Elon Musk's Twitter Takeover - Transcript (2024)

MUSK TWEET:

Launch auto-sequence initiated (aka the holy mouse-click) for 3:45 liftoff #FalconHeavy.

February 6, 2018

ELON MUSK:

Launch direct countdown one, SpaceX Falcon Heavy, go for launch.

CROWD [chanting in unison]:

Ten, 9, 8, 7, 6—

JAMES JACOBY, Correspondent:

It had all the elements of a perfect day for Elon Musk.

CROWD [chanting in unison]:

—2, 1—

SPACEX MISSION CONTROL:

Liftoff! Go Falcon Heavy!

JAMES JACOBY:

A test launch of his latest reusable rocket, the most powerful in the world, capable of deep space exploration. It was a crucial step toward his ultimate goal: the conquest of Mars.

WALTER ISAACSON, Author,Elon Musk:

Elon Musk I think gets his most pleasure out of rocket ships. And at moments when the rockets go off, that's when the childish pleasure comes out.

SPACEX MISSION CONTROL:

T+30 seconds, if you can hear me over the cheering. Falcon Heavy heading to space on our test flight.

WALTER ISAACSON:

He doesn't usually like having pleasure. He doesn't savor the moment. But he does when it's a rocket launch.

MUSK TWEET:

Camera views from inside the payload fairing #FalconHeavy.

JAMES JACOBY:

Throughout the day, Musk provided running commentary at his favorite place to express himself: the social media site Twitter.

MUSK TWEET:

Upper stage restart nominal, apogee raised to 7000 km.

KARA SWISHER,On With Kara Swisherpodcast:

He's a performer. He likes it. He likes it. He likes playing Elon Musk. I swear, he thinks he's Iron Man.

JAMES JACOBY:

Right on cue, Musk’s rocket discharged his own cherry red Tesla, complete with a mannequin in the driver’s seat.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Elon Musk has outdone himself this time.

ELON MUSK:

Normally, for a new rocket, it launched like a block of concrete. I mean, that’s so boring. It’s still tripping me out. I mean, I’m tripping balls here. [Laughs]

JAMES JACOBY:

The electric car and the reusable rocket were part of a vast business empire, from neurotechnology to artificial intelligence to a web of satellites encircling the Earth that has made Elon Musk one of the richest and most powerful men in the world.

MUSK TWEET:

View from SpaceX Launch Control. Apparently, there is a car in orbit around Earth.

JAMES JACOBY:

And the app he was using to live-Tweet the launch? A few years later, that would be his, too.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Elon Musk puts in an offer to buy Twitter.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Elon Musk and Twitter announced a $44 billion deal today.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

He says he wants to transform the company.

ELON MUSK:

Well, I think it's very important for there to be an inclusive arena for free speech.

JAMES JACOBY:

For the past six months, we’ve been investigating Elon Musk’s controversial purchase of Twitter, how it’s expanded his influence into politics at a time of deep division across America—

JEANNINE PIRRO:

Now we’ve got someone who’s going to take over Twitter who actually believes in the Constitution and free speech.

JAMES JACOBY:

—and what it means for one of the world's most important platforms for news and political debate to be under the control of one man.

RONAN FARROW:

This is a human being that we’re giving all of this power to, and there are very few checks on that power right now.

JAMES JACOBY:

This is the story of Elon Musk’s latest mission and its far-reaching consequences.

MALE NEWSREADER:

A new name for Twitter. Twitter owner Elon Musk has replaced the iconic bird logo with an X. This came with almost no warning as he made the announcement that the platform will now be known as X.com.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Today construction crews blocked a lane on Market Street to take down the Twitter sign, letter by letter.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Passersby stopped, clicked and shared on social media what was happening.

MAN ON STREET 1:

I don’t know what the thought process is. This is probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.

MAN ON STREET 2:

I think it’s an ego thing.

JAMES JACOBY:

Over the span of just a few days in July 2023, Twitter disappeared and became X, named after Elon Musk’s favorite letter.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

You know what, Elon Musk thinks he’s Batman, and I’m over it.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

The former Twitter building now home to X and the giant X sign, and the neighbors say the lights coming from that X sign are simply blinding.

JAMES JACOBY:

It was the end of a brand that had grown into a global icon since its founding 17 years ago.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

There is a new service, and supposedly it is the next big thing. It’s a name you can’t forget: It’s called Twitter.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Twitter.

WOLF BLITZER:

Twitter.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Twitter.

RACHEL MADDOW:

Twitter.

MALE REPORTER:

What is Twitter?

ROBERT SCOBLE, Blogger:

It’s stupid and lame and small.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Yet master blogger Robert Scoble can’t keep his fingertips off.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Twitter is rather addictive.

JACK DORSEY:

We’re looking at my Twitter account and—

JAMES JACOBY:

Twitter was founded in 2006 as a simple messaging platform where users posted about daily life.

MALE REPORTER:

Users no longer need a PC or a blog. Messaging can be typed by cellphone. That’s it’s selling point.

JAMES JACOBY:

But it quickly evolved into what became known as the “global town square.”

FEMALE REPORTER:

What made you want to get up and do something today?

EMMY ROSSUM:

Twitter.

ZOË SHIFFER, Managing editor, Platformer:

It felt like it was where the conversation was happening. If there was a news story that dropped onThe New York Times, it was debated on Twitter. If a journalist like me felt like their story was going viral, it was going viral on Twitter.

JIMMY FALLON:

You sent me a tweet.

WILLIAM, PRINCE OF WALES:

The queen started tweeting.

MALE REPORTER:

The pope’s first tweet.

ZOË SHIFFER:

It had famous people across sports, media, politics—

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA:

John obviously needs to work on his typing skills. [Laughter]

ZOË SHIFFER:

—and just generally funny people who were good at Twitter. And the combination of all of those things felt like it was where the conversation was happening.

RAINN WILSON:

I just type something in to my iPhone, and boom, it’s in their brains.

JAMES JACOBY:

Elon Musk joined the conversation in 2010.

MUSK TWEET:

Please ignore prior tweets, as that was someone pretending to be me :) This is actually me.

JAMES JACOBY:

At the time, the South African-born entrepreneur was already rich and had a reputation for taking risks. He’d used the fortune he made as a founder of PayPal to start a rocket company and to buy a stake in Tesla, a fledgling electric car company that under his leadership would revolutionize the industry and earn Musk praise as a pioneer in the fight against climate change.

On Twitter, he started sharing books he liked and random observations about the world.

MUSK TWEET:

Compared to past, today's world is fantastic.

KARA SWISHER:

I liked Elon. I thought he was quirky and interesting and creative.

ELON MUSK:

You could warm Mars up over time with greenhouse gasses and kind of the opposite of what we're doing on Earth. [Laughter]

KARA SWISHER:

I was in great admiration because most people in Silicon Valley are talking about stupid things or making dating apps. He was doing significant stuff.

ELON MUSK:

Thanks for having me. It’s great to see you guys.

KARA SWISHER:

Thank you for coming, I really appreciate it. You kept your promise, which was nice.

JAMES JACOBY:

Kara Swisher writes about Silicon Valley and has known Musk for more than 20 years. She’s interviewed him multiple times.

You started covering Musk even before PayPal, right?

KARA SWISHER:

Yeah. Yes. There was a million startup people like him in Silicon Valley. But I remember him.

JAMES JACOBY:

And what were your impressions of him then?

KARA SWISHER:

I paid pretty good attention to him, but not a lot particularly. But then when he started doing the stuff around SpaceX and bought Tesla from the actual founders, that was interesting, because he was different.

ELON MUSK:

The real big breakthrough that’s needed with the rocketry is a truly reusable rocket.

BARACK OBAMA:

How do you split your time between car and rocket?

ELON MUSK:

Well, it’s usually about 50-50.

KARA SWISHER:

He was a smart person doing big things. And so there—literally can't think of someone who was doing as big things as he was.

What's going on with you and Twitter? It's your happy place.

ELON MUSK:

Some people use their hair to express themselves. I use Twitter.

JAMES JACOBY:

But there was another side to Musk that Swisher came to know over the years.

KARA SWISHER:

He's such a quirky personality and an unusual sense of humor that—much more juvenile than the other boys. They're all boys, but it was even more so. A lot of fart jokes or penis jokes and, whatever. He liked those, he thought they were hysterical.

MUSK TWEET:

Am reading Robert Massie’s book on Catherine the Great. Yeah, I know what you’re probably thinking . . . did she really f* a horse?

JAMES JACOBY:

For Musk, Twitter was the perfect outlet.

RUMMAN CHOWDHURY, Dir., machine learning ethics, Twitter, 2019-22:

Twitter has always been a place where you can be very honest. There were a lot of sassy comments, a lot of wit and, yeah, a lot of things that riled people up. That was literally what Twitter was for.

ANIKA COLLIER NAVAROLI, U.S. safety policy team, Twitter, 2019-21:

Twitter was the free speech wing of the free speech party and didn't have any rules. That was very much the approach when these companies were starting.

MUSK TWEET:

I love Twitter.

WALTER ISAACSON:

Elon Musk is more impetuous, more impulsive, more addicted to things than anybody I've ever seen. That's what drives him. When he gets riled up, he either tweets or plays video games.

JAMES JACOBY:

Musk wouldn’t talk to FRONTLINE, but biographer Walter Isaacson spent the past two years shadowing him.

WALTER ISAACSON:
As a kid, he was bullied on the playground. And he was a scrawny kid, so he kept getting beaten up. They'd push him down the concrete steps and bloody his face, some of the bullies. And those scars have always been with him. Whenever he gets into a dark place, he remembers that playground, and he goes dark. And in some ways, Twitter is the ultimate global playground, except for the scrawny kids and the smart kids get followers. They don’t get smashed into the concrete steps.

LESLEY STAHL, 60 Minutes:

You use your tweeting to kind of get back at critics.

ELON MUSK:

Rarely.

LESLEY STAHL:

You kind of have little wars with the press.

ELON MUSK:

Twitter's a war zone. If somebody's going to jump in the war zone, it's like, OK, you're in the arena. Let’s go.

JAMES JACOBY:

Musk’s natural affinity for Twitter earned him millions of followers. Then tens of millions.

ZOË SHIFFER:

Elon Musk was insanely popular on Twitter. He'd always had a ton of followers, but he was inching up to being the most followed person on Twitter, and it felt like everything he touched turned to gold in terms of follower count. So if he interacted with someone, suddenly that person's follower count shot up. It just felt like there was so much engagement and interest in everything he did.

LINETTE LOPEZ,Business Insider:

Elon had evangelists. He attracted a kind of very online, mostly male following that wants technology to save the world. It was very clear to me that his followers had this kind of brotherly sense, or my cool older brother, my cool uncle, my cool dad, who is trying to fix the world for me.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Tesla shares surging following CEO Elon Musk’s cryptic tweet saying—

MATT LEVINE,Bloomberg News:

It's added a lot of value to his wealth and to the value of his companies.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Shares of Palo Alto-based Tesla jump more than 2% following this mysterious teasy message from CEO Elon Musk. He wrote—

MATT LEVINE:

It's enabled Tesla to raise money. It's increased the size of his fortune. And that's from Twitter, yeah.

JAMES JACOBY:
This is marketing.

MATT LEVINE:

Yeah. Tesla says we don’t really spend on advertising and marketing because Elon Musk is on Twitter.

JAMES JACOBY:

It was a similar approach to another businessman who’d mastered the art of Twitter.

DONALD TRUMP:

I have a big voice. I have millions and millions of followers on Twitter and when I say something, people—some people don’t like it, but most people do like it.

LINETTE LOPEZ:

Donald Trump used Twitter for years to pump himself, his businesses, his show. And it was how he got this massive following.

DONALD TRUMP:

Wow. What a crowd.

LINETTE LOPEZ:

And Elon used Twitter the same exact way. There's very little difference.

JAMES JACOBY:

Similar playbook?

LINETTE LOPEZ:

Similar playbook.

DONALD TRUMP:

You know if I tweet something, CNN and Fox, all of the sudden they say, “We have breaking news. Donald Trump has just made a—” I’m sitting there tweeting. Bing, bing, bing.

