Elon Musk Twitter Quotes

Around 2010, Peter Thiel, the PayPal cofounder and early Facebook investor, began promoting the idea that the technology industry had let people down. “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” became the tagline of his venture capital firm Founders Fund. In an essay called “What Happened to the Future,” Thiel and his cohorts described how Twitter, its 140-character messages, and similar inventions have let the public down. He argued that science fiction, which once celebrated the future, has turned dystopian because people no longer have an optimistic view of technology’s ability to change the world. I

Some people think Elon Musk bought Twitter but what he actually bought is DATA. Whoever has the best information wins. Data is the new oil!

I would let him ruin me as thoroughly and impressively as Elon Musk destroyed Twitter.

Perhaps, he ruminated, Twitter should have an impulse-control delay button.

That’s what Twitter could become,” he said. “If you combine a social network with a payments platform, you could create what I wanted X.com to be.

Threads snap.You would lose your way in the labyrinth.

Musk’s method, as it had been since the Falcon 1 rocket, was to iterate fast, take risks, be brutal, accept some flameouts, then try again. “We were changing the engines while the plane was spiraling out of control,” he says of Twitter. “It’s a miracle we survived.

Then I spoke with proven shapers I knew—Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Reed Hastings, Muhammad Yunus, Geoffrey Canada, Jack Dorsey (of Twitter), David Kelley (of IDEO), and more. They had all visualized remarkable concepts and built organizations to actualize them, and done that repeatedly and over long periods of time. I asked them to take an hour’s worth of personality assessments to discover their values, abilities, and approaches. While not perfect, these assessments have been invaluable. (In fact, I have been adapting and refining them to help us in our recruiting and management.) The answers these shapers provided to the standardized questions gave me objective and statistically measurable evidence about their similarities and differences. It turns out they have a lot in common. They are all independent thinkers who do not let anything or anyone stand in the way of achieving their audacious goals. They have very strong mental maps of how things should be done, and at the same time a willingness to test those mental maps in the world of reality and change the ways they do things to make them work better. They are extremely resilient, because their need to achieve what they envision is stronger than the pain they experience as they struggle to achieve it. Perhaps most interesting, they have a wider range of vision than most people, either because they have that vision themselves or because they know how to get it from others who can see what they can’t. All are able to see both big pictures and granular details (and levels in between) and synthesize the perspectives they gain at those different levels, whereas most people see just one or the other. They are simultaneously creative, systematic, and practical. They are assertive and open-minded at the same time. Above all, they are passionate about what they are doing, intolerant of people who work for them who aren’t excellent at what they do, and want to have a big, beneficial impact on the world.

Why are people so worried that Elon Musk bought Twitter? Don't they know that the corporate world bought their politics long ago?

And then I’d gone and spoiled everything like Charlie Sheen giving a prime time interview, or Elon Musk and Twitter, or Kanye West and . . . you know, every day since 2015.

said. “Right now, Twitter’s suppression of speech is far in excess of the law.

From the very beginning, he saw the potential that Twitter could become what he had envisioned for X.com, a social network that supported financial transactions.

Twitter is an ideal—almost too ideal—playground for Musk. It rewards players who are impulsive, irreverent, and unfiltered, like a flamethrower for the thumbs.

If I wanted to use a platform controlled by mindless, privileged, entitled, pestilential, white terrorists, I'd have gone for Truth social.

More major brands and advertising agencies announced their intention to pause Twitter advertising or just did so quietly. Sales fell 80 percent for the month.

I don’t know why I did it,” he said, looking tired and dejected. “The judge basically said that I have to buy Twitter or else, and now I’m like, okay, shit.

it was an out-of-context, minor point.

An update on the war in the Ukraine, for example, coming from an anonymous user, versus an update from a Blue Checked reporter from Reuters, with a bio that put him or her on the ground in Kiev, could be read differently.

He also realized that success in the field of artificial intelligence would come from having access to huge amounts of real-world data that the bots could learn from. One such gold mine, he realized at the time, was Tesla, which collected millions of frames of video each day of drivers handling different situations. “Probably Tesla will have more real-world data than any other company in the world,” he said. Another trove of data, he would later come to realize, was Twitter, which by 2023 was processing 500 million posts per day from humans.

