Unfiltered Millennial

The biggest story of the 2022 business world that leaked into 2023 was the purchase of Twitter, now known as X, by Tesla and SpaceX owner Elon Musk. His purchase of the struggling social media company attracted the attention of various different audiences.

In October 2022, referencing his purchase of Twitter, he said that he was buying the company to “help humanity, whom I love.” His motive was to return Twitter to the goal of being the global town hall that he felt it should be.

The company, though, quickly became something else altogether. It became a company of chaos, from changing its name to X to launching (twice) a subscription service allowing anyone to become “verified” for only $8 a month. It bounced from crisis event to crisis event while the Chief Twit caused most of the crises, either directly or indirectly.

The specific relevant content for this request, if necessary, delimited with characters: These stories and much more were highlighted in Ben Mezrich’s new book Breaking Twitter. The book highlights the first year of the Elon Musk owning Twitter experiment through the lenses of not the owner, but instead those that were working for him and trying to make his new project work.

The expose takes an interesting look at a company that was definitely on the verge of failing and how Elon Musk infused it with cash just to set it on fire again. It tells the story of a man looking to be validated in some way, and because he was not receiving that validation lashed out at advertisers, employees and even the people he was trying to protect Twitter for.

One story that stood out to me through the entirety of the book was how Elon reacted to the reach that his tweet about the 2023 Super Bowl had versus Joe Biden’s tweet. Elon’s reach was north of a million, but the President of the United States reach was over 23 million. How did the multibillionaire react to not having the listening base he thought he had in his free global public sphere, his digital town hall? He changed the rules of the town hall.

That’s right. The free speech absolutist felt that his speech on the free platform should be prioritized over the leader of the free world because of two tweets about a football game. He demanded the attention of engineers to not fix the various issues with the social media platform, but instead to promote his feed to everyone.

Mezrich’s telling of this story was an excellent narrative not because he was rehashing the facts of the story. Instead he was showing the direct reaction of employees of Twitter seeing what was happening. Mezrich’s storytelling from the perspective of those most impacted by Musk’s buying of the company, the Tweeps, also known as the employees of Twitter.

Mezrich’s book shows us not only did Elon Musk start breaking a brand synonymous with a blue bird logo that was worth billions in brand recognition by many estimates, he was breaking down himself. He was a man looking for validation and buying a company where he could get that directly from the people seemed like an obvious solution.

Instead, he was learning through direct polls, audience reactions to his appearances, and even from his own employees that he was alone in the minority in most of those opinions, and that affected him and his governance of Twitter greatly.

Overall, Mezrich’s book is an entertaining but informative read about what happened over the first twelveish months of Elon’s takeover of X/Twitter. Where the company goes from here is far from seen, but if the first year as told by Mezrich is any metric, the company has a long arduous road ahead before it can become the digital town hall that many, Elon Musk included, wish it to be.