JAMES JACOBY:

Donald Trump's use of Twitter to circumvent the media—first as a candidate, then as president—elevated Twitter to the most influential political platform in America.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

President Trump tweeted to announce the firing of his secretary of veterans affairs.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

President Trump tweeting out policy on gun safety in our nation’s schools.

MALE NEWSREADER:

President Trump tweeting moments ago, Rex Tillerson out as secretary of state.

YOEL ROTH, Trust and safety dept., Twitter, 2015-22:

Twitter skyrocketed to a level of prominence that I don't think its founders really expected.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Is there an effort within the White House to try to rein in the president's Twitter habit?

YOEL ROTH:

It also took on this central role in democratic deliberation that I don’t think anybody could have expected a single tech platform to do.

JAMES JACOBY:

But for most of this time, Musk had steered clear of political controversy on Twitter.

MUSK TWEET:

To be clear, I am not a conservative. Am registered independent and politically moderate.

KARA SWISHER:

I never knew Elon's politics. They were all over the place. He voted for Obama—he was a big Obama supporter, I remember. He liked Obama better than I did. You never knew where he was going to come down politically. He didn't, like—I didn't ever feel he had any big point of view.

MALE NEWSREADER:

California is now under a statewide stay-at-home order.

JAMES JACOBY:

The pandemic would spark a shift in Musk that, like so much in his life, would play out on Twitter.

MUSK TWEET:

The coronavirus panic is dumb.

MALE NEWSREADER:

I think Elon Musk’s tweets are a lot more fun when stocks go up and it’s a bull market. When it’s more serious like this it feels a little like, you know, not the time. Not now, Elon.

KARA SWISHER:
He had a point of view about that the virus was not dangerous. And that may have been, but at the time, people did not know. And it could have gone a lot of different ways. And a million people died.

At one point he was like, "I read everything and I now know." And I'm like, "Thank you, Dr. Musk." And I was like, you don't know anything. It's ridiculous. "Well, they're wrong about the mask wearing," or "They're wrong about the don't-touch thing." I said, well, "They didn't know, and now they know. It's called science."

MALE NEWSREADER:

In California, 40 million residents are in lockdown—

JAMES JACOBY:

At the time, the government had ordered Musk to close his Tesla factories in California.

I mean, he was pissed that his factories were forced to close.

KARA SWISHER:
Yes, ultimately, yes. That's the thing. He wanted them there and he wanted them working. He thought it was an existential crisis if Tesla didn't succeed. He really—for the world, for all of us. And then it got weird.

MUSK TWEET:

FREE AMERICA NOW.

Give people their freedom back!

Hospitals in California have been half empty this whole time.

Now give people back their FREEDOM.

JAMES JACOBY:

Musk told his employees that he intended to defy orders and go to work.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, is defying stay-at-home orders, daring the authorities to arrest him by reopening his California factories.

MALE NEWSREADER:

CEO Elon Musk tweeted, “I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.”

JAMES JACOBY:

Musk aired his frustrations on a Tesla earnings call.

ELON MUSK:

Frankly I would call it forcibly imprisoning people in their homes against all their constitutional rights. [. . .] What the f---? Excuse me. [. . .] This is fascist. This is not democratic. This is not freedom. Give people back their ---damn freedom.

JAMES JACOBY:

Musk’s rhetoric on COVID would win him an unexpected ally in President Trump, who tweeted, “California should let Tesla & @elonmusk open the plant, NOW.”

Musk tweeted back:

MUSK TWEET:

Thank you!

JOE ROGAN:

When you say civilization’s fragile, do you mean because of this COVID-19 s--- that's going on right now?

ELON MUSK:

What's that? Never heard of it.

JOE ROGAN:

It's this thing.

JAMES JACOBY:

He also found a sympathetic ear with Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster in the country.

ELON MUSK:

In general, I think that's like—we should be concerned about anything that's a massive infringement on our civil liberties.

JOE ROGAN:

Yes.

ELON MUSK:

My opinion is if somebody wants to stay home, stay home. If, say, somebody doesn't want to stay home, they should not be compelled to stay home.

JAMES JACOBY:

In May, a cryptic tweet from Musk signaled his shifting politics.

WALTER ISAACSON:
When he tweets, "Take the red pill," a line from "The Matrix," it means question this ideology that may have been imposed. Try to find out the real truth.

"The Matrix"

LAWRENCE FISHBURNE (AS MORPHEUS):

All I’m offering is the truth, nothing more.

WALTER ISAACSON:

But it was mostly a signal that he had joined that, I'd call it the somewhat conspiratorial people on the right who feel that the media and the establishment are imposing a narrative on us.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Today as protests erupted across the country, many governors say it’s still too soon to lift restrictions.

JAMES JACOBY:

Musk’s position on the pandemic aligned him with a growing chorus of conservatives who felt their personal liberty was under attack from all sides.

MALE PROTESTER:

This is our First Amendment right!

JAMES JACOBY:

The government, the scientific establishment, the press and, increasingly, social media.

WALTER ISAACSON:
He was also noticing that on Twitter if you said that lockdowns could cause more harm than good, you'd be kind of repressed on Twitter. So this made him upset.

MALE TALK SHOW GUEST:

They’re saying to us, “If you dare go against what we say is true"—not necessarily what is true, but what we say is true—"then we’re going to boot you."

JAMES JACOBY:

It’s true that social media companies had become more proactive about what was on their sites.

REP. GREG WALDEN, (R) Oregon:

I'd call the hearing to order, and I’d like to welcome our witnesses today, Jack Dorsey, chief executive officer at Twitter—

JAMES JACOBY:

For years before the pandemic, Twitter’s CEO and founder Jack Dorsey had been criticized in the press and lambasted in Congress for his company’s failure to stop the spread of hate speech and misinformation, especially after Russian interference in the 2016 election.

September 2018

JACK DORSEY:

We’re now removing over 200% more accounts for violating our policies.

RUMMAN CHOWDHURY:

We were tasked with making sure our algorithms were responding in a way that was actually beneficial to humanity, not driving misinformation, not driving bias and discrimination.

JAMES JACOBY:

Rumman Chowdhury, a data scientist, ran a team of engineers at Twitter tasked with ensuring the platform's algorithms did not promote harmful content.

RUMMAN CHOWDHURY:

There are millions of tweets any given second that you could see on your timeline. Your little iPhone screen only shows maybe three of those at a time. So we have to build multiple systems that are identifying what you'd want to see.

JAMES JACOBY:
I mean, it shapes the universe of what people are seeing.

RUMMAN CHOWDHURY:
Absolutely. It shapes the universe of perception. It is telling us what is important and what is not important. So my team's job was to ensure that the algorithms that we're building were responding to some of the issues that governments were talking about, people were talking about, and this increasing fear of how social media might be changing the course of elections, how it might be making children's minds rot, how it might be polarizing young men and causing some of the violence that we're seeing in the world.

JAMES JACOBY:

How it might be spreading lies more than truth?

RUMMAN CHOWDHURY:

Absolutely, that's definitely a concern.

YOEL ROTH:

In late 2019, Twitter fielded a large-scale study of users of the service and asked them, "Do you think Twitter should take some type of action on misinformation?" And what we heard back from a majority of users globally was yes.

JAMES JACOBY:

Yoel Roth started at Twitter in 2015 while finishing his Ph.D. in communications. He would work his way up to running the content moderation team, a job that would ultimately lead him to clash with Elon Musk.

YOEL ROTH:

Twitter's users told us that when it came to certain types of harmful misinformation, they didn't think it was acceptable for the company to do nothing. They wanted us to step in. And so that's what we did.

JAMES JACOBY:

That seems like a particularly messy business for a social media company like Twitter. How did you think about your role as sort of an arbiter of truth?

YOEL ROTH:
Misinformation was one of the hardest policy issues for Twitter to take on. For many years, our position was we are not the arbiters of truth. But we also saw that some types of misinformation, if left completely unchecked, could be incredibly dangerous and damaging. And so we had to figure out when and where it might be appropriate to step in.

JAMES JACOBY:

But it does put you at Twitter in the uncomfortable position of having to kind of determine something as misinformation, determine something as being a lie.

YOEL ROTH:

I don't think it's a comfortable position for companies to be in, to have to arbitrate whether something is true or false. But there's still a responsibility that goes along with being the place where these conversations happen. We see that when platforms are hands-off with dangerous speech that dangerous things happen as a result.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

So as misinformation about the coronavirus continues to spread globally, Twitter has implemented a new system to sort of highlight bogus or unverified claims.

ANIKA COLLIER NAVAROLI:

When you are in a very public health crisis and health emergency and individuals are looking for information that can literally be life-saving, to have misinformation spreading could be the difference between life and death.

JAMES JACOBY:

Anika Collier Navaroli, a lawyer and senior member of the Twitter safety team, helped write the company’s content moderation policies. In May 2020, Twitter rolled out a new system of labeling tweets deemed to be misinformation.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Many experts call the steady stream of false information and conspiracy theories an "infodemic."

ANIKA COLLIER NAVAROLI:

So there was this new intervention, which was this label, and I think it really did sort of change the experience and change the conversation for a lot of people, because it felt like social media companies were intervening in things that they never had done before, which they were.

JAMES JACOBY:

Speech police.

ANIKA COLLIER NAVAROLI:

Never met ‘em. [Laughs]

JAMES JACOBY:

Why is it funny?

ANIKA COLLIER NAVAROLI:

You know, I think it's funny to me because people have used a lot of words and a lot of phrases to describe the job that I did, right? We were known as Twitter gods. We were known as Twitter jail and the thought police, the speech police. All of these various terms, I think, have been used towards humans who are showing up every day just trying to do our jobs.

JAMES JACOBY:

What would be a better description, then, of what you did?

ANIKA COLLIER NAVAROLI:

Content moderation.

JAMES JACOBY:

Twitter’s new approach would play into concerns that social media companies had started to constrain what people could say about the pandemic and the response.

TUCKER CARLSON:

They want unquestioned obedience, so they’re cracking down on free expression.

JAMES JACOBY:

In late April, Elon Musk tweeted:

MUSK TWEET:

Silicon Valley has become Sanctimonious Valley. Too much the moral arbiter of the world.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Today Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order to send every eligible—

JAMES JACOBY:

One of Twitter’s first misinformation labels would be the most fateful.

GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM, (D) California:

We are reaching out to all registered eligible voters and giving them—

JAMES JACOBY:

When California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that he’d send millions of mail-in ballots to voters in lockdown, President Trump took to Twitter alleging this would lead to electoral fraud.

YOEL ROTH:

So, in that moment, we had to decide what to do. We had built a new product and a new set of technologies for labeling misinformation. And here was one of the most prominent accounts on the service, spreading misinformation about voting by mail. And so we made the decision to use our new labeling technology on one of Donald Trump's tweets for the first time.

JAMES JACOBY:
How did it feel to make that decision?

YOEL ROTH:
It was a bit like a dam breaking. For years, Twitter had been criticized for not doing anything to address harmful speech from Donald Trump. And in truth, he had kind of paralyzed the company's content moderation efforts because we didn't know what the right answer was. The company was holding back. It was nervous about taking its first action to moderate a sitting head of state. And then we did it. And the response was immediate.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Let’s bring in Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president.

YOEL ROTH:
The day after we labeled Donald Trump's post for the first time, I woke up to Kellyanne Conway on Fox News.

KELLYANNE CONWAY:

I want to raise the name of somebody at Twitter, he’s the head of integrity, and his name is Yoel Roth. He’s @yoyoel. Somebody in San Francisco go wake him up and tell him he’s about to get more followers.

YOEL ROTH:

I was floored. I had never gotten that level of public attention before.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP:

His name is Yoel Roth.

YOEL ROTH:

The next day, I was on the cover of theNew York Postalong with several of my old tweets. The president held an Oval Office press conference decrying social media censorship. He called me a hater.

DONALD TRUMP:

If Twitter were not honorable, if you're going to have a guy like this be your judge and jury, I think you shut it down, as far as I'm concerned. But I'd have to go through a legal process to do that.

YOEL ROTH:

I became the poster child for Silicon Valley bias and censorship.

KAYLEIGH McENANY:

Twitter’s head of site integrity has tweeted that there are, quote, “actual Nazis” in the White House.

