Battle for the Bird

February 1, 2024
A blow-by-blow account of the struggle for Twitter. Jack Dorsey, writes Bloomberg tech reporter Wagner, was a reluctant capitalist when it came to his creation. First online in 2006, Twitter took years to grow to scale, and when Elon Musk bought it for $44 billion in 2022, it was still well behind Facebook, valued at a dozen times more, and Alphabet, Google's parent company, worth $1.5 trillion. "Influence, it turns out," Wagner writes understatedly, "does not always equate to value." Dorsey, too late, lamented that Twitter should have been a platform rather than a program, but ironically, one of the engines of its growth was Donald Trump, a master of the (albeit misspelled and ungrammatical) 140-word zinger. The story of Twitter, writes Wagner, "is one of deception, bad decisions, and misguided trust...of hubris and resentment and na�vet�," and a cluster of those bad decisions concerning Trump, who was for a long time cosseted before finally being unplugged for numerous violations of policy. Question one, in Dorsey's mind, was whether those standards impinged on free speech, on which he was a fundamentalist; when Musk stepped in, he applied some of the same fundamentalism, but mostly by reinstating provocative trolls like Alex Jones, who also "violated Twitter's policy against inciting people to violence," and Trump himself. Russian bots seem to have enjoyed free speech, too, for thousands of them scampered through Twitter, seeding disinformation and plugging Trump's 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. Musk's own fomenting of conspiracy theories and infantile outbursts and antics "meant that X's business got crushed." Twitter is no more, of course, while the X brand is tanking, even as Dorsey muses about creating "something to avoid that ever happening again." Solid business and tech journalism about how a public good became a nuisance in the hands of a reckless billionaire.

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Starred review from February 12, 2024
Bloomberg journalist Wagner debuts with a riveting account of how “hubris and resentment and naïveté” drove Elon Musk’s tumultuous 2022 takeover of Twitter. Musk’s many missteps are given their expected due, most notably his failure to rein in racist content on the platform, but it’s Wagner’s perceptive portrait of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey as an idealist stymied by the demands of capital that’s most revealing. Wagner describes how Dorsey had ambitions to transform Twitter into “the world’s global consciousness, a direct line into the way that people think and communicate and solve problems,” but grew disillusioned with the company after it went public. As a free speech absolutist, Dorsey resented having to curtail offensive tweets to appease advertisers and felt the board of directors’ obsession with profits overlooked Twitter’s value as a social good. Convinced that going private was the only way to escape these constraints, Dorsey, believing Musk shared his vision for the site, successfully persuaded the billionaire to make a bid for the company. The novelistic narrative captures the chaos of Musk’s first days as CEO—which were characterized by conflicting directives and widespread anxiety about impending layoffs—and the psychological insight into Dorsey provides a refreshing change of pace from the bevy of recent Musk-centric accounts. This is Barbarians at the Gate for the social media age. Agent: Pilar Queen, UTA.