Musk had wrought one of the greatest shifts in corporate culture ever. Twitter had gone from being among the most nurturing workplaces, replete with free artisanal meals and yoga studios and paid rest days and concern for “psychological safety,” to the other extreme. He did it not only for cost reasons. He preferred a scrappy, hard-driven environment where rabid warriors felt psychological danger rather than comfort.

Maybe it was part of a larger, cultural shift, maybe it was in conjunction with a wave of excess and decadence sweeping through Silicon Valley itself, or perhaps it was just a symptom of the company’s own success, but in any case Twitter’s mission had become secondary to employees’ lifestyles. Two-hour lunch breaks morphed into two-month leaves of absence. New committees on every possible imagined cause were formed almost daily, eating up hours of productivity and usually collapsing over petty disagreements without ever accomplishing a thing. When people did, eventually, show up to work, there was a noticeable lack of focus.

Musk burst in carrying a sink and laughing. It was one of those visual puns that amuses him. “Let that sink in!” he exclaimed. “Let’s party on!” Agrawal and Segal smiled. Musk seemed amazed as he wandered around Twitter’s headquarters, which was in a ten-story Art Deco former merchandise mart built in 1937. It had been renovated in a tech-hip style with coffee bars, yoga studio, fitness room, and game arcades. The cavernous ninth-floor café, with a patio overlooking San Francisco’s City Hall, served free meals ranging from artisanal hamburgers to vegan salads. The signs on the restrooms said, “Gender diversity is welcome here,” and as Musk poked through cabinets filled with stashes of Twitter-branded merchandise, he found T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Stay woke,” which he waved around as an example of the mindset that he believed had infected the company. In the second-floor conference facilities, which Musk commandeered as his base camp, there were long wooden tables filled with earthy snacks and five types of water, including bottles from Norway and cans of Liquid Death. “I drink tap water,” Musk said when offered one. It was an ominous opening scene. One could smell a culture clash brewing, as if a hardscrabble cowboy had walked into a Starbucks.

Around that time, Musk was asked by a user on Twitter if he was bipolar. “Yeah,” he answered. But he added that he had not been medically diagnosed. “Bad feelings correlate to bad events, so maybe the real problem is getting carried away for what I sign up for.” One day, when they were sitting in the Tesla conference room after one of Musk’s spells, McNeill asked him directly whether he was bipolar. When Musk said probably yes, McNeill pushed his chair back from the table and turned to talk to Musk eye to eye. “Look, I have a relative who is bipolar,” McNeill said. “I’ve had close experience with this. If you get good treatment and your meds dialed right, you can get back to who you are. The world needs you.” It was a healthy conversation, McNeill says, and Musk seemed to have a clear desire to get out of his messed-up headspace. But it didn’t happen. His way of dealing with his mental problems, he says when I ask, “is just take the pain and make sure you really care about what you’re doing.

Elon Musk has the X factor. He doesn’t tweet much; he acts. That’s why he bought Twitter - just to free the caged bird, so it could return to the wild and tweet on.

Is Threads a threat to Twitter? Threads on Twitter refer to the ability to connect multiple tweets together in a continuous conversation. By simply replying to one's own tweets, users can create a chain of related messages, providing a coherent and concise narrative. The feature was rolled out to enable users to share longer stories, thoughts, or discussions without having to break them down into individual tweets. Threads also allows longer videos and does not use hashtags, unlike Twitter. The app requires an Instagram account and has gained immense popularity, with millions of users joining within hours of its launch. As Threads continues to evolve, it remains to be seen how Twitter, under Elon Musk’s ownership, will respond to this competition.

Tesla > NYT. Elon Musk used the instrumental record of a Tesla drive to knock down an NYT story. The New York Times Company claimed the car had run out of charge, but his dataset showed they had purposefully driven it around to make this happen, lying about their driving history. His numbers overturned their letters. Timestamp > Macron, NYT. Twitter posters used a photo’s timestamp to disprove a purported photo of the Brazilian fires that was tweeted by Emmanuel Macron and printed uncritically by NYT. The photo was shown via reverse image search to be taken by a photographer who had died in 2003, so it was more than a decade old. This was a big deal because The Atlantic was literally calling for war with Brazil over these (fake) photos. Provable patent priority. A Chinese court used an on-chain timestamp to establish priority in a patent suit. One company proved that it could not have infringed the patent of the other, because it had filed “on chain” before the other company had filed. In the first and second examples, the employees of the New York Times Company simply misrepresented the facts as they are wont to do, circulating assertions that were politically useful against two of their perennial opponents: the tech founder and the foreign conservative. Whether these misrepresentations were made intentionally or out of “too good to check” carelessness, they were both attempts to exercise political power that ran into the brick wall of technological truth. In the third example, the Chinese political system delegated the job of finding out what was true to the blockchain. In all three cases, technology provided a more robust means of determining what was true than the previous gold standards — whether that be the “paper of record” or the party-state. It decentralized the determination of truth away from the centralized establishment.

