like many others on the big social media platforms, still leave much to explore about the contradictions that remain in figuring out how to amplify these platforms’ positive impacts on society while mitigating their harmful effects. For instance, many books about Facebook/Meta and other online platforms vilify them for selling ads that can be microtargeted based on the data people give them by using the platform. Shoshana Zuboff called it “surveillance capitalism.”

Yet, in the Twitter/X story, Musk is vilified for not listening to advertisers and giving them what they want—such as keeping their content from appearing next to posts about terrorism, hate speech, and the like. When do you give companies what they want versus doing what is good for society? When is it okay to look out for your platform’s business interests, and when not? What does that mean when you say you are protecting free expression?

I started this piece by discussing Musk’s claim that his purchase of Twitter was about protecting free speech. However, as “Character Limit” and “Breaking Twitter” show (and Musk’s more recent behavior has confirmed), that is not Musk’s goal. He is a man desperate for attention and one who wants to do what he wants when he wants and be accountable to no one. 

Musk’s story continues to unfold, including a vast political chapter that will likely provide the basis for his own book and many others after this U.S. election. How will Musk’s takeover of Twitter and his own participation in support of Trump affect the second Trump administration’s policies? What impact will the fact that numerous journalists are no longer tweeting have? Musk claimed he took over the platform to save free speech. Still, as Mezrich rightly points out, Musk “could never have launched a rocket built by ‘citizen engineers,’ the Twitter platform would never be an ultimate source of Truth without the participation of those who had spent their lives learning to report the news.” 

Musk thought he could run Twitter better and would be praised for doing so. While there is no check on his power to make changes to the platform, he has no power to make people praise him—except those he pays to do so. As criticism of him continues to grow, he gets wilder. The question is: How will that affect our democracy, and will it be the ultimate end of one great platform experiment? These two books give us a glimpse into the answers to those questions by giving us an inside look at how Elon Musk makes decisions, his lack of regard for being held accountable, and his poor business decisions that have tanked the valuation of the company.