Turbulent Twitter, Ticked Users & The Chief Twit's Tyranny
The real origins of Twitter, its volatile journey and what happens when a $200 billion man invades one of the biggest social media platforms.
Hey,
Another week, another story but first… TGIF! On another note, ‘Zedites’ and ‘Zeolites’ are just two letters apart, no?
This one’s about the elephant in the room.
A Story For You
This is how it started.
And this is how it ended.
An outrageous turn of events in the past eleven months has led to real-life Tony Stark acquiring Twitter in what looked like a prolonged episode of an over-the-top reality TV series. Keeping Up With The Kardashians? Try Massacring With Musk. It’s absurd to even think that all of this started at the beginning of this year! If the news hasn’t smothered you enough with information, we’re sprinting down memory lane to unravel Musk’s sanctimonious relationship with the blue bird.
Musk’s unfettered shopping spree in January makes him the largest shareholder in the American communications company by March, with a 9.2% stake and a $3 billion bill at checkout.
Innocent CEO, Parag Agarwal announces that Musk will join the board of directors only for the latter to decline a few days later. Instead, he shows intent of invasion, offering to buy Twitter at $54.20 per share for a generous valuation of $43 billion.
Twitter, wary of Musk’s motive, swallows a poison pill in hopes of preventing onslaught by the richest man in the world.
A poison pill might specify that if any single entity or person acquires a company stake of 15% or more, all other shareholders will be able to acquire additional shares for half their market price, or alternatively the company could simply distribute an extra share for each one already owned, while not doing so for the party that triggered the provision. Those were the terms of the poison pill Twitter Inc. adopted in April 2022, shortly before agreeing to a buyout by Elon Musk. (Credits: Investopedia)
Unable to force the pill down, Twitter regurgitates and accepts Elon’s offer. Musk, now desperate to finance the bid, sells $8.5 billion of Tesla shares and raises $7 billion from his rich buddies, prepared to take on yet another company under his wing.
A month later, the exotic billionaire ‘temporarily holds’ the deal and questions Twitter’s bot (spam or fake accounts) count, wanting to make sure that it’s below 5% of the total users on the platform. Impatient Twitter shareholders, whose shares have fallen by 12%, file a class-action lawsuit over Musk’s strategy of lowering the price before acquisition.
On the verge of escaping from the deal, Twitter sues Musk to force his hand into completing it. He reverses his decision after a valiant effort to get out of the mess and ends up purchasing Twitter for $44 billion.
He enters Twitter HQ with, what has been touted to be, one of the poorest dad jokes of the century. And with that, the ordinance of Musk begins.
But, before we get on with the nitty gritty of the aftermath of Musk’s entry into Twitter, it’s noteworthy to draw resemblance of the tumultuous takeover this year, with the micro-blogging platform’s origins.
A Story From Someone Else
Twitter’s Scandalous Start
It all began with the clean-shaven, bright-eyed individual in the centre of the gallery. If it wasn’t for Noah Glass, Twitter, as we know it today, wouldn’t have conceptualized. To describe him is to go back to Steve Jobs’ famous ad campaign in 1997. The misfit, the rebel and the troublemaker who wanted to disrupt the mainstream and who wanted to do it with great passion. One his first stints at entrepreneurship was Audblog, a platform that converted audio blogs from remote locations to MP3, that would eventually be hosted on the internet. We’re unaware of Audblog today, because it bit the dust when he went on to co-found Odeo, which would sprout as a podcasting platform a while later.
Odeo needed funding and a heavy-pocketed Evan Williams, having freshly sold his venture Blogger to Google, became an early investor. Williams, unlike ordinary investors was quietly shrewd and involuntarily intrusive. At one point, the Odeo team worked out of Evan’s old apartment on the investor’s insistence. They ultimately grew out of the space when Noah expanded his team, bringing in a sharp-witted, imaginative and ambitious student from NYU - Jack Dorsey, as an on-and-off web designer.
With the trio now complete, Odeo was on its way to immeasurable success when, as one of the early employee recalls, ‘shit hit the fan’. After repeated testing, Odeo finally had a product ready when a behemoth of a company introduced a podcasting platform, built into iTunes. Apple, with its 200 million iPods, crushed Odeo’s idea in an instant. The company that promoted disruption had stuck to its word. Odeo’s 14-member team, which now included investor Evan Williams and one his Google friends - Christopher ‘Biz’ Stone, regrouped and brainstormed to salvage what they could out of the predicament they were in.