JAMES JACOBY:

The Trump administration pointed to tweets Roth had posted back in 2016, not long after he’d joined Twitter, accusing him of bias.

LOU DOBBS:

This is just incredible. “I’m just saying we fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason.” It’s obviously not decency, and it’s sure as hell not neutrality or objectivity.

JAMES JACOBY:

What were you thinking tweeting those things?

YOEL ROTH:
I regret those tweets.

JAMES JACOBY:
But do they not reveal a liberal bias? I mean, that's what the president was saying, they reveal a liberal bias.

YOEL ROTH:

My personal opinions didn't impact Twitter's policies. Twitter's policies were the product of dozens of people working on them and were subject to approval, not just by me, but by a team of executives and ultimately by the company's CEO, Jack Dorsey. I take the responsibility that goes with my job seriously. I wouldn't post those things today. I would recommend against others in my line of work doing so. But I think taking years-old posts out of context and suggesting that they represent some type of systematic bias is a misrepresentation of the facts.

JAMES JACOBY:
Isn't it a legitimate question, though, to ask in certain circ*mstances whether the referee is biased? At Twitter the vast majority of the staff, I believe, lean Democratic, right? So isn't it a legitimate question to ask if the ref is biased?

YOEL ROTH:
I think it's a legitimate question to ask. There's also no evidence that it's true.

MALE PODCAST HOST:

Now there are new gatekeepers and more gatekeepers than ever.

TUCKER CARLSON:

They’re authoritarians. If they’re willing to censor the president, they will think nothing at all of silencing you. And they don’t.

JAMES JACOBY:

Elon Musk would echo the concerns.

ELON MUSK:

Silicon Valley, or the San Francisco Bay Area, has too much influence on the world, in my opinion. And I say that as someone who has spent most of his life in California, mostly in the Bay Area. There's some out there who just want to shut down one side of debate or another. I think we should resist that.

JAMES JACOBY:

In October 2020, concerns about bias at Twitter would only intensify when it made an unprecedented move: temporarily blocking aNew York Postnews story about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the run-up to the presidential election.

MIRANDA DEVINE,New York Post:

These oligarchs in Big Tech are treating us as if we are thieves in their authoritarian regime.

MATT TAIBBI,Rolling Stone, 2004-20:

Twitter had locked out a story about Hunter Biden's laptop. They kept it from being transmitted for about a day. Then they locked theNew York Postout of their account for two weeks. It was kind of a historic moment in American censorship.

JAMES JACOBY:

Matt Taibbi, then a reporter forRolling Stone, was alarmed by the development.

MATT TAIBBI:

These companies—Facebook, Twitter, Google/YouTube—they are de facto monopolies in terms of distribution. They control overwhelmingly who gets to see what. Once you start going down that road, the whole history of any sort of unfree society in the world is that once you take a step in that direction, it never stops. It always keeps going.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

The Trump campaign is accusing Twitter and Facebook of censorship after the social media company—

JAMES JACOBY:

Twitter had blocked the story due to concerns that the laptop was part of a Russian hack-and-leak operation intended to disrupt the American elections. It wasn’t.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Twitter’s CEO also said Twitter should have communicated better about why—

JAMES JACOBY:

Twitter and Dorsey soon admitted that blocking theNew York Poststory was a mistake. Musk agreed.

MUSK TWEET:

Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate.

WOLF BLITZER:

Joseph R. Biden Jr. is elected the 46th President of the United States, winning—

JAMES JACOBY:

Three weeks later, President Trump lost the election, and Twitter continued to slap labels on his tweets and many others that spread lies about the results.

MALE NEWSREADER:

This morning President Trump plans to speak to thousands of his supporters.

YOEL ROTH:

Between Election Day and Jan. 6, Twitter labeled more than 140 separate tweets from the president.

DONALD TRUMP:

Every time I put out a tweet, even if it’s totally correct, totally correct, I get a flag.

YOEL ROTH:

We labeled them as misinformation. We restricted them. We fact-checked them. And the president kept posting them. Every day, the same thing, the same content, the same lies.

ANIKA COLLIER NAVAROLI:

I am very concerned about what happens tomorrow, especially given what we have been seeing on the platform for the last several months.

JAMES JACOBY:

On Jan. 5, in a video obtained by FRONTLINE of an internal Twitter conference call, Anika Navaroli warned that Trump’s tweets could lead to violence.

ANIKA COLLIER NAVAROLI:

And we’re still confused as to when we are actually going to be able to either trigger again like a crisis or an emergency. Does somebody need to be murdered?

JAMES JACOBY:

For months, she’d been urging top executives to change tack, to not just label some of Trump’s tweets, but take them down.

ANIKA COLLIER NAVAROLI:

What I was advocating before Jan. 6 was not for the permanent suspension or permanent banning of any one account, but rather the taking down of individual content. And I remember sending a message to a larger team and saying, and this was like December of 2020, saying out loud, "If there were any other country in the world in which the leader of the elected party was contesting an open and fair election and their followers were openly calling for civil war, would we do anything differently?" Because I firmly believed given the other circ*mstances that I had worked and I had seen that we would, and yet we were not acting in this specific case.

JAMES JACOBY:

So your warnings basically were unheeded.

ANIKA COLLIER NAVAROLI:

Yes.

JAMES JACOBY:

Did you get a sense that part of the reluctance to do anything much about Trump's tweeting before Jan. 6 was because he was a star of Twitter?

ANIKA COLLIER NAVAROLI:

Very much so. He was the main attraction.

I believe that the Twitter platform was used to incite violence on Jan. 6.

JAMES JACOBY:

And Twitter knew about it.

ANIKA COLLIER NAVAROLI:

I specifically warned them. Yes.

JAMES JACOBY:

And nothing was done.

ANIKA COLLIER NAVAROLI:

Nothing was done.

JAMES JACOBY:

Navaroli would eventually resign.

Twitter's founder Jack Dorsey didn’t respond to our request for an interview.

The company has said that it had a policy of giving heads of state more latitude and that Navaroli’s account leaves out the "unprecedented steps" it took to respond to threats during the 2020 election.

As the events unfolded on Jan. 6 at the Capitol building—

JAN. 6 INSURRECTIONIST:

This is America!

JAMES JACOBY:

—Twitter temporarily suspended the president—a 12-hour time-out.

But two days later, Trump was at it again.

YOEL ROTH:

The president returned to Twitter and posted that he would not be attending President Biden's inauguration. He posted that the American patriots who had supported him would have a voice "long into the future." And that tweet lit a fuse.

And we saw that the president's rhetoric about patriots having a voice into the future was being seen as a call to action, as a promise that the president would have people's back as they protested, demonstrated and even carried out acts of violence.

JAMES JACOBY:

You were interpreting it as a call to arms, but was it literally a call to arms?

YOEL ROTH:

I want to emphasize that wasn't my interpretation. That was how people received the president's statements. Whatever the president's intentions—and we can't get in his head, we don't know what he was thinking—whatever his intentions, the result was that lots of people interpreted it as a call to action and a call to violence. And it was not possible for the company to avoid taking action any longer.

JAMES JACOBY:

I've got to be honest, who elected you to take away the megaphone? Who are you to make that choice?

YOEL ROTH:

I'm no one. And it wasn't my decision. It was my recommendation. There were other people who were involved in it, who reviewed it, who weighed in on it. But ultimately, it shouldn't be any one person's decision. It's a terrifying amount of power for a company to have, for any one person to have, whether it's me, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk—no one should have that kind of power. And yet that power exists. And somebody has to make a call whether incitement of violence from a head of state crosses the line. And I didn't seek out that power. I don't think anyone working at Twitter or Facebook or any other platform did. But when the power finds you and when the risks are so significant, there is no choice but to act.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

This morning President Trump waking up without his favorite megaphone.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Twitter has announced it is cutting off President Trump’s ability to post on the social media site permanently.

DONALD TRUMP:

I think that Big Tech is doing a horrible thing for our country.

JAMES JACOBY:

The suspension of President Trump was widely criticized, including by Elon Musk.

MUSK TWEET:

A lot of people are going to be super unhappy with West Coast high tech as the de facto arbiter of free speech.

MALE CONFERENCE MODERATOR:

Joining us remotely, Elon Musk.

JAMES JACOBY:

He’d call Twitter’s decision a grave mistake.

ELON MUSK:

I do think that it was not correct to ban Donald Trump. It alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice. I think permabans just fundamentally undermine trust in Twitter as a town square where everyone can voice their opinion.

JAMES JACOBY:

Musk saw Twitter’s decision not as an isolated incident but part of a larger trend in American culture.

WALTER ISAACSON:

I think he felt that the educational establishment, the media, the people who ran Twitter had sort of fallen into a groupthink. And he felt they were suppressing people who were outside of the mainstream, especially people on the right.

JAMES JACOBY:

He called it the “woke mind virus”

WALTER ISAACSON:

He basically meant the progressive, very anti-capitalistic or anti-business feelings as well as the political correctness he felt where you had to use the right pronouns and other things.

JAMES JACOBY:

An episode in Musk’s complicated family life would intensify his feelings about progressive politics. By 2022, he’d had 11 children with three different women. That spring, one of his teenagers came out publicly as transgender.

WALTER ISAACSON:

And he got his mind around that OK, but she became very left-wing and progressive and Marxist, rejected him for being a billionaire and changed her last name. And he kept saying, "That's the most hurtful thing that's ever happened." And that, too, I think, pushed him because he felt that the woke ideology had infected her and others. And so he becomes more anti-establishment, more anti-woke.

BILL MAHER:

Elon Musk, ladies and gentlemen.

JAMES JACOBY:

He would later explain his disdain for woke politics to comedian and talk show host Bill Maher.

BILL MAHER:

You have talked about this woke mind virus.

ELON MUSK:

Yes, it's often anti-meritocratic. You can't you can't question things. Even the questioning is bad. Almost synonymous would be cancel culture.

BILL MAHER:

OK, so this—

ELON MUSK:

I really can't emphasize this enough, we must, we must protect free speech. And free speech only matters—It's only relevant when it's someone you don't like saying something you don’t like, because obviously, speech that you like is, yeah, that's easy. So it's—and it's, the thing about censorship is that, sure, for those who would advocate it, just remember at some point that will be turned on you.

JAMES JACOBY:

Musk’s tough talk about the woke mind virus and his newfound free speech crusade would help make him one of the most popular figures in America.

MALE NEWSREADER:

He talk about his woke mindset virus, and I think he’s right. It is a virus.

MALE TALK SHOW GUEST:

He’s not afraid to speak the truth. He’s speaking the truth very boldly.

JAMES JACOBY:

He was tapping into a growing concern in much of the country that progressive ideas and policies had gone too far.

ELON MUSK:

At it’s heart wokeness is divisive, exclusionary and hateful.

MALE SPEAKER:

On Sunday evening we got a notice: “Hi, The Babylon Bee, your account has been locked for violating the Twitter Rules.”

JAMES JACOBY:

For Musk, the last straw was in March 2022, when Twitter suspended one his favorite accounts, The Babylon Bee, a right-wing satirical website.

MALE SPEAKER:

And our offending tweet was, “The Babylon Bee's man of the year is Rachel Levine.” And—

FEMALE SPEAKER:

Which we thought was a nice honor.

JAMES JACOBY:

The Babylon Bee had mocked the nation’s highest-ranking transgender official, Adm. Rachel Levine, by awarding her the title “Man of the Year,” a violation of Twitter’s misgendering policy at the time.

MATT TAIBBI:

Elon Musk took issue with the banning of The Babylon Bee. They were taken off because they, I guess, misgendered one of Biden's appointees, a trans appointee. And I could see why people would think that's offensive. But we've protected comedy in this country for a long time, even when it's incredibly offensive, precisely because that's where a lot of social change happens. If you start making it bannable to say the wrong thing, you're going to not have comedy soon.

MALE TALK SHOW GUEST:

You know, it’s just a joke, and they're asking us to basically bend the knee and say, "We admit that this is hateful conduct, please keep us on your platform," and we’re not going to do that.

YOEL ROTH:

In the case of The Babylon Bee, they posted content that misgendered Adm. Rachel Levine. They claimed it was satire, but they did it fully recognizing that they had violated Twitter's rules. You don't get to join somebody else's community and decide that you're going to set your own rules.

