Twitter Founders on Musk’s Tumultuous Takeover | The Circuit

it's one of the most influential and controversial social networks today but for years struggled to moderate content and make money then one of the world's richest men stepped in to some he was the knight in shining armor to others he was Twitter's worst nightmare official Elon Musk has agreed to buy Twitter for 44 billion dollars Twitter down 11 after musk filed to walk away from that merger agreement there's two kind of dramatic outcomes that could come from this legal battle Twitter is now officially owned by Elon Musk and the news is still sinking in oh welcome okay to our customer support At Your Service we've got the expenses reasonably under control so the company's not like in the fast lane of bankruptcy anymore and releasing features uh faster than Twitter's history at the same time Elon Musk is going to transition away from his CEO role into an executive chairman role these days everyone has an opinion on Twitter so I wanted to get some perspective from its original Architects and these people no Twitter better than almost anyone obviously it's a huge story that people have been fascinated with for a year now so right well years well here we go should my feet be off the ground like a little kid let's just start with like tell me who you are and your what was your role should we do each other instead yes so this is Jason at Goldman on Twitter Jason worked with me on Blogger we got acquired I left Google Jason took over blogger but then we did Twitter he's like I'm in you guys have been friends for a really long time indeed yes and so Evan Williams uh was uh the Creator and founder of blogger and then the doc crash happened um and EV kept it alive essentially through force of will yeah started Odo and uh then Twitter was spun out and he eventually became CEO of Twitter and was on the board so there's been a lot of changing of the guards at Twitter when Elon burst onto the scene were you both just like what yeah it was surprising I mean I'm trying to remember the first bursting on or if I was even aware of it were you the idea that he was going to buy the company to me initially saying like oh he's not going to be really serious about this it's going to be uh like the way you sort of you know put in a reservation on like a fancy sports car there have been a couple moments where I'm like oh I started this thing with some other people a long time ago in this little office and then the world's richest man bought it right and it's this big news story like how did how did that happen that's weird was there any part of you that was like oh this is interesting maybe it's a little exciting yes I like interesting things to happen right I'm not a fan of things staying the way they are I mean that's why we do Tech that's why we start new things Twitter had been getting better and better actually the trajectory of improvements in the year or two uh prior to Elon but then I was like Elon my holy holy moly he does crazy things this will be interesting and fun we'll see what happens yeah we may differ on this point yeah I mean I I was just concerned because like everything he was talking about that he wanted to do with the product seemed pretty lightly considered we gotta defeat all the Bots and you know we there's all the stuff about like the culture wars but it became clear over time no that is his primary interest in owning the platform is the kind of push on these particular cultural uh issues and his own personal use of the product he wants to make better so how do you feel about what he's done so far I don't think he's dialed it in quite right yet well it's gone pretty poorly I mean I'm just objectively speaking the moves fast sort of Mythos is blighed by that most of the things that have been pushed out the door like Twitter blue or view counts make sure you amplify my tweets so that everyone sees them uh which is again if you own the product you can do that it's just a curious way to product manage a global platform for years Twitter was criticized for not innovating fast enough not making enough money struggling to get users did something have to happen my main feedback that I recall giving on board is we need to do more things more Innovation more bigger Bolder bets that's much easier said than done a lot of that effort though was going towards making the platform more safe and dealing with a lot of things have been overlooked for a long period of time including you know harassment abuse like manipulation by non-state actors you're talking about real problems that they had to clean up and deal with um so I I respect the fact that they spent a lot of time on that as opposed to shipping new features and given what we know now about how 2022 played out economically something probably would have happened right you know it's unlikely that Twitter would have just sailed through without massive layoffs without some sort of activist interest in the company Twitter was in a vulnerable state I just don't think it needed to be uh quite this silly is there something about his hardcore approach that's shaking the valley up well I think the fact that interest rates are going up and there's the greatest economic downturn for the industry since 2000 has more to do with why the industry has choking up um and I don't think that Facebook and Google are doing massive layoffs because they saw that Elon could get people to sleep on the floor there is a particularly among like the VC world this hunger for this era of austerity which is like employees with their free kombucha and all of their lattes and all this stuff like that everyone wants these goddamn lattes they're running us out of business can't sell enough ads for this kombucha on tap and and like now that air is over and you know people are gonna have to buckle down the tables have turned the austerity of Silicon Valley begins Jack Dorsey who co-founded Twitter with you said Twitter is the