How Jack Dorsey’s Plan to Get Elon Musk to Save Twitter Went South
An excerpt from Battle for the Bird shows how Twitter’s two most prominent leaders contributed to its current dilemma.
Elon Musk was growing irritable on Friday evening, Nov. 4, 2022. It had been just over a week since he’d closed his $44 billion deal for Twitter, and advertisers were bailing on the company in droves. Many brand-conscious marketers were worried that Twitter’s historical reputation for nastiness would return as a result of Musk’s pledge to defeat the “woke mind virus,” his derisive term for the censorious attitude he felt had sucked the joy out of his favorite social network.
Musk said the way to save Twitter was to restore what he saw as freedom of speech. He hadn’t actually changed any of Twitter’s speech policies by that Friday, but the list of advertisers who had paused their Twitter ads already included United Airlines, REI and Volkswagen and was steadily growing. This was a major concern, considering Twitter made roughly 90% of its revenue from advertising.