JAMES JACOBY:
Can you explain, why is there a policy about misgendering?

YOEL ROTH:
If somebody expresses a preference to have somebody use one set of pronouns and somebody willfully uses another, that's an attempt to silence them. It's an attempt to intimidate them, to abuse them, to harass them. And that conduct ultimately makes people less comfortable speaking publicly on a platform like Twitter, which I view as counterproductive. You can make that decision when you're a company. And there's lots of reasons for it. You do it because it attracts users. You do it because it attracts advertisers. You do it because certain identity categories are actually protected under the law in the United States and elsewhere, and you have an obligation to do it. But those are decisions that you make as a company. You are curating a community, and you get to decide whether some types of harmful and hateful conduct are outside of the bounds of what's OK.

JAMES JACOBY:

When Babylon Bee was suspended, Musk’s ex-wife texted him a suggestion.

FEMALE ACTOR [reading texts]:

Can you buy Twitter and then delete it, please? xx

America is going INSANE.

. . . Please do something to fight woke-ism. I will do anything to help! xx

JAMES JACOBY:

Musk tested the waters on Twitter.

MUSK TWEET:

Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy. What should be done?

WALTER ISAACSON:

At the beginning of 2022, things were going really well for him. He had a lot of money burning a hole in his pocket because he had exercised some stock options. But when things go well for Musk, he gets unsettled sometimes. He wants to shake things up. He's been, as his brother Kimbal says, a drama addict his whole life. And when things are calm, he seeks out storms.

JAMES JACOBY:

By March, Musk had been quietly buying Twitter stock, hoping to push the company in a new direction.

WALTER ISAACSON:

He told me, this could fulfill my vision of X.com, which was a company that started 20 years earlier that morphed into PayPal, but he had wanted it to be larger than a PayPal. He wanted it to be a social network, a payments platform, a place where everybody could create content and get paid for it. He wanted to transform content the way Steve Jobs transformed the music business.

JAMES JACOBY:

Twitter offered him a seat on the board. In texts with Parag Agrawal, Jack Dorsey’s new CEO, Musk seemed eager to help.

MALE ACTOR [reading Musk text]:

I have a ton of ideas, but let me know if I'm pushing too hard. I just want Twitter to be maximum amazing.

WALTER ISAACSON:
In the midst of the turmoil of him buying stock and being offered a board seat on Twitter, he flies off to Hawaii. He doesn't usually take vacations, but this is three or four days at Larry Ellison's house, and he's meeting a girl he was seeing at the time, Natasha Bassett, an Australian actress. But instead of relishing the vacation, he stays up all night tweeting and texting.

MUSK TWEET:

Most of these "top" accounts tweet rarely and post very little content. Is Twitter dying?

JAMES JACOBY:

It was the day Musk was set to join the board. Agrawal texted him:

MALE ACTOR [reading Agrawal text]:

You are free to tweet "is Twitter dying?" or anything else about Twitter, but it's my responsibility to tell you that it's not helping me make Twitter better in the current context.

JAMES JACOBY:

Musk snapped back:

MALE ACTOR [reading Musk text]:

What did you get done this week?

JAMES JACOBY:

Less than a minute later:

MALE ACTOR [reading Musk text]:

I'm not joining the board. This is a waste of time.

JAMES JACOBY:

Fifteen seconds after that:

MALE ACTOR [reading Musk text]:

Will make an offer to take Twitter private.

WALTER ISAACSON:

Elon's impatience and impulsiveness just drove him to say, "I don't want a board seat. I want to control this."

JAMES JACOBY:

Musk made his offer.

TREVOR NOAH:

—$43 billion, all cash, take it or leave it.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

He tweeted the news about an hour ago simply saying, quote, “I made an offer.”

MALE NEWSREADER:

Elon Musk wants Twitter, but he doesn’t got it yet.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

This is not only a big win for free speech, it is about a big shift that’s coming.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

He says he wants to transform the company.

JAMES JACOBY:

Kara Swisher was initially optimistic.

KARA SWISHER:

I thought it was a great idea. I thought he'd be a good owner.

JAMES JACOBY:

Why?

KARA SWISHER:

Because he has the money, the means and the creativity to do something. I thought he could get stuff done. And he actually asked me my ideas because I knew a lot about Twitter. I was a very heavy user. I was working with Twitter on a bunch of things that were interesting, to make money. And I was very clear—"You can do it. You can make this into a much better business." And he said, "Let's get together and talk about it."

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

So we heard Musk this afternoon say he’s not sure that this will succeed.

JAMES JACOBY:

Not all of his friends and family were so enthusiastic.

WALTER ISAACSON:

In early April, he's at the factory in Texas with Tesla. His brother is arguing, "Don't get into Twitter, you've got enough else to do." Even his kids at dinner are saying, "Why are you doing this?" His kids say, "We don't use Twitter." I just sat and watched as all these arguments were going on, but I did ask him, how does it fit in to all your other missions? And he said, "Well, it doesn't really fit in, but maybe by helping democracy, it'll help civilization survive." I think he always has to put these things in some huge, large, epic framework. And he eventually convinced himself of that.

ELON MUSK:

My biological neural nets concluded that if Twitter was not bought and steered in a good direction, that it would be a danger for the future of civilization.

WALTER ISAACSON:

He is somebody, ever since he was reading comic books as a kid, who needs to see himself on an epic mission.

JAMES JACOBY:

After Twitter had accepted his offer, Musk appeared celebratory at the Met Gala with his mother.

MAYE MUSK:

I told him not to take on the world and the universe, and he didn't listen.

ELON MUSK:

Aspirationally, I am trying to do good for humanity and the future of civilization.

MATT LEVINE:

Throughout all of this, I really thought, he has bought some Twitter stock. He's talked about buying Twitter. What are the odds that he will actually get his act together? There's a gap between Elon Musk tweeting, "I want to buy this company," or sending an angry text message saying, "I want to buy your company," and the bankers at Morgan Stanley putting together the commitment letter saying, "Here's your $44 billion of financing."

JAMES JACOBY:
Did it appear like an impulse buy?

MATT LEVINE:

I would have said more like a rage buy. It didn't on the surface seem to have a ton of business or financial logic to it. One reason it seems impulsive is because he changed his mind a week later. He tried to get out of the deal.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Elon Musk now backing out of his $44 billion agreement to purchase Twitter.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

—the social media giant suing him for $44 billion in an effort to enforce their original merger agreement.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Does Elon musk have any legal footing here?

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Maybe.

MATT LEVINE:

I think that probably what was happening there was mostly that he realized he was overpaying. No one really knows, but I think that probably what he was looking to do was recut the deal at a lower price. Probably.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Musk hinting of a new era of Twitter earlier this week—

JAMES JACOBY:

After several months of legal wrangling, Musk gave up, agreeing to the terms of his original offer.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Elon Musk is in control of Twitter this morning. The world’s richest man closed his blockbuster deal overnight—

MALE NEWSREADER:

And now that it’s no longer a publicly traded company, he’ll have no shareholders to answer to, which means he can run the company how he wants.

JAMES JACOBY:

On Oct. 26, 2022, Elon Musk arrived at Twitter headquarters with a gag in hand.

WALTER ISAACSON:

I was standing in the lobby with Parag Agrawal and some of the leaders of Twitter. They were waiting for Musk to come in. And then he comes in with that sink.

MUSK TWEET:

Entering Twitter HQ—let that sink in!

WALTER ISAACSON:

You could feel a certain tension in the air because Twitter is this caring, comforting environment with all sorts of quiet rooms and yoga studios and mental health days, and they believe in psychological safety. And Musk turned to me and said, "Psychological safety?" And he sort of laughs. He says, "That's the enemy of innovation. I believe in hardcore intensity."

JAMES JACOBY:

Musk had taken on more than $12 billion in debt and needed to start making cuts, quickly. He’d brought with him a team of friends, relatives and loyalists from his other companies to help him do just that.

YOEL ROTH:

Suddenly an army of people materialized in the office who didn't have Twitter name tags or Twitter computers, and who started telling Twitter staff what to do. And the assumption was that they had some kind of authority because Elon had brought them over.

They knew how to build cars. They knew how to launch rockets. They knew how to dig tunnels. But they didn't necessarily know about how to run a social media company.

RUMMAN CHOWDHURY:

Teams were asked originally to print out code, I think 50 pages of code, and have it reviewed by a Tesla engineer. People were standing at the printer printing out their code and sort of standing in line like a bunch of students about to be reprimanded by a dean. That whole exercise is not valuable. Engineers who build cars do not understand the code behind social media systems. They're totally different things. That was just a performance of loyalty.

JAMES JACOBY:

Within days, Rumman Chowdhury was part of the first round of layoffs.

Everyone’s rolling? OK.

We spoke to a group of former employees, some of whom told us they'd been initially excited by the prospect of Musk taking over.

ALIM VIRANI, Engineering manager, 2019-22:

I was what I would initially call Team Hype when he was first offered to buy the company. And then in early June, we had an all hands with him.

PARAG AGRAWAL:

Elon, thank you so much for joining us.

ELON MUSK:

Parag, thanks for having me. Glad to be able to speak to everyone.

JAMES JACOBY:

A leaked video of the meeting was posted online.

ALIM VIRANI:

And I said, OK, I'm going to see the business version of Elon Musk, not the weird Twitter guy, right? And we're going to hear facts about his product vision. And we're going to hear a bunch of stuff around that. He showed up late to that meeting. He showed up in a very unprofessional manner.

ELON MUSK:

I’ve made this joke already, but some people use their hair to express themselves. I use Twitter. [Laughs]

ALIM VIRANI:

The meeting was very meandering. It was very light on details.

ELON MUSK:

Some of my comments about Twitter being sort of like a digital town square, but really much more than that.

FEMALE TWITTER EX-EMPLOYEE:

It was going into AI.

ADAM TREITLER, HR analyst, 2021-23:

He talked about extending the light of consciousness, and he started to get into Mars colonization.

ELON MUSK:

We should take a set of actions most likely to extend the scope, scale and lifespan of consciousness as we know it, and—

FEMALE TWITTER EMPLOYEE:

I can’t believe I have to transition from aliens away from this conversation back to Twitter. What do you—

ALIM VIRANI:

I guess I didn't quite hear at that meeting what I thought I would see, a very professional visionary or industrialist. I just saw the same Twitter guy.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Elon Musk, making major moves after his takeover at Twitter, telling employees layoffs will begin later this morning.

JAMES JACOBY:

A week after Musk’s takeover, the entire Twitter staff received an email.

ADAM STEIN,Engineer, 2015-23:
Five, 5:30 on Thursday, which is 8 o'clock—people have left for the day on the East Coast, Central time—this note about, oh, here are layoffs going to happen. You'll get an email either to your work email or your personal email.

ADAM TREITLER:

I remember over text with half my team, and we were literally refreshing. We were logging into our computers. I'm on the East Coast. I stayed up until 3 a.m. that night [laughs], just kind of checking, like, "Do I still have access?" And then at 3 a.m. I was like, "You know what, I'll find out in the morning if I'm still an employee."

JONATHAN SPEAR,Designer, 2021-23:

I was having dinner with my family, and I'm on the East Coast, and my phone was just dinging during the dinner. I opened my computer and when I had logged in, I lost access. Everything shut off. The screen went gray at that moment and I literally started crying in front of my kids.

KIKO SMITH,Mission critical engineer, 2013-23:

It could have been handled a whole lot better, should have been handled a whole lot better and with more humanity, and so shame on him for that.

YAO YUE,Software engineer, 2010-22:
I spent over an hour and a half—I don't know why I'm so emotional. I thought I'm over this. So I lied in bed and I scrolled to the top of the timeline and I looked at everybody's message. I scrolled over about nine hours worth of saluting emojis. And the next day is like you went through a fire and you're looking for survivors.

MALE NEWSREADER:

This morning, thousands of Twitter employees are out of a job.

JAMES JACOBY:

There would be more rounds of layoffs and firings over the coming months.

ADAM TREITLER:

It felt like I was on a sinking ship. They had just let 75% of the people on the ship drown and I'm still here on this ship. And I'm like, [laughs] "I don't know what I'm doing."

