Extremely Hardcore: Our New York magazine cover story
Here’s this week’s free Platformer — an excerpt of our big new cover story about Elon Musk’s Twitter at New York magazine. We strive to make the free edition of this newsletter as useful as possible. But subscribers get more — including our recent scoop about Twitter’s risky plan to save its ads business by forcing you to give it more of your data. A new year is the perfect time to buy an annual subscription, and ensure you have access to all our scoops in 2023 and beyond. Subscribe now and we’ll send you the link to join us in our chatty Discord server, where we now post all of our breaking news first.
Extremely Hardcore: Our New York magazine cover storyTwitter’s staff spent years trying to protect the platform against impulsive ranting billionaires — then one made himself the CEOFor the past several months, Platformer has covered every twist in the story of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, from his first day on the job to his increasingly risky ideas to save the business. And for almost as long, we’ve hoped to be able to tell a fuller version of the story — one that conveyed the chaos that Musk unleashed in its totality, along with untold stories about the employees he chewed up and spat out along the way. Today, along with our colleague Alex Heath at The Verge, we published our effort to do just that. “Extremely Hardcore,” our new cover story at New York magazine, attempts to capture what it has felt like for those inside — while raising the question of whether the fallout could take big chunks of Musk’s empire down with it. We hope you’ll enjoy the story, which we excerpt below. Browse the version of the article posted to The Verge and you can watch Musk’s net worth fall as the chronology unfolds. And, of course, we’ll have plenty more to say on this subject in coming weeks as the company’s free fall continues. On that subject: we’re told that Twitter revenue on Tuesday was down 40 percent year over year. And Musk’s first giant interest payment on the company is due at the end of the month. Things are going to get worse before they get better. On October 26, an engineer and mother of two — let’s call her Alicia — sat in a glass conference room in San Francisco trying to explain the details of Twitter’s tech stack to Elon Musk. He was supposed to officially buy the company in two days, and Alicia and a small group of trusted colleagues were tasked with outlining how its core infrastructure worked. But Musk, who was sitting two seats away from Alicia with his elbows propped on the table, looked sleepy. When he did talk, it was to ask questions about cost. How much does Twitter spend on data centers? Why was everything so expensive? Alicia was already tired of Musk’s antics. For months, he had gone back and forth about buying the company where she had worked for more than a decade. He’d tried to back out of the deal, but Twitter sued, and the chief judge of Delaware’s Chancery Court said a trial would move forward if the acquisition wasn’t complete by October 28. Facing what many legal observers called an easy case for Twitter, Musk caved. So here they were, trying to show Musk what he was about to buy, and all he wanted to talk about was money. Fine, she thought. If Musk wants to know about money, I’ll tell him. She launched into a technical explanation of the company’s data-center efficiency, curious to see if he would follow along. Instead, he interrupted. “I was writing C programs in the ’90s,” he said dismissively. “I understand how computers work.” Alicia knew Twitter had problems; when prospective employees asked her why she’d stayed there so long, she would tell them, honestly, that the company was incredibly inefficient. It took a long time to get buy-in on projects, and communication across teams was generally poor. But it operated with a “benevolent anarchy” through which anyone could influence the direction of the product. “You didn’t need someone in a position of power to explicitly grant you permission,” Alicia says. “It was very much a bottom-up organization.” Rumors were swirling that Musk planned to cut 75 percent of the company. People were audibly sobbing in the bathrooms. Unlike some of her colleagues, Alicia wasn’t reflexively anti-Musk. She respected what he had done at his companies and felt hopeful that, as someone who thought of himself as an engineer, he would support her highly technical work. But Musk had a different interest that day. Twitter, he said, should immediately get into video. “We really should be able to do longform video and attract the best content creators by giving them a better cut than YouTube,” he said, according to Alicia’s recollection. The infrastructure engineers in the room agreed that adding support for longform video was technically possible, but their job was building