After some time, everyone will have a blue badge ( verified ) on Twitter, except me; I will be unique among the paid blues; sure, it is still the world’s largest non-profit, as Elon Musk said.

Money-monger means Elon Musk, CEO of Twitter, and such ones who put everything at risk, enjoying their life with working-class earnings.

The singular virtue of the [Twitter] fiasco over which [Elon] Musk has presided is the possibility that the outcome will sever, at least temporarily, the American conflation of wealth with intellect. Market valuation is not proof of genius.

Are you familiar with the phrase "to grok"? It comes from the 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. The main character is a human raised on Mars whose English language is peppered with Martian words. "To grok something" means to wrap your head around a concept.

Calacanis was told to sit in on product meetings, but Twitter engineers quickly began to view him as a joke when they realized Musk had little regard for him.

The billionaire, racked with paranoia, had convinced himself that not all of Twitter’s employees were real.

The goal was to reassure the ad agencies that Musk’s Twitter wouldn’t descend into a cesspool of misinformation and hate speech.

The company was incurring more than $3 million3 a day in interest, with its first quarterly interest payment fast approaching at the end of December.

That morning, a Syrian refugee entered a park in Annecy, France, and stabbed several children. A brutal video of the attack quickly emerged and began spreading across Twitter. The few employees who remained on the gutted trust and safety team scrambled to remove it. In the past, when violent imagery went viral on Twitter, the company used a data matching tool to detect any tweets containing it and wiped them out all at once. But the employees discovered that the tool they relied on wasn’t working. When they investigated, they learned that it was one of the bits of code that engineers had torn out months earlier. The tool had mistakenly flagged an image of a SpaceX rocket launch, so Musk had ordered the entire system be killed.

By February 2024, the investment giant Fidelity had marked down the value of X, which was still paying off its onerous debt bill, to $11.8 billion, down more than 73 percent from its $44 billion purchase price.

When they became operational four months later, Musk was at his south Texas house and went on Twitter. “Sending this tweet through space via Starlink satellite,” he wrote. He was now able to tweet on an internet that he owned.

And the hot new things that were just starting out—Facebook and Twitter—certainly did not look like their predecessors—Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Sun Microsystems—that made physical products and employed tens of thousands of people in the process. In the years that followed, the goal went from taking huge risks to create new industries and grand new ideas, to chasing easier money by entertaining consumers and pumping out simple apps and advertisements. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” Jeff Hammerbacher, an early Facebook engineer, told me. “That sucks.” Silicon Valley began to look an awful lot like Hollywood. Meanwhile, the consumers it served had turned inward, obsessed with their virtual lives.

You commit a crime if you support and collaborate with hired members of the criminal intelligence agencies who approach you to eliminate the truth. Sure, you also perpetrate and exploit the rules in an unfair context; indeed, it obtains a desired outcome that victimizes the victim.” “As a human, I love and respect all people; I fight for others’ rights as an advocate of humanity; and I also bring to justice those who commit crimes and misdeeds, regardless of distinctions, even if I face the consequences and victimization. Despite that, I never hesitate to exercise and practice it, feeling and learning that if death is everyone’s fate and destiny, then why not accept it in such a glorious way?” After being victimized by fake accounts of Rumi and the son of a shit, Sa Sha, on social media, I blocked them. However, they cannot escape from the inhuman crimes that they have been committing on social media while living in a civilized society. He, the son of a snake, and she, the shit of a snake, disappeared, working together to victimize me for many years with the consent of criminal intelligence agencies and Qadiyanis, the followers of a fake religion of a fake Jesus. More than a decade ago, their profiles started with fake names; behind that were a top cheater, criminal, inhuman, sadist, pretender, and worse than a beast, with the conspiracy of other criminals. However, I became the victim of those criminals and inhuman nature who succeeded in putting me on the death list. In 2020, the criminal’s chief and his gang from Canada, Germany, the USA, Australia, the Netherlands, Pakistan, India, the Middle East, and around the world, along with other criminals, succeeded in deleting an article on me on Wikipedia and sending abusive, insulting, and discriminating emails to my immediate family. They remained in their criminal ways to defame and damage me, but they significantly failed and faced the penalty for their wrong deeds by God and the law of the world. Despite that, they reached their mental match once to further victimize me; this time, they were directly on my social media, but through their team of evil-minded people to victimize, harass, threaten, and damage my writings, label restrictions, and lock my account every time. Read this underlined link in detail. As a result, I became compulsive enough to deactivate my profile on Twitter to stay away from all such scoundrels. Alas, deactivated Twitter account will automatically become deleted forever after thirty days; consequently, I will lose more than one hundred thousand tweets and my post data because of Elon Musk and his dastard team, who support the political mafia and forced me to remove a screenshot of a Wikipedia article that was illegitimately removed as they harassed me by tagging, restricting, and locking my account and asking my ID card to transfer my privacy to third parties of political criminals and to make my opponents happy. It is a crime to restrict freedom of expression through such tactics under the umbrella of community behaviour.