JAMES JACOBY:

And how many of you, even by a show of hands, are still waiting on a proper severance? What you were promised? Really, all of you?

Thousands of former workers have sued Twitter, raising claims including unpaid severance and bonuses. Twitter contends its ex-employees have received everything they’re owed.

All-Inpodcast

ELON MUSK:

Twitter Customer Support, at your service. [Laughter]

JAMES JACOBY:

Musk defended the layoffs on the Silicon Valley podcastAll-In.

All-Inpodcast

MALE PODCAST HOST 1:

How did you get to your intuition on what the efficient frontier of employees needed to be to make the product better?

ELON MUSK:

Well [laughs]. Um, yeah. [Laughs]

DAVID SACKS, Entrepreneur:

Well, I observed part of this, where you basically asked the question, "Who here is critical and who here is exceptional?"

ELON MUSK:

Yes, I mean, really, the criteria I was trying to apply, and obviously you’re not going to be perfect if you’re moving fast and there’s a lot of people you’re talking about here, is that anyone who is exceptional at what they do, where the role is critical, they have a positive effect on others and they are trusted, meaning they put the company's interests before their own, should stay.

MALE PODCAST HOST 2:

Pretty straightforward.

ELON MUSK:

Yeah. And also is up for working hard. That would not, that would have not—that was not Twitter's prior culture.

YOEL ROTH:

The first time that I met Elon Musk was a few hours after he fired my boss. I assumed that I was going to be fired and was frankly surprised that it was happening in person. But a member of Elon's team requested to meet with me.

So the initial perspective that somebody on his team had was, well, turn off all access to content moderation tools. Just stop all of it. Nobody moderates anything.

JAMES JACOBY:

Really?

YOEL ROTH:

And I explained that that wouldn't be a viable approach because there's lots of types of moderation that are simply non-negotiable. Around combating terrorism, around protecting children. I suggested that we not shut down those lines of work, and he agreed.

And I was just floored. There was a moment that I had been expecting not just to be fired, but to be walked out the door immediately. And instead I was making a recommendation to Elon Musk about content moderation. He agreed with me and he understood what we were trying to do. And I thought for a minute, maybe it won't be as bad as we've been assuming. Maybe it's all just for show.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Hate speech is surging on Twitter following Elon Musk’s takeover—

JAMES JACOBY:

But Musk would soon be tested.

MALE NEWSREADER:

He put up a Bat-Signal to racists, to misogynists, to hom*ophobes.

JAMES JACOBY:

Groups that monitor hate speech, like the Anti-Defamation League, spotted a worrying trend.

JONATHAN GREENBLATT, Director and CEO, Anti-Defamation League:

We saw this surge of toxic trolling and hate speech that just blew up on the platform days after the company was bought.

YOEL ROTH:
There was a trolling campaign that was supposedly testing the waters of the new Twitter. The idea was that trolls should come to the platform and post racist content as proof that Elon was now allowing racism in a way that the previous administration didn't. And so there was a surge in racism.

JAMES JACOBY:

A coalition of groups including the ADL called on big advertisers to pause spending on Twitter.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

There’s a growing list of companies pressing pause on their Twitter ads.

FEMALE REPORTER:

Audi’s leaving, GM is leaving, Pfizer’s leaving—

JONATHAN GREENBLATT:

We wanted clarification on how the company was thinking about its policies around addressing hate and harassment on its service.

JAMES JACOBY:

The tactic of working with advertisers and pressuring advertisers is essentially a tactic of "let's hit them where it hurts." Advertising is their main revenue stream.

JONATHAN GREENBLATT:

Procter & Gamble and Unilever and Kraft and Coca-Cola and McDonald's and Starbucks, these businesses invest billions of billions of dollars in their brands. They spend countless amounts of money to try to connect with consumers. And all we want to do is make sure they understand that their brands are being flighted up on these sites next to, I don't know, swastikas, or next to white supremacist content, or next to other hateful content. And then, look, if McDonald's thinks or Coca-Cola thinks that they want their ads up against horrible racist content, they can do that.

TREVOR NOAH:

The day Elon officially took over, the use of the N-word on Twitter shot up 500%.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

And so there’s this question of whether or not trolls or different people are testing the limits of what is appropriate on Twitter.

MALE NEWSREADER:

And I think it tells you all you need to know about how Musk’s messaging and his signaling has been received—

JAMES JACOBY, Correspondent:

As hate speech continued to surge, Musk called in Yoel Roth, who was now leading Twitter’s trust and safety division.

YOEL ROTH:

My directions from Elon directly were, "Shut it down. Get rid of all of it." He actually even wanted us to go further than we had previously and said it's not just about targeted hateful conduct, attacks on somebody. Just take all of this stuff down. Get rid of the slurs. Get rid of all of it. And he pushed us to take a more aggressive position, shutting down free speech. He was doing it out of a recognition that advertisers objected to this content and were judging him and the new Twitter by our ability to effectively moderate it.

JAMES JACOBY:

But as advertisers continued to stay away and revenue plummeted, Musk suddenly changed course and began pushing back.

MUSK TWEET:

Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists. Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.

JAMES JACOBY:

Inside Twitter, he asked Roth and his team to block posts supporting the advertising pause.

WALTER ISAACSON, Author,Elon Musk:

One of the things that was very hypocritical in my view is that you had people urging boycotts because they thought Twitter was allowing too much hate speech, and Musk decided he wanted to shut down some of these people who were advocating a boycott. Well, that goes against free speech principles. That's pure political speech. And Yoel Roth and other people there said you can't do that.

YOEL ROTH, Trust and safety dept., Twitter, 2015-22:

I was spending more and more of my time each day dealing with impulsive and erratic questions and decisions and feeling that I was becoming less and less effective in pushing back on them. I would get questions about conspiracy theories about Twitter's moderation and would have to spend hours answering them.

I managed to push back on some of Elon's requests to ban users outside of our policies, but I was sort of left wondering, at what point does that not work anymore? At what point does he not listen to me? At what point do I get fired for this? And I realized that pushing back on individual bad decisions wasn't going to be enough. And so I quit.

ELON MUSK:

[Laughter] Is this working? Hey guys, you’re on, too, welcome. [Laughs]

This is me curling a 45.

JAMES JACOBY:

With Yoel Roth gone—along with much of the trust and safety team—Musk was remaking Twitter in his own image.

ELON MUSK:

Here we are at the merch thing, and there’s an entire closet full of #woke.

JAMES JACOBY:

In late November, he announced a general amnesty for many accounts Twitter had previously suspended and reinstated The Babylon Bee, former President Donald Trump and neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin.

JONATHAN GREENBLATT, Director and CEO, Anti-Defamation League:

He basically turned back on a lot of people who'd previously been banned from the platform, the kind of bad actors who were using Twitter to abuse people, to bully people, to intimidate people, again, to propagate antisemitism and anti-Black racism and fairly awful stuff.

JAMES JACOBY:

Musk defended the amnesty, stating that the company was using its algorithms to ensure that even if hateful content was posted on Twitter, that content would not get seen by many users.

All-Inpodcast

ELON MUSK:

There's more of an allowance for what some might call hate speech on the system, but it's just, it's not going to be promoted. It's not—We're not going to be recommending hate speech [laughs], at risk of stating the obvious.

JAMES JACOBY:

He argued that the critical thing to tackle was "hate speech impressions"—the number of times a tweet actually shows up on someone’s timeline or search results.

All-Inpodcast

DAVID SACKS:

You're doing a lot more to take down hate speech than the company previously was doing.

ELON MUSK:

Yeah, absolutely. Hate speech impressions are down by a third and will get even lower.

JAMES JACOBY:

But this claim was almost impossible to verify.

YOEL ROTH:

There was a moment shortly after I left Twitter when the company said that every week they would put out new data about the prevalence of hate speech. To the contrary, Twitter has actually cut back on the level of data available to researchers who want to study the platform. Twitter went from being one of the most transparent companies to one of the least.

MALE REPORTER:

The Twitterverse exploding over that controversial tweet—

JAMES JACOBY:

Part of Twitter’s problem was Musk himself.

MALE REPORTER:

He deleted that Tweet but not before it got more than 100,000 likes and retweets.

JAMES JACOBY:

His tweets at times became dark and conspiratorial.

FEMALE REPORTER:

Just 48 hours after the violent attack on Paul Pelosi in San Francisco, Elon Musk, Twitter’s new CEO, tweeted out a conspiracy theory about the attack.

MUSK TWEET:

There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye.

MALE REPORTER:

The article questions Mr. Pelosi's sexuality, even suggesting he may have known his attacker.

KARA SWISHER,On With Kara Swisherpodcast:

It was so hom*ophobic. It was crazy. Here's the owner of Twitter retweeting misinformation about an attack on a man, and in an anti-gay way. I was like, who does this? And then it got just weird and mean, like constant attacks, constant retweeting misinformation. Then he started doing transphobic stuff. He's got a kid who's trans. That was shocking. And so it just went on and on and on and on. And it was like, what in the world happened to you?

JAMES JACOBY:

Musk deleted the post about Paul Pelosi and would later apologize. But the controversial tweets kept coming.

WALTER ISAACSON:

He would stay up late, drink Red Bull, take Ambien. Sometimes he would get into this dark demon mode, and that's when the very paranoid or conspiratorial tweets came out.

One day he was traveling with a friend, Antonio Gracias, and Musk had kept tweeting late at night, doing these ridiculous tweets, sometimes very harmful ones. And so the friend said, "Let me take your phone and I'm going to put it in the safe here in the hotel room." Friend punches in the code and he said, "That way you can't use it late at night." At 3 in the morning, Musk calls hotel security to get him to open the safe and he starts doing tweets. He was addicted to tweeting.

Late one night in the workroom at Twitter with some of his young cousins they all got kind of giddy and were joking. And at one point somebody suggested, "Hey, make your pronouns 'prosecute Fauci'." Now, this is something that could both insult people who are trans, insult Anthony Fauci, but they all started laughing about it, and then finally Musk tweeted it out.

MUSK TWEET:

My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.

WALTER ISAACSON:

That tweet infuriated people around him. It infuriated his girlfriend. It infuriated his brother. It showed Elon Musk was skittering a bit around that deep rabbit hole of conspiracy theories.

MUSK TWEET:

He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.

JAMES JACOBY:

One night, Musk tweeted about George Soros, the Jewish billionaire and frequent target of antisemitic conspiracy theories.

JONATHAN GREENBLATT:
He described him as like Magneto. Of course, Magneto is a comic book character from X-Men, who was a Jewish survivor himself. But Magneto seeks to destroy humanity. And when you suggest that someone like Soros, a real person, wants to do something like that, we've seen how it leads to violence.

When we use words carelessly, it can create consequences. And that's what deeply troubled me about what Elon said.

MALE REPORTER:

You know, people today saying, “He’s an antisemite.”

ELON MUSK:

I’m like a pro-semite.

JAMES JACOBY:

On CNBC, Musk was asked why he continued to risk his business and his brand.

ELON MUSK:

There’s a scene in "The Princess Bride," great movie—

MALE REPORTER:

Great movie.

ELON MUSK:

—where he confronts the person who killed his father. And he says, offer me money, offer me power, I don't care.

I’ll say what I want to say, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it.

JAMES JACOBY:

Musk’s tweets had the power to marshal an army of followers. Shortly after he left the company, Yoel Roth found out what it was like to be on the receiving end. When a false accusation surfaced on Twitter that Roth condoned pedophilia, Musk chimed in.

YOEL ROTH:

Elon Musk, with more than 100 million Twitter followers, responds to these insinuations that I condone pedophilia, and he says:

MUSK TWEET:

This explains a lot.

YOEL ROTH:

The threats against me went from being "you're biased and you deserve to die" to being "you're a child molester and you deserve to die." "You’re trafficking children and you deserve to die."

MALE PODCAST HOST 1:

I think he’s a sexual deviant.

MALE PODCAST HOST 2:

It seems like a lot of these people that were on Twitter seem to be child enthusiasts.

MALE PODCAST HOST 3:

That’s the kind of guy that was censoring you. That guy. That should frighten everybody.

YOEL ROTH:

The Daily Mailwent further and published where I live. And so at that point, it was not just threatening emails and texts and phone calls. It was the very real possibility that somebody could show up at my house. There were people emotionally activated to fight against a cabal of pedophiles, with me apparently as their ringleader.