closest thing we have to a global Consciousness solving for the problem of Twitter being a company Elon is the singular solution I trust this is one of the worst age tweets of all time like I mean like this is this is honestly one of the worst tweets that's ever been put on the platform and there's a lot of them Jack has been very consistent on this from the beginning is that he really was interested in Twitter as a protocol like a public good that could be used uh in the same way that Civic infrastructure exists the problem was with Twitter is that we were inherently not building a public good we were building a for-profit Enterprise I had debates when I was running the company with Jack and other people in the company about whether Twitter could or should be that and I think Jack agrees at this point that once it was we took Venture Capital it couldn't be that what I think is interesting and exciting is that it's opened up a space for potentially other platforms or other protocols to emerge and people may pay attention to them because Twitter maybe has less of a gravitational force for everybody's attention there are a lot of folks out there who are angry at Jack like I think some folks feel like Jack's fed Twitter to the elong wolves do you feel that at all or I I do uh like the I mean if you look at the timeline of how the deal was put together it's pretty clear that Jack was instrumental I'm not mad at Jack I think he made a mistake I mean he cares so deeply and he did the decision he thought was correct I'm guessing it's not going the way he was hoping in fact Dorsey admits it it all went South so let's take the other part of the Tweet what is Twitter is Twitter the global town square is it the global Consciousness in your view oh gosh no we have a global Consciousness it's not Twitter I think that's not right it's conceptually sort of like oh let's connect all the people in the world and have a communication mechanism even at Google with the best technologist in the world people who are building the bleeding edge of the internet in early 2000s those people including the founders fundamentally did not understand that the web was a platform for self-expression yeah so this is an old version of Larry Bird um in which she had like Larry the Bird if you realize the bird was named Larry the bird's name Larry yeah 2007. you guys get to South by Southwest are you is this like what are you feeling it's just like oh my God we just created this and we're gonna change the world yes there was a time in which having a cell phone was not a sufficient condition to know what your friends were doing the memory lane thing is so interesting because there's so much history that's intertwined with world history I mean could you even pick like if what fave tweets of all time plane landing in the Hudson Lane in Hudson's is a good one plane landing in the Hudson broke on Twitter and that was what fave celebrity onboarding moments I got invited on Oprah hi it's Friday live and I'm on Twitter for the first time sitting next to me is Evan Williams the co-founder of Twitter can you believe all this tweedly D stuff going on the plan was I would talk about Twitter she asked me a couple questions and she'd send her first tweet on air and then she hit the key with the yellow tape on it which doesn't sound situate it didn't send the Tweet the Tweet went away yeah and uh then they kept the commercial and so when they're at commercial I typed in her tweet you impersonated Oprah is basically what we're learning yeah another memorable one was the Dalai Lama who supposedly he wanted to be on Twitter and it was super awkward he's delightful obviously but it felt like I was there to sell him on Twitter and and I said oh so we're gonna you know get you on he's like I don't need that but I was told that's why worry I thought this was all sold through already this was pre-iphone I think yeah and so we got his account all set up so we just gave him the Blackberry and then he used this account or with one of his people used this account for years but my wife and I paid the bill the Blackberry so we were paying Dalai Lama's cell phone bill for a very long time do you know how like the shortcut to Nirvana that you get by virtue of having the Dalai Lama on your friends and family plan has to be has to be amazing this was a way of using the web as this portal into other people's experiences and other people's lives well this is the hardest question right like what makes it amazing also makes it a cesspool yeah and how do you keep the best without the worst right there is a view that the problem with centralized platforms or for-profit platforms is they they take all the money that all the people create but Twitter in its history has never made money like there's been profitable years but overall there's no money I mean I've made money I mean thank you but um in to some extent platforms once they reach a certain scale do kind of work like governments you have to have rules and you have to enforce rules I believe or else you have Anarchy and in some sense regulation has been trying to catch up so you were the white house chief digital officer do you think Twitter should be regulated oh definitely the type of Regulation I think is almost inarguable that anyone ought support is just greater transparency on how these things work there is this naive perception similar to the money making thing which is that these companies will do anything to twist the knobs to squeeze a few more dollars the reality is that no one running these companies actually understands what's going on that well I mean like these are we're talking about stochastic systems that are amplifying content according to a set of rules that some human wrote but the output of those rules is unpredictable increasingly some human didn't write the rule yeah exactly exactly and so you don't even know you don't even know what people are seeing or why why we including the people who built