The sea doesn’t feel fear and danger, how long and how fast the rain falls.” “I try not to fight; however, I stay right, realizing insight.” “The hope is such a candle and light that prevents the darkness of despair.” “The sea does not require to be recognized and neither falls into the rivers, nor it hinders, falling the rivers into it. Similarly, intellectuals, geniuses, and the sea of wisdom figures do not need and look for applause and appreciation, but they are naturally and automatically honoured by those who feel and understand their wisdom and thoughts.” “It doesn’t bother me whether you are a male or a female if you stay civilized. Remember, crossing the limits and over-clearness do not work here. I hope you will take a dose of knowledge before you humiliate yourself.” “Why should I stay on Twitter if it restricts my voice? It is a Question for Twitter since one year ago, my writing and view approached significant impressions, whereas now only a few impacts exist. Is it not an attack on freedom of the press and speech?” “Money-monger means Elon Musk, CEO of Twitter, and such ones who put everything at risk, enjoying their life with/from working-class earnings.” The Deadly Silence *** I never became attractive, For anyone’s eyes I cried a lot At home and journey I am such a candle flame Which is about to turn off, You will find nothing In a dark house I have borne the journey, With constant pain My life stayed At a loss and worthless Carrying the burden of insight, Wisdom and courage What would I try When the deadly silence of destiny That has become my destination. --- “A candle cannot beat the Sun, nor the drops of rain defeat the Sea.

Dear John Twitter (Delete Twitter Sonnet) For a long time I've been backin' away from twitter, but I didn't cut tie completely hoping that it might get better. Now that a far right billionaire baboon has turned it into the internet sewer, there's no point to hanging on to filth, twitter used to be relevant, but no longer. From time to time, colonial morons try to bring back the good ol' days of segregation. It's up to the human society to take charge, and castrate their ambition through isolation. Quarantine rabid dogs by absolute dissociation, To entertain filth is to perpetrate uncivilization.

What was once called the digital town square is becoming Musk’s mirror.

Employees began openly poking fun at their subdued chief executive. After suffering a series of embarrassing hacks over the years, Twitter had upped its security and forced top executives to use YubiKeys, hardware devices that generated random passwords, to shield Twitter’s digital empire. Once, Agrawal unexpectedly piped up in a Slack group that was open to all employees. But rather than a comforting missive, his message was a randomly generated collection of letters and numbers, apparently copied from his YubiKey. Employees mocked him by posting gobbledygook passwords of their own.

It quickly became apparent to the execs that Musk lacked basic knowledge of the merger agreement he had signed.

He aimed barbs at the comedian Kathy Griffin, who decided to turn her Twitter account into a parody of Musk’s in an attempt to test the limits of “free speech” and was subsequently banned by the billionaire.

In a CBS News 60 Minutes interview, he showed total contempt for the SEC, saying he didn’t have anyone routinely reviewing his social-media messages. “To be clear,” he said, “I do not respect the SEC”—which on Twitter he mocked as the “Shortseller Enrichment Commission.

Don't be puzzled and surprised if Elon Mush is on Twitter like Trump at the White House.

Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund had taken a $2 billion stake in the company, instantly making it one of the carmaker’s largest shareholders. Minutes later, as Musk headed to the airport to fly to the Gigafactory in Nevada, he typed out a fateful message on Twitter: “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.