JAMES JACOBY:

What was it like for you?

YOEL ROTH:

For the first time in a long time I was terrified. I was no stranger to being harassed online, but I feared for my life.

JAMES JACOBY:
What would you say to Musk in reaction to doing something like that, to using his position and his power in that way?

YOEL ROTH:
I think there's so many ways that somebody with Elon Musk's resources, influence and ability to reach the public could advance the public conversation on issues that matter. But to use his power to terrorize a former employee, to baselessly accuse a gay man of being a pedophile, one of the oldest, most offensive, most dangerous tropes out there, it's inhumane.

JAMES JACOBY:

As the attacks on Yoel Roth continued, Musk embarked on a new campaign: He began to suspend some Twitter users he took issue with.

LINETTE LOPEZ,Business Insider:

For years, there has been a Twitter account, ElonJet. It has been posting where Elon's jet is. This is public information. Elon has hated this ElonJet account. And then Elon claimed someone had been stalking his son.

WALTER ISAACSON:

A stalker came by where he was staying in Los Angeles and he thought, well, maybe it's because they tracked us on ElonJet.

MUSK TWEET:

Last night, car carrying lil X in LA was followed by crazy stalker, who later blocked car from moving & climbed onto hood.

WALTER ISAACSON:
If there's one thing sure to trigger Elon Musk, it's a threat to his kids, and especially this kid X. So he shuts down ElonJet.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Twitter account @elonjet suspended.

ELONJET POSTER:

I did the appeal thing and I just said, "I don’t believe I violated any terms."

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

—which is surprising given that he’s talking about free speech on the platform, except if you track where he goes on his private plane.

JAMES JACOBY:

In response Musk tweeted:

MUSK TWEET:

Real-time posting of someone else’s location violates doxxing policy.

LINETTE LOPEZ:

Doxxing is revealing the identity or location or address of an individual online. A number of journalists posted links to the public flight pattern, that anyone can find. And Elon got rid of those people, too.

MALE NEWSREADER:

International criticism raining down on the billionaire after the social network suspended several journalists.

MALE NEWSREADER:

The Washington Post's Drew Harwell,The New York Times' Ryan Mac and CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan have fallen prey to Twitter’s blocking spree.

WALTER ISAACSON:

He shuts down any journalist who had referred to or linked to ElonJet. And it made no sense. It really was a violation of this notion of free speech.

JAMES JACOBY:

Soon Musk was prohibiting users from posting links to a rival site as well.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Twitter suspending accounts of upstart rival service Mastodon.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

It all comes one month after Musk proclaimed that he wanted Twitter to be a place of free speech and would grant, quote, "amnesty to all previously banned accounts and reinstate them."

LINETTE LOPEZ:

I thought that was hypocritical, the idea that Elon is some kind of hero against doxxing, takes some kind of stand against publishing people's personal information, is complete and total nonsense.

JAMES JACOBY:

Reporter Linette Lopez, who’d been attacked by Musk and his followers before, took to Twitter with her criticism.

Within a day she, too, found herself locked out, with no explanation.

LINETTE LOPEZ:
I always say that Elon is a law and order guy, as long as he writes the laws and gives the orders. That's how he felt about free speech on Twitter: "I love free speech, as long as the speech is mine and I have the freedom to say whatever I want." But there were a lot of people on Twitter who didn't seem to get that same respect.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

I mean, what he’s doing it’s like Whac-A-Mole. He sees something and he’s going to smack it down. But how do you broadly enforce that?

FEMALE REPORTER:

—critics calling the move dangerous and hypocritical.

JAMES JACOBY:

Amid the criticism, Musk ran a Twitter poll and ultimately backtracked on the suspensions.

MALE NEWSREADER:

There’s been a global backlash after Elon Musk’s Twitter suspended the accounts of several journalists on Thursday.

All-Inpodcast

MALE PODCAST HOST:

All-Inpodcast now sponsored by—

JAMES JACOBY:

Even some of Musk’s allies on the podcastAll-Inwere now questioning his judgment.

All-Inpodcast

DAVID FRIEDBERG, Entrepreneur:

He came in and did exactly what the old regime did, which is that he took the rules and he took the, quote, "moderation policies" and he found a way to use them to make some editorialized decisions that he thought was appropriate.

CHAMATHPALIHAPITIYA, Venture capitalist:

I think that hopefully, he gets all this s--- under control over there. He finds a good executive team. I would like to see him get back to landing rockets on barges, getting to Mars.

MALE PODCAST HOST:

Finish self-driving. We're almost there.

JAMES JACOBY:

Musk appeared to be listening. After watching the World Cup final with Jared Kushner, he asked his followers to respond to another poll:

MUSK TWEET:

Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll.

JAMES JACOBY:

Fifty-seven percent of voters said yes, Musk should step down. Three days later, he sounded deflated.

ELON MUSK:

This company is like, basically you're in a plane that is headed towards the ground at high speed, with the engines on fire and the controls don't work.

JAMES JACOBY:

Musk said he was going to stay on until he could find a new CEO. But he’d continue to make impulsive decisions.

FEMALE SPORTS COMMENTATOR:

Super Bowl Sunday has arrived, and—

ZOË SHIFFER, Managing editor, Platformer:

Elon Musk flies on his private jet to the Super Bowl.He's sitting in the stands watching the game.

MALE SPORTS COMMENTATOR:

Wow, you got some brilliant minds in that photo. Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk.

ZOË SHIFFER:

And he tweets out basically his support for the Philadelphia Eagles. I think his tweet was something like, "Go Eagles" with a few American flags on it. Biden, around the same time, posts a somewhat similar tweet. "Fly, Eagles, fly," and it's a video of his wife, Jill Biden, who's walking with an Eagles jersey on. The game goes on. Elon Musk checks his phone. Weird. It looks like Joe Biden, who he's called "a damp sock puppet in human form," is doing much better than he is in terms of engagement on this very similar tweet.

JAMES JACOBY:

Zoë Schiffer and her colleague at Platformer spoke to multiple sources at Twitter about what happened next.

ZOË SHIFFER:

By the end of the game, the Eagles lose and Elon is completely furious. Something is going on with his account, in his mind. And so he gets on his jet. He flies straight back to Twitter's office in San Francisco.

JAMES JACOBY:

At 2:36 a.m., she says an urgent message went out, and roughly 80 engineers were pulled into work.

ZOË SHIFFER:

And they're tasked with fixing the issues with the algorithm. What the engineers decide to do is reconfigure the algorithm so that Elon Musk's account is boosted.

Very quickly, we're able to talk to people who were in the room at the time and were working on these algorithmic changes. And the reason that people are talking to us is that people are pissed at this point.

JAMES JACOBY:

The effect was immediate.

MALE REPORTER:

If you use Twitter and you feel like you’ve been seeing a lot of Elon Musk lately, you’re not crazy.

MALE REPORTER:

The entire "For You" feed was just Elon Musk.

SARAH SILVERMAN:

Because it behooves all of us to be privy to the fresh and original insights of the richest man in the world.

ZOË SHIFFER:

I was seeing so much Elon. And then I tweeted, "Is anyone else's 'For You' tab just Elon Musk today?" And it was hundreds of people were like, "Yes, what is happening?"

JAMES JACOBY:

Musk posted a provocative meme. He then denied his tweets had been deliberately boosted at all and blamed a glitch in the algorithm for what had happened.

So what was it like to observe that, going from this free-speech absolutist who's upset about how Twitter had been wielding its power. Now he's in charge. It seems like he's—at this point, he's like a king who wants to make up his own rules.

WALTER ISAACSON:

You know, Musk feels, "I'm going to be free, I'm not going to be restrained," and he can not be a pretty sight at times, but that's the Musk that also gets things done.

He's always wanted to be king of the playground.

JAMES JACOBY:

Amid the chaos of his first months running Twitter, Musk made another impulsive decision that would reverberate across American politics and have far-reaching implications for free speech online.

MUSK TWEET:

The Twitter Files on free speech suppression soon to be published on Twitter itself. The public deserves to know what really happened . . .

JAMES JACOBY:

As always, he announced it with a tweet.

Musk had assembled a team of writers critical of the mainstream media and given them access to a trove of internal documents in an effort to expose how Twitter had censored users before he bought it.

Matt Taibbi was the first person Musk brought in.

Did you come in with any degree of skepticism? What was his real motivation here? What, was he using you in some way?

MATT TAIBBI, Twitter Files writer:

Of course I worried about that. Of course I worried "Is he using me?" But what I decided from the beginning was, I want to look at the material. If the stuff in there looks like it can be confirmed, I'm just going to focus on that and I'm not going to worry about his motivations as long as I feel like the stuff in the stories is right.

JAMES JACOBY:

Taibbi and the team combed through thousands of company emails and internal communications. They started publishing a series of controversial stories known as "the Twitter Files."

MICHAEL SMERCONISH, CNN:

In the words of Elon Musk, “Here we go!” He alerted his 119,000,000 followers to a long thread called the Twitter Files.

TUCKER CARLSON:

Twitter Files.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Twitter Files.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Twitter Files.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Twitter Files.

JAMES JACOBY:

Most major news organizations were skeptical of the Twitter Files—

MALE REPORTER:

Potentially what is being presented is selective.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Twitter employees knew what they were doing was f’d up.

JAMES JACOBY:

—but Fox News seized on them.

MALE NEWSREADER:

It wasn’t a smoking gun, it was a flaming howitzer.

JAMES JACOBY:

Some of the most explosive stories revealed that Twitter deplatformed and de-amplified certain users and content—

SEAN HANNITY, Fox News:

Apparently, I’m on the list.

JAMES JACOBY:

—sometimes at the request of government.

ALEX BERENSON, Author:

I wrote a Tweet that began, "It doesn’t stop infection or transmission," and they banned me.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER, Twitter Files writer:

We know for a fact that the White House singled out Alex Berenson, a reporter skeptical of the COVID vaccine, to be taken down, and they deplatformed him. That's so far beyond the bounds of what's acceptable.

JAMES JACOBY:

Michael Shellenberger, a writer known for his contentious positions on climate, nuclear and drug policies, was part of the project.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER:

I think the whole point of having a platform is it's supposed to be reflective of a society, and it's going to allow a lot of different views, including ones that we disagree with and ones that we think are outright lies. It's the whole point of free speech, actually. A right to be wrong, a right to disagree, a right to spread—one person's misinformation is another person's point of view.

MALE PODCASTER:

Yoel Roth, who is this guy?

JAMES JACOBY:

Yoel Roth was once again singled out.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Yoel Roth, again ironically the global head of trust and safety—

JAMES JACOBY:

He was accused of secretly suppressing users deemed to be spreading misinformation.

GLENN GREENWALD:

His name is Yoel Roth.

JACK POSOBIEC:

Yoel Roth.

STEVEN CROWDER:

You may not know Yoel Roth, but you need to. A lot of people didn’t know about George Soros a long time ago.

JAMES JACOBY:
Were these people getting filtered? Were they getting—were these systems used to basically downgrade their reach?

YOEL ROTH, Trust and safety dept., Twitter, 2015-22:

Yes, and Twitter said it would do that in the Help Center in the Twitter rules. When accounts violated the Twitter rules, whether it was posting COVID misinformation or election misinformation, if they did it repeatedly, they might get a label like "Do not amplify" on their account.

JAMES JACOBY:

Would they know about that?

YOEL ROTH:

They wouldn't. Twitter didn't disclose those labels publicly because it didn't have the tools for doing so. And I think that's a reasonable criticism. But people act like the whole practice was a mystery and was a conspiracy. It wasn't. It was in the rules. The rules explicitly stated that accounts that violated the rules would receive visibility filtering, and they did.

JAMES JACOBY:

But I mean, address the point directly of that you were secretly suppressing specific viewpoints, especially on the right.

YOEL ROTH:

I don't think that's what the Twitter Files show. And I don't know that we've done a comprehensive analysis that demonstrates that these actions were skewed or biased one way or the other. I think we've seen a handful of cherry-picked examples.