these systems can't confidently say they understand the effect of what they've built people outside have no idea the complexity and the thoughtfulness that goes into these decisions about what can stay on it reminds me of different metaphors you're like you're like hosting a party yeah yeah and like someone's ruining the vibe yeah if you want to have a good party in a good environment you need to make it comfortable and safe for everybody but you you try to do that for the whole world and then it gets very hard and it's very very nuanced and I believe you want to host a good party not just say like do whatever you want on the streets we just paved the streets and that's all we do how do you feel right now looking at something that you created kind of going through this I'm very Zen but I I was sad when the purchase actually went through I was like oh I no longer own any Twitter and I really felt for the people who were there who when you know had a lot of turmoil and lots of really great people but maybe we just had the wrong idea with Twitter now it's time to move on to some other idea some other ideas that musk has moved on to a tick tock inspired for you timeline a new color-coded verification system he's gotten rid of Legacy check marks and of course Twitter Inc the company doesn't even exist anymore it's now called x-corp even some Twitter employees still on the inside admit it's a work in progress as those now on the outside continue to process what it was like being in the eye of the storm so give me some snapshots over the course of the Deal or No Deal roller coaster what was happening inside the company it felt like the company was kind of uh Frozen uh you know it was not the most productive uh six months with the company even though the company feels or felt internally like there wasn't a lot going on the rest of the world was buzzing so I would head into headquarters and my manager was saying um be careful because there were people out there that are wearing body cams it was as if everybody just wanted a piece of the pie I think we didn't really know if it was really ever going to really happen until the last minute yeah it was just such a roller coaster and it felt like a bad Netflix series but a lot of it unfolded on Twitter too like a lot of Twitter's culture is using products the deal happens Elon Musk owns Twitter were any of you inside the company the day he walked in with the sink I wish I had oh my God I wish I I was Manu you are we were the resident cartoonist you gave your new boss a cartoon that was kind of making fun of him I picked one that would not be uh perceived as boot licking not being too kind but I didn't want one that was so critical that would she would find me on the spot it was a very twittery um you know response from you you break it you buy it um explain it because he was damaging the company in many ways like the stock was going up and down and it was just chaos so I thought you know if you you break the company in a way like the culture even from the outside so now you have to buy it what kind of communications did you have with Elon himself or his team what were they telling you to do there were these Lifeboat projects where Elon would just you know in a random meeting say an idea and all of a sudden that was one of the directives um top Prime directives for the company to work on yeah that explains why I was reviewing so much documentation from teams and projects I've literally never heard of until that day I think it's a very common um toxic management technique to keep people in very tight deadlines so they never have time to think at some point I made a very simple tool to help people save some of their documents things that would be useful for future employment and then I was fired one hour later I mean I was in meeting I was in a meeting for some high priority Elon will have to be done by yesterday so this project and I was just disconnected from the meeting we all received an email saying that the next morning you would receive one of two emails one that would either go to your personal email telling you that you're no longer with the company or to your work email saying that you know you're still at the company for a lot of us it would be our last day at Twitter um and for me it was people just were putting the salute Emoji into uh one of the company-wide slack channels and yeah it was sort of amazing to watch that all all sort of happening at once now this is like four days before the election and Helen said you were working on Election misinformation I I was I had so many windows open that day I need to monitor like midterm elections trying to connect with different teams and I checked the VPN VPN is logged out and that's how I found out that I had lost access and was no longer a part of the company and I know I worked remotely but I think that was truly one of the times where I felt the most alone Sean you lasted longer than anyone yeah and then you decided to resign I'm not the kind of person to have an illusion about company where you find my like soul mates or like you know devote like I guess I don't identify my core being with the company the way like layoffs were done there was like no like like Grace to it like two weeks later he sent an email uh basically like you know on ultimatum to Twitter employees like you have two options one you stay at Twitter 2.0 and it were extremely hardcore two get some servants and like get lost and I was like this is my exit ticket turn down the hardcore approach I'm not very hardcore how many people does it actually take to keep Twitter up and running at some point tour is a companion everyone was making fun of because Twitter went down all the time being aware but then Twitter did a lot of good job uh making things stable and there was like a lot of like Innovative Technologies like Twitter um like invented it came up with and I think it's a testament to the existing Engineers who who wrote very