Elon takes over Twitter

Twitter has a new CEO. And he'd like to see your code, please

Oct 28, 2022

“Elon Musk transforming into a blue bird, digital art” / DiffusionBee / I realize he doesn’t look like a bird here but that was the prompt!

Elon Musk took over Twitter on Thursday like a military general who had assumed power by force, purging the company’s ruling regime and replacing it with the singular effect of his personality. “The bird is freed,” he tweeted a few hours after his $44 billion purchase closed, and he had become the CEO of a newly private company. And more than 2 million people clicked the “like” button, eager to see what the world’s richest man might have in store for them.

From the outside, and especially to his supporters, it looked as if Twitter finally had the strong leader it has lacked for so long. His Tesla is a phenomenon that helped usher electric vehicles into the mainstream, and his SpaceX has inspired countless imaginations with its reusable rockets. Meanwhile, his growing embrace of right-wing politics has attracted a fan base eager to see a social network that felt more like the free-for-all of Twitter’s past.

From the inside, though, Musk’s arrival has been experienced primarily as chaos. For more than a day now, employees have gone without any official, company-wide communication from their new leaders. An all-hands meeting planned for Thursday afternoon was canceled abruptly a few hours after it was announced, presumably since Musk’s purge had begun and the company’s remaining leaders no longer had clear answers to give.

On Friday, though, some engineers began to receive requests from Musk’s intermediaries. He would like to see the most recent software code that they had written, the engineers were told. And he would like them to print the code out and show it to him.

According to four current employees, engineers spent Friday afternoon at Twitter dutifully printing out their code in anticipation of meetings with Musk and some of his senior engineers from Tesla. Other engineers were told to prepare for “code pairing” with Musk, in which they would sit with him and review code together.

Just after noon, an executive assistant asked engineers to begin preparing code to show to Musk. “Please print out 50 pages of code you’ve done in the last 30 days (if you haven’t submitted code in the past 30 days, then you can go back up to 60 days),” the assistant wrote in a Slack message obtained by Platformer. “Please be ready to show on your computer as well.”

“Recency of code is important but also use a code that shows complexity of our code,” she added.

By mid-afternoon, printouts were seen everywhere at Twitter headquarters, I’m told.

In mid-afternoon, the instruction changed again. A notice went out to employees ordering them to cease printing out their code, for reasons that were not immediately clear.

“UPDATE: Stop printing,” read another bolded notice obtained by Platformer. “Please be ready to show your recent code (within last 30-60 preferably) on your computer. If you have already printed, please shred in the bins on SF-Tenth. Thank you!”

So far I’ve been unable to speak with anyone who actually underwent one of these pop quizzes with Musk; one source said the meetings keep getting delayed. But employees are exasperated at the lack of communication from their leaders, and have spent the day trying to piece together information from news reports, Slack messages, and whispered gossip.

“Director-levels have no idea what’s going on,” one employee told me.

***

One thing Musk did communicate publicly about was his intentions around content moderation.

“Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints,” Musk tweeted around 11AM. “No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.”

Twitter already has a trust and safety council, as many were quick to note. But that council would not be asked to weigh in on account reinstatements or individual posts. What Musk suggested here bears obvious resemblance to Meta’s Oversight Board, and within a few hours the board had emailed me to say “We would welcome the opportunity to discuss Twitter's plans in more detail with the company.”

I found all this at least somewhat heartening, since it suggested to me that Musk is indeed beginning to understand that there is market demand for content moderation, and that Twitter will not survive without it. (A point Nilay Patel argued forcefully, and beautifully, today in The Verge.)

It also suggests delays in action, though, and those will be both good and bad. It will be good, to the extent it stops Musk from allowing all the worst actors back onto the platform, like the Joker freeing all the inmates from Arkham Asylum to once again run wild on the streets of Gotham City. And it will be bad, in that it will prevent the company from addressing spikes in hate speech, election interference, and other forms of abuse.

One research group found that usage of the N-word on Twitter had spiked nearly 500 percent since Musk closed the deal, the Washington Post reported, in a grim sign that Musk’s arrival had encouraged racists to test the platform’s limits. By the day’s end, GM temporarily suspended advertising on the platform, saying it wanted “to understand the direction of the platform under their new ownership.” (It’s worth noting that GM and Tesla are rivals, though.)

Meanwhile, the European Union warned Musk that he better not allow hate speech to take over the platform. “The bird will fly by our rules,” said — somehow — Thierry Breton, the European commissioner for the internal market, in the sort of quote I find only slightly more believable than the idea that Twitter engineers spent all day printing out the company’s code base only to be told that wait, actually, could they please go shred it.

***

They say that truth is the first casualty of war, and if Musk’s takeover wasn’t actually a military operation, it did inspire the kind of hoaxes and misinformation that are commonly associated with them.

Early in the day multiple outlets reported, falsely, that Kanye West’s Twitter account had been restored after his recent antisemitic outbursts. In fact, though, his account had never been suspended.

Much funnier, though also creepy and bad, is the fact that at least two guys walked out of Twitter headquarters today with cardboard boxes claiming falsely to have been fired. One of them gave his name as Rahul Ligma, as in “ligma balls,” and it was up to The Verge’s Alex Heath to determine that, in fact, no such Ligma works for the company.

Ligma and his friend, “Daniel Johnson,” managed to fool several news outlets before the jig was up, though. All of this seemed to delight Musk, who later tweeted — and yes this is real — “Ligma Johnson had it coming 🍆 💦.”

It has truly been a terrible couple of weeks for the credibility of the tech press; here’s hoping we can get through the year without Platformer making a Hugh Jass of itself.

***

If Rahul Ligma was one icon of Musk’s Twitter takeover, Parag Agrawal surely was the other. Handed the job by the feckless Jack Dorsey less than a year ago, Agrawal at first appeared to be a victim of circumstance: too early in his job to have gotten much momentum, his tenure appeared immediately snakebitten by the arrival of Musk — first as an investor, then a board member, then a somewhat hostile acquirer, then a scoundrel trying to weasel his way out of the deal.

Whatever Agrawal might have thought about all that, he kept it to himself, staying firm and quiet as Twitter’s excellent lawyers ultimately forced Musk to overpay for the company by tens of billions of dollars. Agrawal’s reward: about $50 million, Bloomberg reported, higher than the amounts I’ve seen reported previously and not bad for 11 months’ work.

Fellow purge victims Ned Segal (CFO) and Vijaya Gadde (chief legal officer) seem to have made out OK for themselves too, making $37 million and $17 million respectively, according to Bloomberg. Twitter will almost certainly be worse off without them, and they deserved better than their unceremonious dismissals. But Musk had long ago made clear that he wanted new leadership at the company, and I can’t imagine either of them were all that surprised.

***

What else?

Musk promised to swiftly investigate the alleged shadowbanning of an account named Catturd. Finance writers reflected on the long and ignominious history of Twitter as a public company. Twitter discontinued ticketed Spaces. And somehow, amid all this, the company shipped something: the ability to buy and sell NFTs through tweets.

Finally, after the Musk deal closed, Kevin and I re-recorded the first half of Hard Fork on Thursday night — our first emergency pod. If you haven’t subscribed yet, this one’s a good place to dive in.