Now, I think there's a reasonable question to ask whether accounts on the left and on the right had the same rate of violation of the Twitter rules. Do Democrats break the rules as often as Republicans? I don't know. That's a really good question that should be studied. But when you see a handful of examples of it and conclude that those must be the only types of accounts that received visibility filtering, I just—I don't think there's enough evidence there to support that conclusion.

MALE NEWSREADER:

The real winner in this is Elon Musk, right?

JAMES JACOBY:

Elon Musk was delighted with the controversy, even though he was using his own methods to suppress content he didn’t like.

All-Inpodcast

ELON MUSK:

Almost every conspiracy theory that people had about Twitter turned out to be true. [Laughter] So is there a conspiracy theory about Twitter that didn't turn out to be true? So far, they've all turned out to be true. And if not more true than people thought.

JAMES JACOBY:

The Twitter Files team went on to publish portions of emails to Twitter from government agencies and academic institutions that were flagging potential misinformation about vaccines and voting as well as possible foreign efforts to disrupt elections. The messages asked Twitter to review the content and consider taking action. Musk’s team claimed it was evidence of a conspiracy to censor Americans.

FEMALE REPORTER:

Twitter Files journalists say they uncovered a censorship industrial complex.

JAMES JACOBY:

They called it a "censorship industrial complex."

ELON MUSK:

The degree to which various government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on in Twitter blew my mind.

JAMES JACOBY:

That's a big claim. That is a big claim, to say that there's a censorship industrial complex. It also sort of implies that the government is successfully exerting its influence on these companies to infringe upon the First Amendment rights of Americans.

MATT TAIBBI:
Well, I think they are. I think that's probably the case. Yeah.

JAMES JACOBY:
Mm-hmm. When you say probably the case, you mean what?

MATT TAIBBI:

I mean, is it technically against the law? I don't know whether it's technically a First Amendment violation. It's censorship to me. I just think that the fact that they're doing it at all is maybe not legitimate. I definitely don't want the Department of Homeland Security making decisions about what can be published and what can't be published, or what's going to be amplified or not amplified.

JAMES JACOBY:
Well, they're not making decisions. They're sending requests, as you said, to these companies like Twitter, right?

MATT TAIBBI:
I just don't want them involved at all in doing that. And I don't think I'm alone. I think a lot of people feel the same way.

JAMES JACOBY:

According to the Twitter Files team, a key part of the so-called "censorship industrial complex" was a group of academics running a project called the Election Integrity Partnership.

JOE ROGAN:

I just read the "election integrity committee," I get super suspicious. Just the name of that.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER:

Joe, they basically would flag hundreds of millions of tweets.

JOE ROGAN:

That’s insane.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER:

And tens of millions of them were censored.

RENEE DiRESTA, Stanford Univ. Internet Observatory:

The claims that we tried to censor, I think I've seen anywhere from 22 million to 800 million tweets. That is a staggering number of tweets. There is no universe in which that could have happened, and there is no evidence in the Twitter Files that it did, because it didn't.

JAMES JACOBY:

Renee DiResta helped run the Election Integrity Partnership, which was set up in 2020 by academics and researchers studying the problem of misinformation. Its purpose was to flag election misinformation to platforms and government, both of which were coming under increasing pressure to deal with the issue.

RENEE DiRESTA:

The goal of it is not to disenfranchise or silence or censor anybody. The goal of it is to ensure that the best possible information is out there so that the public can see it. And if there had been emails in which we were demanding platforms take things down, the Twitter Files investigators could have released those. But they didn't because they don't exist.

JAMES JACOBY:

DiResta’s role in the partnership was held out as proof of the so-called conspiracy due to her work as an advisor to the Senate Intelligence Committee and her background as a CIA intern.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER:

One of the big leaders of the censorship industrial complex is this person named Renee DiResta.

RENEE DiRESTA:

It is very hard to get people angry about a concept. It is not as hard to rile them up about a person.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER:

Renee DiResta, a former CIA fellow, or at least allegedly former—

I think she’s dangerous and needs to be disempowered—

RENEE DiRESTA:

Michael Shellenberger used me and he made me the face of this thing. And he took the fact that I had interned for the agency as an undergrad, which had never been a secret, and he somehow turned it into part of a vast cabal. You get turned into a character.

JAMES JACOBY:
What's that been like?

RENEE DiRESTA:
Well, it leads to death threats. It leads to harassment. And it is very, very hard for me to refute any of it because in the environment that we live in, people who trust Michael Shellenberger are going to be disinclined to trust me.

JAMES JACOBY:

The Twitter Files claim to kind of uncover this sort of coalition, right? Between folks like yourself, the academic portion of this, government and Big Tech. And that essentially this all adds up to a censorship industrial complex. So, on the face of it, what are we supposed to make of that claim?

RENEE DiRESTA:

Well, I mean, on the face of it, there's no actual evidence for it in the Twitter Files. This is the thing that's been the most remarkable piece of the whole thing, is that the evidence does not appear in the Twitter Files. But you know, there's always this grain of truth that provides the seed on which a conspiracy can be built. And so, is it true that our team briefs the government? Yes, yes it is. Is it true that our team talks to Twitter and Facebook? Occasionally, yes, we do. That's never been a secret. Does that translate into, "We talk to them about the need to take down conservatives"? No, absolutely not.

ANDERSON COOPER:

Critics are saying that Musk and his allies are misrepresenting the work of Twitter’s former management—

FEMALE REPORTER:

Tiabbi also admitted that the Trump campaign asked for content moderation and that he left those links out.

MALE REPORTER:

What is Taibbi doing?

MEHDI HASSAN:

There’s a lot of omission in the Twitter Files, a lot you and your colleagues don’t tell us. You mentioned in passing, for example, in your very first thread that the Trump White House made requests of Twitter, too—

JAMES JACOBY:

As the writers of the Twitter Files kept publishing, they were criticized for multiple factual errors, quoting emails without context and jumping to unsubstantiated conclusions.

MEHDI HASSAN:

Do you know what the 22 million number is, Matt? Can you tell me? Because we checked. Twenty-two million came after the election, it wasn’t in the run up. They flagged 3,000. So, you were off by 21,997,000.

MATT TAIBBI:

There’s been a lot of things—I stand by my story.

JAMES JACOBY:
I've got to ask you, because both fellow journalists and some of the subjects of your reporting have called out some inaccuracies in the reporting. What happened there? Were you sloppy with some facts?

MATT TAIBBI:

Yeah.

JAMES JACOBY:

How does that not affect the credibility of what you're going for here?

MATT TAIBBI:
I've been doing this for 30 years. If you go back and look at my record, I haven't had to issue a whole lot of corrections in my life. I try extremely hard to get everything correct. In this case, we got a few things wrong.

JAMES JACOBY:

Musk’s Twitter Files didn’t end up proving a grand conspiracy. But they did fuel a larger conversation about the relationship between government and social media companies and raised important questions about the extent to which government has been pressuring platforms to remove content.

REP. JIM JORDAN, (R) Ohio:

We welcome our witnesses and thank them for appearing today. We will begin by swearing you in. Would you please stand and raise your right hand.

JAMES JACOBY:

Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger were called to testify by Republican Congressman Jim Jordan, a Trump supporter who for years has insisted that Big Tech has been biased against conservatives. That is, until Elon Musk bought Twitter.

JIM JORDAN:

I mean, God bless him. We wouldn't know any of this but for the fact that this guy, hard work, smart guy, amazing success story—who decided to go buy Twitter because he cares so much about the First Amendment. I think he's been just amazingly transparent, and God bless him for doing it.

Now we all know why. You guys said at the outset, this is the most chilling story, and you guys areNew York Timesbest sellers, award-winning journalists. But in all your time in the journalism field, this issue, most important. And how this—what did you call it, Mr. Shellenberger, this complex? What did you call it?

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER:

Censorship industrial complex.

JIM JORDAN:

Totally. This web of censorship, big government, Big Tech, NGOs, all this web of censorship, that's what this committee is going to get to. And that's not right or left. This is just right or wrong. This is wrong. We know it's wrong, and it's about protecting the First Amendment.

JAMES JACOBY:
When you say that big government is colluding with tech companies like Twitter to censor people, what do you mean by censor? What does it actually mean?

JIM JORDAN:
Take down political speech. Take down speech that you—that governments label as misinformation. You step back and you think, that's not supposed to be how it works in America, but yet that is in fact what was going on. You have multiple examples of that. Take this down. Can you work on removing this one? What's happening? Are you limiting the visibility of this one? All from the government to a private company.

JAMES JACOBY:
Well, you say it—it's a private company. So doesn't the private company ultimately make the decision as to what they choose to promote or suppress or take down?

JIM JORDAN:
You can't have this censorship industrial complex and then get away with saying, "Oh, but by the way, it wasn't us doing it. It was the private company."

JAMES JACOBY:
Do you think that the government has a role in working with the tech companies to prevent foreign interference with elections?

JIM JORDAN:

What we're focused on primarily is the limitations on political speech. This idea that other people who had a different view on certain aspects of how the country dealt with the COVID pandemic and the vaccine issue, that they were censored. That's our big concern, is protecting the First Amendment. When you start having the government tell you what is misinformation, disinformation, or the scariest one of all, malinformation. Malinformation is, it's true statements, but we don't like the context. We don't like what people take from that, so we're going to censor that, too. That is really frightening.

JAMES JACOBY:
But again, though, on the specific issues, though, in terms of foreign disinformation, do you agree that's a threat?

JIM JORDAN:
Yeah, no one appreciates that. No one likes that. No one wants that happening. But the First Amendment's the First Amendment.

JAMES JACOBY:

Several former Twitter employees were called to testify, including Anika Collier Navaroli.

REP. ANNA PAULINA LUNA, (R) Florida:

I want to let you know that this is a violation of the First Amendment, and the federal government is colluding with social media companies to censor Americans. Mr. Chairman, I ask—

JAMES JACOBY:

Do you think that what you were engaged in at Twitter was censorship?

ANIKA COLLIER NAVAROLI:

No, I was—Censorship is done by the government, and I've never worked for a government entity. The American First Amendment is very clear on who it applies to, right? The very first words are, "Congress shall make no law," right? It is not about private companies. It is not about Twitter. It is not about Facebook. It is not about any of these private companies making decisions about speech, right? Companies are, have always been allowed to do these things. They've always been allowed to regulate their rules and make rules and decide what you can and can't say.

REP. NICK LANGWORTHY, (R) N.Y.:

Now, Mr. Roth, you were part of the secretive SIP-PES censorship team at Twitter, correct?

YOEL ROTH:

No, sir. I'm not sure what that refers to.

JAMES JACOBY:

Not surprisingly, Yoel Roth came under fire.

REP. LAUREN BOEBERT, (R) Colorado:

Mr. Roth, while at Twitter, how many meetings did you have with the FBI?

YOEL ROTH:

I couldn’t say for sure, but I would say it was—

LAUREN BOEBERT:

More than 10?

YOEL ROTH:

That’s a reasonable estimate.

LAUREN BOEBERT:

More than 20?

YOEL ROTH:

I couldn’t say for sure.

LAUREN BOEBERT:

More than 50?

YOEL ROTH:

That seems a bit high.

JAMES JACOBY:
In your experience, did the federal government use its power to coerce Twitter to make decisions about content moderation?

YOEL ROTH:

No. Do I know whether it was the federal government's intention to coerce the platform? No, I have no idea. But I know that in practice, there were no decisions that Twitter made that were the product of a demand from the U.S. government or from any other government to remove content or censor content or restrict content related to the election. Twitter made those decisions independently.

JAMES JACOBY:
If you step back from it, though, and you see the amount of interactions that there were between you and the government agencies, FBI and others, is there anything potentially problematic about how tight a relationship that was?

YOEL ROTH:
I think it would be a problem if the government were involved in the policing of speech. But it's not what happened in reality. And in fact, the Twitter Files show again and again that when we receive requests, we evaluate them against our rules. And if the conduct violates our policies, we enforce them. And if it doesn't, we don't. And if the reports came from the FBI, we evaluated them the same way that we would if they came from the DNC, the RNC, a member of Congress or an ordinary user.

JAMES JACOBY:
The FBI is a little bit different than even the DNC complaining about something. It's the FBI, right? When the FBI comes knocking, it's naive to think that that doesn't have some sort of an effect, right? The fact that they're sending a request might be coercive just by doing so.