robust systems you know some things can probably get done faster because there's sort of less management bureaucracy and layers and things like that I had a former co-worker at Google who said something like their their product shipment strategy is constipated so does that make Elon Musk like a big laxative or something pound Square would be held to a jewel I agree in on the internet and in the world and uh there's nothing quite like it there's these other platforms and you can go there but I think having a single space where you know you can tweet it you're a congress person and you know there's there's a good chance they'll see it and there's a chance they'll reply and things like that that's not happening on Facebook that's not happening on Instagram that's not happening on Tick Tock I think it is important that there be some some sort of Public Square on the internet does Twitter survive this well we tried to kill the product a lot I mean we we I mean it didn't work very well for a while when we were working there so I mean there seems to be anti-fragile but I it'll survive I mean things things that big don't die Yahoo is still a company Myspace is still a thing so you're preparing Twitter to Yahoo yeah I think that's fine I mean maybe it's thriving but reputationally it's very different does the brand recover I think that's hard I think brand recovery is much harder and now the brand is very linked to Elon should it be a company yeah should the internet be a company no and guess what anyone can make a new Twitter or a better Twitter or like it's just a whole new paradigm on the internet and lots of people are trying right now and that's really cool I sure I assure your optimism which is rare for me uh but like you know because you know we're in like a really bad market right now and that's when the coolest stuff has always happened I mean we met up in the the post dot crash era right um and we were like in a detective's office on Market Street like you know it was like there was no one was building companies in San Francisco the other thing that drives me possibilities is is platform Evolution and there hasn't been one in a long time in Tech the last platform Evolution was the mobile Revolution and the cloud computing Revolution and it's been a for in terms of tech just a very long time since those and you know it's a long time by how thirsty the industry is to believe in any anything else like like please let it be web3 please let it be the VR goggles there's got to be some new land out there um and now like everyone believes it's going to be Ai and in that one at least as opposed to the other two looks like it might be something like you can do stuff with it which is and it's getting better faster which is a good Hallmark of Technology what about Elon musk's brand does that recover yeah I think he's brilliant but no one's brilliant everything this is one of in my view silicon Valley's fundamental sins is is the sin of Genius where you believe that someone's made a ton of money must be smart I think the idea of social media is probably the thing I'm questioning the most right now yeah for a minute we thought oh the best would be a food we like got media from our friends Tick Tock and some other places are showing the media from your friends is probably not as good as the media from some super talented you know person who's you've never met before and I actually think there's tons of interesting things now if we think about how do we use the internet to help people be more social without consuming or creating media so maybe the future of social media is the separation of social and media really interesting what are the chances that Elon does pull this off what are the chances he creates a Twitter that's a better version yeah I don't know how comfortable Elon is with losing billions of dollars maybe is fine maybe he can get to break even and then just play with it if a hundred million people in the world share the most interesting idea or thought and the computers could algorithmically give you the most interesting slice of that that's a hell of a media service but I also think generally the new thing does not come from the old thing yeah tweets I have a weird relationship with Twitter we all do everyone in the world I feel like this is maybe this will give you some closure any advice from old Twitter to new Twitter some of the stuff that's trying to come along to replace Twitter is like this is going to be a serious place for serious conversations by serious people and I don't think that's what attracts a global audience I don't think that's what succeeds ultimately it's got to be delightful I love that point Twitter was fundamentally founded on humor yeah it was a bunch of people who like joking around and they created a new way to joke so what about what about Twitter to my advice for entrepreneurs just generally is never to underestimate the role that luck plays in your life we like in the industry to ascribe success to like some flash of Brilliance that people have and those things do happen but so much of the execution risk comes down to being lucky and like being in the right place at the right time at the right cycle of the platform Evolution and we're entering a somewhat exciting phase in which everything is kind of in Ruins and smoldering and that's should produce something good right here's to being in the right place at the right time yeah maybe getting used to a new vibe right get lucky new Vibe should we gaze off into the distance nearby [Music]

Channel: Bloomberg Originals

Views: 94,141

Keywords: News, bloomberg, quicktake, business, bloomberg quicktake, quicktake originals, documentary, mini documentary, mini doc, doc, us news, world news, finance, twitter, twitter takeover, twitter founders, elon musk, elon musk twitter, twitter documentary, Evan Williams, jason goldman

Id: SKia5QUiGkE

Length: 24min 2sec (1442 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 09 2023