stuff — not strategy or marketing. It seemed as though Musk didn’t understand the basic organizational structure of a social-media company; it was as if a rich guy had bought a restaurant and started telling the cooks he wanted to add a new dining room. Might he want to speak with the media product team instead? Just then, David Sacks, a venture capitalist and friend of Musk’s who had advised him on the acquisition, walked into the room. A fellow native of South Africa, Sacks had worked with Musk at PayPal and later led the enterprise social-networking company Yammer to a $1.2 billion sale to Microsoft. “David, this meeting is too technical for you,” Musk said, waving his hand to dismiss Sacks. Wordlessly, Sacks turned and walked out, leaving the engineers — who had gotten little engagement from Musk on anything technical — slack-jawed. His imperiousness in the middle of a session he appeared to be botching was something to behold. (Musk did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) Continue reading at The Verge. Governing
Industry
Those good tweetsFor more good tweets every day, follow Casey’s Instagram stories. im more scared of someone coming up to me with a camera asking me questions for their tiktok than i am of being held at gun point Talk to usSend us tips, comments, questions, and extremely hardcore workplace behavior: casey@platformer.news and zoe@platformer.news. By design, the vast majority of Platformer readers never pay anything for the journalism it provides. But you made it all the way to the end of this week’s edition — maybe not for the first time. Want to support more journalism like what you read today? If so, click here: |
Key phrases
Older messages
Why TikTok's future has never been so cloudy
Wednesday, January 4, 2023
ByteDance thought it had a deal with the government in August. Then came the bans — and a spying scandal
13 predictions for platforms in 2023
Friday, December 16, 2022
Twitter! ChatGPT! Content moderation! And more
Twitter’s risky plan to save its ads business
Wednesday, December 14, 2022
Agree to personalize your ads — or else
How Elon botched his war on bots
Tuesday, December 13, 2022
PLUS: Why it's time to start leaving Twitter behind
The real scandal inside Facebook's cross-check program
Wednesday, December 7, 2022
It's not the program itself — it's the inequality it perpetuates
You Might Also Like
TikTok creators, strap in...
Saturday, April 27, 2024
Plus tips, news & Buffer updates for your social media journey Image Hey folks 👋🏾 It happened — Bytedance will be forced to sell TikTok in the US or risk being banned entirely. This isn't
🚀 Q1 2024 Space Earnings
Friday, April 26, 2024
Plus Seraphim Space's second investment fund, $MNTS listing deficiency warning, $RDW's new MoU, and more! The latest space investing news and updates. View this email in your browser The Space
When 1% Market Share Shifts Represent $5b of Market Cap
Friday, April 26, 2024
Tomasz Tunguz Venture Capitalist If you were forwarded this newsletter, and you'd like to receive it in the future, subscribe here. When 1% Market Share Shifts Represent $5b of Market Cap If it
Emble, Inbox Airlock, and Hireforce
Friday, April 26, 2024
User testing, but easy and fast BetaList BetaList Daily Emble User testing, but easy and fast Inbox Airlock Keep your Gmail inbox clear from unwanted email Hireforce Simple & effective recruitment
Issue#116: Building $1K-$10K MRR Micro SaaS Products around Agencies, AI Processing & AI Content - Part 1
Friday, April 26, 2024
Welcome to the 290 new subscribers who joined this week. With 31000 members, today our Micro SaaS HQ ecosystem is one of the biggest ecosystem exclusively meant for Micro SaaS builders/founders. 👉 Get
Best channel to grow ecommerce in 2024?
Friday, April 26, 2024
See what Ezra Firestone says , Do you know that more than 100 million Americans like to shop online? It's no wonder that the ecommerce market is on track to hit a jaw-dropping $6.3 trillion this
MicroConf Atlanta — My Biggest Learnings — The Bootstrapped Founder 315
Friday, April 26, 2024
MicroConf 2024 is over, and you get to learn what I learned.
What to expect at Sifted Summit 2024
Friday, April 26, 2024
Haven't got your ticket yet? Here's what to expect over the two days. View this email in your browser. 1200 x 380 (Desktop & Tablet) (2)-1 Hey there, Is it just us, or is the Summit Summit
The problem with VC: Reason #384
Friday, April 26, 2024
We have brunch with HelixNano cofounder Carina Namih, Isomer enters secondaries market and the startups mitigating AI's impact on the climate. View in browser Notion flagship logo final Good
SaaSHub Weekly - Apr 25
Thursday, April 25, 2024
SaaSHub Weekly - Apr 25 Featured and useful products 12 Foot Ladder logo 12 Foot Ladder Prepend 12ft.io/ to the URL of any paywalled page, and we'll try our best to remove the paywall and get you