Some short sellers, feeling the pressure, will begin to gang up together to attack a company—through the media, online investor forums, and, increasingly, on Twitter—all as part of an effort to change the narrative of a company, to highlight the negatives around its business or reveal a failing that normal investors may not recognize. Essentially, they’re trying to scare investors and drive a targeted stock price down.

temporarily

All the headlines would be factually correct, but there were facts, and then there was the Truth.

Even so, the headlines seemed unfair.

Fifty years ago, they would have been celebrating in the streets. Even six months ago, they might very well have been cheering Elon on in newsrooms across the country and around the world.

giving them back to any celebrity whose account had over a million followers. Just as suddenly as the level playing field had begun, it had ended; the legacy Blue Check system was back in place, as arbitrary

Whatever I post on Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook and Elon Musk's Twitter (now X), I see only one impression of myself and another from the Twitter team, and the rest remains restricted since I do not want to be a paid customer instead of a free user.

Despite the low morale, poor working conditions, and widespread layoffs, Musk couldn’t understand why he didn’t have more loyalty from his workforce. Perhaps threatening those who remained would make them more faithful.

One of the billionaires’ many followers posted one of Yoel’s own ancient tweets from November 2010, well before Yoel had gone to work for the platform: Can high school students ever meaningfully consent to sex with their teachers?

They all knew what was coming, and if they didn’t, they could see it in the separation between the two camps—Twitter 1.0 and 2.0—and even in David Sacks’s smirk.

After more than 30 years in the middle of it, we could tell you stories. The best you can hope for in the news business at this point is the freedom to tell the fullest truth that you can. But there are always limits. And you know that if you bump up against those limits often enough, you will be fired for it

Amazingly, as of tonight, there aren’t many platforms left that allow free speech. The last big one remaining in the world, the only one, is Twitter, where we are now. Twitter has long served as the place where our national conversation incubates and develops. Twitter is not a partisan site — everybody’s allowed here, and we think that’s a good thing. And yet, for the most part the news you see analyzed on Twitter comes from media organizations that are themselves thinly disguised propaganda outlets. You see it on cable news, you talk about it on Twitter. The result may feel like a debate but actually the gatekeepers are still in charge. We think that’s a bad system. Starting soon, we’ll be bringing a new version of the show we’ve been doing for the last six-and-a-half years to Twitter.

Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Jack Dorsey formerly of Twitter, Tim Cook of Apple, Elon Musk of Tesla—all these business leaders regularly attend their companies’ quarterly calls. Let’s take a concrete example. Chevron, one of the world’s largest oil companies, had revenues of about $140 billion and a market value of about $190 billion in 2019. The management held a conference call for investors and analysts on January 31, 2020, to highlight its performance.20 The analysts and investors asked twenty-nine questions. What percentage of these do you think were about the future? More than 70 percent.

Vijaya,

It was easy, in retrospect, after many aspects of the Post’s reportage were eventually corroborated by more news agencies, to judge Twitter’s actions in subduing the story—but it was also easy to forget how chaotic that moment in time was.

The riots had led to more than 840 arrests, multiple deaths and injuries, investigations, and massive ongoing litigation, and had clearly been instigated by the perception that the 2020 election had been fraudulent.

What did you get done this week?” Elon had shot back to Parag.

Sacks, too, was throwing out wilder and wilder ideas, as good an acolyte as any billionaire could hope to have.

Don't be puzzled and surprised if Elon Musk is on Twitter like Trump at the White House.

Musk has an intuitive feel for engineering issues, but his neural nets have trouble when dealing with human feelings, which is what made his Twitter purchase such a problem. He thought of it as a technology company, when in fact it was an advertising medium based on human emotions and relationships.

On one of the Zoom calls, some of the advertisers could be seen folding their arms or signing off. “What the fuck?” one of them muttered. Twitter was supposed to be a billion-dollar business, not an extension of Elon Musk’s flaws and quirks.

It was not always a pretty sight. Musk’s method, as it had been since the Falcon 1 rocket, was to iterate fast, take risks, be brutal, accept some flameouts, then try again. “We were changing the engines while the plane was spiraling out of control,” he says of Twitter. “It’s a miracle we survived.

