Extremely Hardcore

February 5, 2024
Shafted employees, bad engineering, annoying marketing ploys, precarious financial performance, and tons of hate speech are the fruits of Elon Musk’s 2022 takeover of Twitter—now X—according to this acid-etched debut exposé. Platformer editor Schiffer tags Musk with much error, including loading the company with burdensome debt; brusquely firing thousands of workers without notice and stiffing many on severance pay; driving away advertisers with free-speech zealotry that threatened to place their ads beside unsavory content; presiding over declines in usership and revenue that brought the company close to bankruptcy; boasting of his free speech commitments while bowing to foreign governments’ demands to censor posts; and opening up the platform to bigoted content (Schiffer cites statistics indicating that appearances of the n-word tripled on Musk’s watch and homophobic slurs increased 58%). The portrait of Musk that emerges is unremittingly negative, depicting him as cold, cruel, and narcissistic. Musk’s associates also come in for opprobrium: Schiffer accuses journalist Matt Taibbi of misrepresentations in his reporting on the “Twitter Files” (internal company documents Musk gave to sympathetic reporters, Taibbi among them, after his takeover, in the hope of proving Twitter’s liberal bias) and of doxxing a blameless Twitter employee in connection with the Hunter Biden laptop story. Schiffer’s prose is savvy, punchy, and tart in narrating the platform’s “collapse into disinformation and chaos.” This will furnish Musk’s many detractors with savory red meat.

February 1, 2024
An egomaniac takes charge. Drawing on interviews with more than 60 employees, internal documents, court filings, and congressional testimony, journalist Schiffer, managing editor of the investigative tech newsletter Platformer, makes her book debut with a sharp, gossipy account of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter. Not a biography of the volatile entrepreneur, Schiffer's investigation looks at the effect of Musk's takeover on the social media site itself and on the company's thousands of employees. As the author recounts, Musk wavered in his decision to buy Twitter, beginning in January 2022, when he began accumulating shares; a few months later, he joined the board and made an offer to purchase the business. Suits and countersuits slowed the process, which finally ended in the fall of that year, when Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. Chaos ensued. Intent on cutting costs, Musk instituted massive layoffs, including engineers, content managers, and root password holders. "Without the root password," Schiffer notes incredulously, "the company didn't have administrative access to its own machines." Musk insisted that his demands be fulfilled immediately by a diminished number of full-time and contract employees. His product ideas "weren't bad," Schiffer writes, "but they were all over the map. In addition to relaunching Twitter Blue, he was exploring a payments platform, long-form video, long-form tweets, and encrypted direct messages." Layoffs weakened morale, and advertising revenue dropped, resulting from racist, antisemitic, and homophobic posts. Schiffer cites tweets from disgruntled employees: "Everything happening on Twitter now," one remarked, "is a lot easier to understand if you've ever had a younger sibling that invented a game and added a new rule every time they started losing." "Since he was a child," Schiffer writes, "Musk had harbored a belief that he was destined to have a great impact on the world." As this account shows, that impact could be disastrous. A well-researched report on Twitter's calamitous year.

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