Divided into smaller teams now, they all worked to devise Odeo’s new direction. Glass and Dorsey gravitated towards each other. And that’s when Dorsey proposed the idea of an SMS-based communications platforms that would allow users to share short messages to the public; and keep tabs on each other with status updates.
The duo and a German developer shared their idea with the rest of the team. Williams, still dubious of the suggestion, made Noah the head of the project for Dorsey’s brainchild. Noah was obsessed with the idea. It was like a kid trying candy for the very first time! He was the one that pushed the idea to fruition and even coined the term: Twittr.
Christopher ‘Biz’ Stone would help out occasionally but everyone in Odeo knew it was Noah’s fanaticism towards the idea that propelled it to what it would become.
In March, Jack, the Neil Armstrong of Twitter, tweeted this:
Twitter was presented to the board members of Odeo in 2006 and no one could care less about Noah’s enthusiasm. That’s when Williams drafted a letter to the investors, insisting on buying back all their shares and making their $5 million investment whole.
In his letter to Odeo's investors, Williams wrote this about Twitter:
By the way, Twitter (http://twitter.com), which you may have read about, is one of the pieces of value that I see in Odeo, but it's much too early to tell what's there. Almost two months after launch, Twitter has less than 5,000 registered users. I will continue to invest in Twitter, but it's hard to say it justifies the venture investment Odeo certainly holds -- especially since that investment was for a different market altogether. (Credits: Business Insider)
Evan Williams bought Odeo back from its investors, changed its name to Obvious Corp and fired the flag bearer of Twitter - Noah Glass.
Two questions which never got answered:
Did Evan Williams know about Twitter’s potential and undersell it to the investors to get the bigger share?
Why did Williams fire Noah Glass?
That was Twitter’s start and alas, 16 years later, history repeated itself in some ways.
The Aftermath of Musk’s Acquisition
Like Evan Williams, the first decision Elon Musk made after the buyout was to fire key individuals. CEO Parag Agarwal, CFO Ned Segal and Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde, were axed, with the golden parachute deployed.
Elon didn’t waste a second establishing his dominance. In fact, here are some words exchanged by him in the first meeting with the employees, when he called for one at a 20-minute notice:
We just definitely need to bring in more cash than we spend. If we don’t do that and there’s a massive negative cash flow, then bankruptcy is not out of the question. That is a priority. We can’t scale to 1 billion users and take massive losses along the way. That’s not feasible. I don’t think we will.
Let me be crystal clear. If people do not return to the office when they are able to return to the office, they cannot remain at the company. End of story.
Basically, if you can show up in an office and you do not show up at the office, resignation accepted. End of story.
Those who go hardcore and play to win, Twitter is a good place. And those who are not, totally understand. But then Twitter is not for you. (Credits: Verge)
Twitter was losing $4 million a day and the only way to reduce the negative cashflow, according to Elon, was to make some irreversible changes in the workplace. 50% of the Twitter headcount was aimed to let go, which also included 90% of India’s Twitter staff.
In addition to the massacre, Elon was fixated at charging $20 for Twitter Blue but after a brief negotiation with Stephen King and a lot of backlash from many others, reduced the amount to $8.
Even though Elon envisioned this to be a boon for Twitter, he couldn’t help scammers using it to their advantage. American giants, Eli Lilly lost billions of dollars after a bot account on Twitter with a verification badge tweeted, “Insulin is free now.”
After a brief pause in the subscription service and a few more executives leaving the company, we can’t help but think about Twitter’s future.
And the only way to give you an idea of how abrasive and spontaneous things are at Twitter, would be to end the story here. And guess what? We are.
A Story From You
As much as we love hearing stories from you, we’d love to get your thoughts on the matter this time.
What do you think about Elon’s way of handling things at Twitter?
Looking forward to hear from you,
Aamer
Hi Aamer, the picture of Noah Glass you've used is not the actual Noah Glass who was a part of the Twitter founding team. This Noah Glass is actually the CEO of Olo, which is a whole different company. It is an easy mistake because there are just 2-3 pictures of the Twitter Noah Glass out there. Loved reading the articles though, looking forward to more!
Wow this is amazing information.
All the hype really suppresses true information. Really glad I got to read this.
And to answer your question. Elon is definitely not acting like a leader. I understand he is a businessman and is focused only on profits but unfortunately no business survives without people and maybe he is forgetting that.