Elon Musk and Twitter's Year
The world's best biographer is Walter Isaacson, the man behind Steve Jobs. He's just published another monumental work: Musk. Isaacson says hardly anyone gets a biography written about them while still young and at the peak of their powers, the way Musk has — after all, when Jobs first came to him, it was because his health was already failing and he wanted to leave a record for history. But it's a good thing things played out this way: Musk's two-plus decades of remarkable achievements — especially the details behind every decision at Twitter (now rebranded X) that the media completely failed to understand last year — have now been documented, making this a rare case of a business strategy being laid bare just one year after the fact.
The world's richest person changes hands often, and giants like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are all bigger than Twitter. So what is it about Musk and Twitter that kept the media obsessively covering them for over a year? Let's start with Twitter.
Twitter's predecessor, Odeo, was a podcast platform, but it quickly ran into trouble once Apple launched iTunes. Just before the money ran out, the company ran something like an internal hackathon-style startup competition, splitting into small teams to fire off ideas in every direction — and one of those teams produced the product that became Twitter, giving the company a new lease on life. The pivot from audio to a text platform became what we now know as Twitter, and developer Jack Dorsey became its founder. It's a story that shows just how flexible and tenacious Silicon Valley tech companies can be.
Twitter's breakout moment came at South by Southwest (SXSW) in 2007, a hugely important event in America's tech and arts scene. At the festival, people discovered that checking Twitter let them know what everyone else was up to across the sprawling venue, so America's top early adopters carried the Twitter habit they'd picked up there back into their own social circles. As an aside, this festival is remarkable for having launched two unicorn companies — the other being Airbnb, which took off the same way: attendees needed a place to stay, tried it once, got hooked, and carried the product back to their communities once the event ended. Both went on to massive success.
A Single Tweet Exposed a US Military Kill Operation
Twitter is different from typical social platforms because Jack Dorsey and company drew heavily on SMS text messages when designing it — including the 140-character limit. Everyone already knew how to send a text message, so no one needed to be taught, and the platform spread rapidly and broadly as a result. Twitter's core insight still holds up today: it lets you express a thought instantly, or see what people around the world are thinking in real time. Take the U.S. military's raid on Osama bin Laden, "Operation Neptune Spear" — the public first learned about it because someone in Pakistan heard the sound of U.S. military helicopters and casually tweeted about it. And this was supposed to be one of the most secret operations in the world!
Twitter quickly became one of the world's top social media platforms, but its path to commercial success was rocky. For one, leadership turned over constantly — Jack Dorsey left the company at one point, in a situation not unlike Jobs's exile from Apple, before being brought back later. The operation was also loosely run: in the early years, the system crashed so often that logging in would greet you with a picture of a whale or a little blue bird, because the site had crashed yet again. For years, its business performance never quite matched its user engagement.
So why did Musk want to buy it? The book gives us two factors. First, Musk is someone who loves a challenge, and in early 2022 everything was going his way, so he couldn't resist buying Twitter to remake it. Second, one of his children is deeply left-leaning and has a strained relationship with him, which made Musk realize just how far to the left America's public discourse had tilted — and he wanted to change that.
The Shock of an 80% Layoff — Musk's Five-Step Method
After taking over, Musk did what he does in every industry he enters: he caused a massive shock. The one that hit the tech world hardest was the mass layoff — he cut a staggering 80% of the workforce, a figure so extreme that anyone who heard it was stunned, and it became the biggest talking point in tech media all last year. Most people assumed the cuts were made with no method at all, but he actually followed five steps — what's now called the "Musk algorithm": 1) question every requirement; 2) delete unnecessary parts; 3) simplify and optimize; 4) accelerate the process; 5) automate. These steps let Twitter keep running with a fraction of its former headcount. But between the mass layoffs and Musk's habit of picking fights on Twitter itself, advertisers were genuinely spooked for a while, and last year Twitter looked like it was drowning in bad news.
But users weren't scared off — if anything, plenty of people seemed to enjoy watching Musk argue on Twitter even more, and monthly active users actually hit a new high. To give one example, Twitter is now Japan's third-largest social media platform, trailing only video platform YouTube and LINE. It also leads in a number of Southeast Asian countries, and in Taiwan, Twitter's monthly active user count is comparable to TikTok's (抖音) — nowhere near as small as people tend to assume.
With such a large and important user base, Twitter can't please everyone: some think it moderates too much, others think it leans too far left or too far right, and plenty of these people have gone off to build their own platforms. But the independent services built to attack Twitter's specific weaknesses have mostly retreated after a rough stretch. The biggest threat was Meta's Threads, and even that already seems to have cooled off — further proof that Twitter's position was built up over time, and nothing can go head-to-head with it.
Musk's past ventures, like SpaceX and Tesla, have followed the same arc: they look like they're plunging straight into hell at first, only to pull up later. Right now, it looks like Twitter has survived its layoff gamble and is pushing into new territory across the board. Twitter is applying for payment licenses everywhere, and if it manages to unify payments globally, Musk's vision is to build something as all-encompassing as WeChat (微信). Even if that doesn't fully pan out, just the first phase — a global creator platform — would already carry serious weight, and it should have a major impact on YouTube, currently the world's largest creator platform. After finishing the book and comparing it against Twitter's actual trajectory this past year, you really do have to marvel: the world does seem to produce the occasional chosen one.