In the future, he told them, the teams at Twitter would be led by engineers like themselves rather than designers and product managers. It was a subtle shift. It reflected his belief that Twitter should be, at its core, a software engineering company, led by people with a feel for coding, rather than a media and consumer-product company, led by people with a feel for human relationships and desires.

Alex Spiro, the lawyer, also urged caution. He felt that some jobs at Twitter did not require genius computer skills. “I don’t understand why every single person that works at a social media company has to have one-sixty IQ and work twenty hours a day,” he argued. Some people need to be good at selling, others need the emotional skills of good managers, and some are merely uploading user videos and don’t have to be superstars. Plus, cutting to the bone

Alex Spiro, the lawyer, also urged caution. He felt that some jobs at Twitter did not require genius computer skills. “I don’t understand why every single person that works at a social media company has to have one-sixty IQ and work twenty hours a day,” he argued. Some people need to be good at selling, others need the emotional skills of good managers, and some are merely uploading user videos and don’t have to be superstars. Plus, cutting to the bone risked having the system fail if anyone got sick or fed up.

Musk reluctantly agreed to delay the mass firings until November 3. They were announced that night in an unsigned email: “In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global work force.” About half of the company’s employees worldwide, and close to 90 percent of some infrastructure teams, were let go, their access to company computers and email immediately switched off. He also fired most of the human resources managers. And that was just round one in what would be a three-round bloodbath.

I’m a big believer that a small number of exceptional people who are highly motivated can do better than a large number of people who are pretty good and moderately motivated,” he told me at the end of that painful second week at Twitter.

On the Friday after the Twitter board accepted his offer, Musk flew to Los Angeles to have dinner with his four older boys at the rooftop restaurant of the Soho Club in West Hollywood. They did not use Twitter very much and were puzzled. Why was he buying it? Just from their questioning, it was clear that they didn’t think it was a great idea. “I think it’s important to have a digital public square that’s inclusive and trusted,” he replied. Then, after a pause, he asked, “How else are we going to get Trump elected in 2024?

Instead of simply invoking his mantra about the goodness of free speech, Musk went deeper and made a distinction between what people should be allowed to post and what Twitter should cause to be amplified and spread. “I think there’s a distinction between freedom of speech and freedom of reach,” he said. “Anyone can just go into the middle of Times Square and say anything, even deny the Holocaust. But that doesn’t mean that needs to be promoted to millions of people.

There was another thing that Emanuel did not understand. Musk wanted to run Twitter himself, just as he was doing with Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Neuralink.

A lot was hitting him that week. He was scheduled to give depositions in the Delaware court case seeking to force him to close the Twitter deal, an SEC investigation, and a lawsuit challenging his Tesla compensation. He was also worried about controversies over the use of Starlink satellites in Ukraine, difficulties in reducing Tesla’s supply-chain dependence on China, a Falcon 9 launch of four astronauts (including one Russian woman cosmonaut) to the International Space Station, a West Coast launch the same day of a Falcon 9 carrying fifty-two Starlink satellites, and sundry personal issues regarding children, girlfriends, and former wives.

Twitter prided itself on being a friendly place where coddling was considered a virtue. “We were definitely very high-empathy, very caring about inclusion and diversity; everyone needs to feel safe here,” says Leslie Berland, who was chief marketing and people officer until she was fired by Musk. The company had instituted a permanent work-from-home option and allowed a mental “day of rest” each month. One of the commonly used buzzwords at the company was “psychological safety.” Care was taken not to discomfort.

I calculated that would mean he would be running six companies: Tesla, SpaceX and its Starlink unit, Twitter, The Boring Company, Neuralink, and X.AI. That was three times as many as Steve Jobs (Apple, Pixar) at his peak.

Twitter was distrusted by half the country, he believed, because it had suppressed certain viewpoints. To reverse that would require radical transparency.

For example, Twitter put Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya on the Trends blacklist, which meant that the visibility of his tweets was curtailed. He had organized a declaration by some scientists arguing that lockdowns and school closures would be more harmful than helpful, a controversial view that turned out to have some validity. When Weiss uncovered how Bhattacharya had been suppressed, Musk texted him, “Hi. Can you come this weekend to Twitter headquarters so we can show you what Twitter 1.0 did?” Musk, who had espoused similar views on COVID lockdowns, and Bhattacharya spoke for almost an hour.

A long list of government enforcement agencies essentially got to operate Twitter as an involuntary contractor,” Taibbi wrote.