YOEL ROTH:
I disagree. If you look at the Twitter Files, you see again and again that my team and I pushed back on the FBI, on DHS, on anyone who brought us something that wasn't true and wasn't valid.

JAMES JACOBY:

Jim Jordan’s investigation has also targeted former government officials.

You're the poster child for censorship.

NINA JANKOWICZ, Former head, Disinformation Governance Board:

Yeah, yeah. Even though I never had any intention or desire to censor anyone.

JAMES JACOBY:

Back in April 2022, Nina Jankowicz was appointed to lead a new board inside the Department of Homeland Security, part of a broader push by the Biden administration to respond to misinformation in the wake of the pandemic and lies about the 2020 election. It was called the Disinformation Governance Board.

NINA JANKOWICZ:
I mean, the name is pretty bad, right? I think it evokes a lot of authoritarian vibes to it. And I understand why people would shiver when they heard it. But the idea of the name wasn't that it would be governing all of disinformation in the country. It was that it would be governing the department's response to disinformation.

JAMES JACOBY:

When the new board was announced, Elon Musk quickly weighed in.

MUSK TWEET:

This is messed up.

JAMES JACOBY:
What was the board going to do and what was DHS going to do about disinformation?

NINA JANKOWICZ:

It's less sexy than it might seem. We never had any intention of censoring. But we, as any government agency does, look at social media to understand what is happening. And in some cases, with things relating to the security of the homeland—elections, infrastructure, borders, natural disasters—there might be narratives of concern. And what the department would then do, likely, although we never got to this point, we would likely put out good information. The problem was the department didn't communicate well at all about what the board was. And what was filled into that vacuum was a bunch of lies.

TUCKER CARLSON:

Nina Jankowicz, who’s like a total idiot, obviously—

MALE PODCAST HOST:

This woman is a clear Democrat-supporting authoritarian.

MALE REPORTER:

There are concerns from critics about this new executive director, Nina Jankowicz.

JAMES JACOBY:

As the controversy grew, Jankowicz herself came under attack.

NINA JANKOWICZ:

I want to be clear that it wasn't just criticism. This was an allegation that the board was going to be a minister of truth and that it would have the power to send, quote, "men with guns to the homes of Americans who expressed opinions that the government didn't like." That is what Tucker Carlson said about the board and about me.

TUCKER CARLSON:

Men with guns plan to, quote, “identify individuals who could be descending into violence.” Could be descending.

JAMES JACOBY:

When a conservative commentator on Twitter compared the disinformation board to Nazi Germany, Elon Musk weighed in.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Elon Musk says the idea that the feds will watch what we say and believe is one thing only: “discomforting.”

MUSK TWEET:

All’s well that’s Orwell.

JAMES JACOBY:
How did Elon Musk contribute to the controversy swirling around you and the governance board?

NINA JANKOWICZ:
Every time Elon Musk responded to any of the conspiracy theories about the board or about me, there was almost certainly a bump in the harassment and threats that I received. When Musk responds to something with his millions of followers, it by nature then kind of surfaces that tweet.

JAMES JACOBY:

The backlash put an end to the Disinformation Governance Board before it even got off the ground. But the threats continued.

NINA JANKOWICZ:
They really ran the gamut. A lot of people saying that I had been committed treason and should pay the price. People threatening my child, who at that point was unborn. [Laughs] I was a few weeks away from giving birth. My family and I were doxxed, so our address was released multiple times. I had a private security consultant looking at the dark web for me, and he advised me at that point that I probably shouldn't be doing things like going to the coffee shop alone or getting gas alone.

JAMES JACOBY:

Jim Jordan’s committee accused Jankowicz of leading an “un-American attempt to establish a de facto Ministry of Truth within the federal government.”

Do you think that there have been legitimate questions asked about where the line should be when it comes to the government's role in working on disinformation?

NINA JANKOWICZ:
I think those are reasonable questions that deserve to be discussed in a really nuanced and nonpartisan manner, and that is not what we have. Having had conversations with people like Rep. Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz, because they subpoenaed me and I had to go to a deposition, I don't believe that they think that the government is actually censoring people. I think that the intention of the campaign against disinformation researchers is to give the Republican Party more leeway in how it presents the truth. The idea is that they can certainly play fast and loose with the truth. And I think that benefits them, as we've seen with 2020, Jan. 6, etc., etc.

SEAN HANNITY:

Congressman Jordan, take a bow, sir, you helped get rid of the Ministry of Truth. Thank you for doing that.

JAMES JACOBY:
What do you have to say to the people that believe that this investigation, one, is creating a chilling effect that will enable people to spread lies about election integrity in 2024? And let me ask you—I think you're going to have to address it. And the fact of the matter is—

JIM JORDAN:

I am addressing it. I just can't believe you're asking the question.

JAMES JACOBY:
Why is that? Because it's—listen, the Jan. 6 committee, the report said you were a significant player in Trump's efforts to overturn the election results following his defeat. And according to the report, you participated in numerous post-election meetings in which senior White House officials—I mean, why is this laughable?

JIM JORDAN:
No, because you're saying—you're saying that us investigating the censorship of speech by Americans is going to have a chilling effect, and it's like you've got it backwards. They chilled speech. Big Tech, big government pressured them. Take down these tweets. Take down this material. That's the chilling impact on speech, because it doesn't get done. And now you're trying to say, like, Jim Jordan, who's investigating this, is somehow chilling speech? You've got to be kidding me.

MALE NEWSREADER:

When they censored truthful data—

JAMES JACOBY:

The claim that the government has been censoring Americans is now being fought out in the courts.

MALE NEWSREADER:

A federal appeals court has ruled that the Biden administration likely overstepped First Amendment protections.

JAMES JACOBY:

In one ongoing federal court case, newly revealed communications between the White House and social media companies have led to a ruling that the Biden administration likely violated the first Amendment in its efforts to curtail misinformation.

The issue may now be heading to the Supreme Court, but the targets of Musk’s Twitter Files say there are already far-reaching consequences.

YOEL ROTH:

Social media is a battlefield, and I think anybody who's going to war is going to try to skew the battlefield to their advantage. One way to do that is to make companies too scared to do what Twitter did for years. And I think every platform from now until the end of time is going to think about what it would mean to fact check one of Donald Trump's tweets. Perhaps we're past that point, but for every hearing, for every report, for every news cycle, platforms are going to hesitate just a little bit more before the next time they take some type of politically controversial action.

ANIKA COLLIER NAVAROLI:

All of this work and all of this effort that so many people went and put into attempting to defend our democracies and defend our information ecosystems is very much starting to fall apart.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Twitter’s blue bird logo is no more.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

—and it was replaced with a giant X.

JAMES JACOBY:

By summer 2023, Musk’s long-term plans for X were finally coming into focus. With the company losing money fast, he made good on his promise to appoint a new CEO.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

She is Linda Yaccarino, who’s just left a top position running ad sales at NBC Universal.

LINDA YACCARINO:

Elon focuses on product design, and I’m responsible for the rest, running the company.

JAMES JACOBY:

Musk and Yaccarino signaled an ambitious new direction for X, a so-called "everything app" for messaging, calls, social media posts, entertainment, payments and more.

LINDA YACCARINO:

I was joining the company to partner with Elon to transform Twitter into X, the everything app.

KARA SWISHER:

She's a very high-ranking ad executive, probably one of the top ones in the country. Maybe she will figure it out. Maybe they can make it into a big business. She thinks she can make it a good home and an effective home for advertisers. Of course, she knows, as someone who bought advertising, maybe it's not a good home for advertisers.

JAMES JACOBY:

Well, Musk isn't a guy who's failed all that many times. I mean, he's been wildly successful. He sends rockets into space. He's got an incredible car company.

KARA SWISHER:
Cars and rockets are not media.

JAMES JACOBY:
This is harder than rocket science?

KARA SWISHER:
It's not harder or less hard, it's just different. And just because you play basketball doesn't mean you're good at baseball. The problem with a lot of these tech people is because they think they're good at one thing, they're good at everything. And that's just not the case.

ELON MUSK:

OK, OK, let me see. Is this working? [Laughter] Well, let's just make sure this thing's working first.

REP. TONY GONZALES, (R) Texas:

I really appreciate Elon coming down and giving an unfiltered depiction of what’s happening on the border.

ELON MUSK:

This is not like a piece that’s being filmed and then subsequently edited and whatnot.

JAMES JACOBY:

Under Musk, X is becoming a home to what he calls "citizen journalism"—and a platform for some of the most divisive voices.

TUCKER CARLSON:

Hey, it’s Tucker Carlson. We're told there are no gatekeepers here. If that turns out to be false, we’ll leave.

JAMES JACOBY:

Tucker Carlson started a show on X after he was kicked off Fox News.

DONALD TRUMP:

We’ll get bigger ratings using this crazy forum that you’re using than probably the debate.

RUMMAN CHOWDHURY, Dir., machine learning ethics, Twitter, 2019-22:

Billionaires want to own media platforms. I've never seen a billionaire own a media platform that so obviously is using it as a personal platform. He has a megaphone for his perspectives. He has used it to maliciously attack people via the, quote, "Twitter Files." He has used it to spread actual misinformation. And I worry about what then is happening behind the scenes, and, importantly, what's going to happen in the next election, not just in the U.S., but also other countries around the world.

JAMES JACOBY:

On the world stage, it’s becoming clear that Musk’s rhetoric about free speech does not necessarily extend to other countries.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

The Turkish government asked Twitter to censor its opponents right before an election, and Elon Musk complied.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Tonight Elon Musk under fire after Twitter appears to have censored links to a BBC documentary that’s critical of the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

LINETTE LOPEZ:
You know, Elon has said that he does not believe in free speech as a concept that goes beyond borders, That each country has its own idea of free speech.

ELON MUSK:

The best we can do is really to hew close to the law in any given country.

LINETTE LOPEZ:

Which, if you don't want to get kicked out of certain nations, is certainly the business perspective to take. Elon desperately wants to get Tesla into India, so the fact that he has subjugated his desire for free speech in Modi's India does not shock me at all.

ELON MUSK:

I'm confident that Tesla will be in India and will do so as soon as humanly possible.

KARA SWISHER:

Someone very smart said to me, "This is a guy with other business interests around the world, especially SpaceX and Tesla and Starlink. He needs influence around the world with autocrats and governments." When he walks in a room as the head of Tesla, OK, just another—like, look, Ford walks in, it's the same thing; he's on the same level. But when he's also the owner of Twitter, he gets a little more attention, and it gives him political power.

MAURICE LEVY, Advertising executive:

You don’t need any introduction. You have been always proven right. Now there is—

ELON MUSK:

[Laughs] Not always. [Laughter]

MAURICE LEVY:

There are some people who believe that you are a genius. And there are some who will believe that you are evil.

ELON MUSK:

I am definitely not evil. [Laughs] So yeah, hopefully not evil. Aspirationally not evil. Um, so—yeah.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

SpaceX says all systems are go for its launch of the most powerful rocket ever into orbit.

JAMES JACOBY:

Almost a year since he bought Twitter, Elon Musk is more powerful than ever.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Elon Musk’s brain chip company is looking for volunteers for its first human trial.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Elon Musk starting his own artificial intelligence company.

SPACEX MISSION CONTROL:

Booster after-chamber pressure is nominal.

JAMES JACOBY:

He’s also more controversial than ever.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Elon Musk threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

—reports Elon Musk refused to provide Starlink access to the Ukrainian military.

WALTER ISAACSON:

Musk has an obsessive belief that there's only one overriding principle, and those are the laws of physics. If it's policy, if it's sentiment, if it's anything else, you can push back and ignore it.

MALE SPACEX COMMENTATOR:

The entire Starship stack continuing to rotate. We should have had separation by now. Obviously this is—does not appear to be a nominal situation.

WALTER ISAACSON:

He's willing to shoot off rockets and let them blow up. He's willing to fire engineers at Twitter
and see if it survives. And he feels that we've become a society filled with more referees than innovators, filled with more lawyers than doers.

FEMALE SPACEX COMMENTATOR:

Live view there of our control center at Starbase.

WALTER ISAACSON:

Musk has one rule that guides him, which is never be constrained by the rules.