--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Elon owns Twitter, and users feel bitter, except for some who don't. Most want moderation, but some weirdos don't. And now Elon might fire half the staff, and Elon says, let it sink in for a laugh.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Elon will come to hell. Says Virgis and Eli Patel. And if Twitter Just feels like a bunch of noise You ain't seen nothing yet. Says Chief Twit with all the toys.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But we're here to ease the pain. Coming up Elon Explained. Alright Support for Today Explained comes from BetterHelp.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Let me tell you a true story. Last weekend, I got an email from a listener who wanted to discuss their problems with me. And I said, look, I don't think that this is about me personally. At least I hope it's not. Why don't you try BetterHelp.com slash Explained? Absolute truth.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Find the one with BetterHelp. The one is not me, guys. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at BetterHelp.com slash explain. That's BetterHelp.com slash explain.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm, you know, tweeting more or less stream of consciousness, you know. It's not like, let me think about some grand plan about my Twitter or whatever, you know. I'm like literally on the toilet or something. I'm like, oh, this is funny, and then tweet that out, you know. That's like most of them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's been one week since Elon Musk took over Twitter, and Shereen Ghaffari's here from Recode to tell us how it's going. It's Today Explained.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: It has been chaotic, to say the least. Elon started off on day one walking into Twitter's headquarters with a sink in his hand to make a pun. Let it sink in that he's now the owner of Twitter.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He made the rounds with employees, chatted with them in the coffee room. And while it may look kind of collegiate and pictures and funny, it's actually really not to all the Twitter employees who are sitting there waiting in fear to see if they'll be fired or laid off.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Elon Musk holding his first town hall with Twitter employees since agreeing to acquire the company for $44 billion.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The good question, layoffs, which Musk didn't rule out. He says, quote, right now, Twitter's costs exceed the revenue, so that's not a great situation to be in. But anyone who's obviously like a significant contributor should have nothing to worry about.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Dissolving the board was just one of the changes that Musk has made since acquiring that social media platform. Musk already fired some of the company's top execs, including the CEO, CFO and head of legal policy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Last week, Musk fired four top Twitter executives for a cause, which means the company can avoid paying severance and unvested stock awards to those executives.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: One source described it as an information vacuum, that Twitter employees are looking to news reports, are looking to Vox and the New York Times to find out what's actually going on at the company. They're just sitting there with no updates.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there's also people trying to prove to Elon that their team or their job is worth it. So you see people spitting out and pitching new ideas and products.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And Elon's also ordering some folks to sit there and deliver on these intense deadlines to do things like, for example, bring back Vine, reportedly the old Twitter short form video app.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Officer, I got one question for you. What are those? I'm hearing about employees working 12-hour shifts over the weekend, sleeping in conference rooms to basically make sure that they can keep their job.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And then we hear on Wednesday night from a Bloomberg exclusive report that Musk is indeed planning to lay off half the staff. That's something like 37 to 3,800 employees on Friday in one big swoop.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This would probably be one of the most dramatic changes in the history of this company. Definitely the biggest personnel change that we've ever seen.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And it would really risk Twitter being able to run the way we expect it to day to day. Hundreds of millions of people use Twitter. If they don't have enough engineers to make sure that they can fix bugs in the code or keep the servers running, that means that Twitter could just shut down.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think that's like the worst case scenario. You know, if Elon makes sure that he has enough people to keep that going, there's also this issue around, well, what's going to happen to, you know, all the content moderation that happens day to day on Twitter, especially because we know that's a place where Elon has said he wants to cut back.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: He came into Twitter saying that he wants to cut back on it and make sure everyone can say anything they want so long as it isn't illegal. Twitter has become kind of the de facto town square.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it's just really important that people have both the reality and the perception that they're able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: Now he's walked that back a little and is saying he will do some content moderation. He does take hate speech seriously.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, Musk tweeted, Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints. No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: But at the end of the day, it's very important to be looking at these cuts. Is he actually going to eliminate the roles that deal with this stuff that are the front line in taking down something like a racial slur or making sure a teenager isn't being bullied?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because if there's no one there to do that job, that's the kind of content that's just going to run rampant. And we've already seen a surge in racial slurs since Elon took over.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: There was a report saying that the N surged something like 500 in the 12 hours after Elon did the deal Twitter says that they trying to combat this but it going to be a massive game of whack and they be poorly understaffed if Elon guts that department Which it sounds like he will.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We don't know for sure yet, but that would be in line with his plans, would be to drastically reduce there, yes.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And this is why some people, especially liberal types, are now leaving Twitter. That's right. You know, I think we've seen, you know, everyone from Shonda Rhimes to LeBron voice concern about this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're seeing some liberal politicians as well say that they're concerned and may leave Twitter. I think we haven't honestly yet seen like a mass exodus. Joe Biden's still on there.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: There is some evidence to show that a lot of liberal or left-leaning accounts are losing followers and that right-wing accounts are gaining some followers. and that data comes from a company called Social Blade.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But that's actually a continuation of a trend that we've been seeing for months. There was a report on this back when Elon first started this deal in April.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: So I think it's important to remember, too, that Twitter has been a dying platform in a way now for years and that it's smaller than all its other big competitors like Facebook or TikTok and that it's actually there's evidence that it's losing some of its most prolific users internally.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: According to internal Twitter research, the number of tweeters has been going down since the pandemic began. Heavy tweeters account for less than 10% of monthly overall users, but generate 90% of all tweets and half of the company's revenue.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: So Twitter was already kind of a broken platform and it had this problem of users leaving. And, you know, I think Elon can either fix that best case scenario or what a lot of people are really concerned about, just make it even worse by turning Twitter into a more toxic place.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Where are people going? Back to Facebook? Yeah, I think there's a bunch of different reasons why these users are leaving, but definitely one of them is that a lot of celebrities complain that Twitter feels like a negative place, and it has been that way for a while.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: And so they want to go to platforms that feel more fun or entertaining, like TikTok. There's something called Mastodon, which is popular with some people looking for something different.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Isn't that like a metal band? It really sounds like that. No, it's like an open source, you know, kind of community-oriented service similar to Twitter.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: There's also Discord, which you may know about, originally really popular with gamers, but it's kind of like Slack for social media. You can post your updates there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But again, I think there's a lot of really powerful people on Twitter on the left and right, and we'll see in the coming weeks if there's enough of like a mass migration to one particular platform where it will take Twitter's place definitively.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So he's pretty successful with electric cars, also surprisingly successful with space. Sort of a mixed bag with his boring company. Do you think he met his match in social media?
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: I think so. I think social media is a totally different beast than building an electric car or a rocket, as complicated as that may be.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There are a lot of really thorny political, social, diplomatic problems, and it's not really clear if Elon Musk is the person to solve them.
--:-- Shereen Ghaffari: That was Recode's Shereen Ghaffari. More on those really thorny political, social, diplomatic problems in a minute on Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Built Rewards.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Built Rewards says it lets you earn points on your rent. By paying rent through Built, they say you can earn flexible points that can be redeemed toward hundreds of hotels and airlines, perhaps a future rent payment, your next Lyft ride, and so much more.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Your home isn't just where you sleep. It's your community and Built wants you to go out and do things in the community. You can eat at your favorite local restaurants, then earn more points.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can get VIP treatment at certain fitness studios. You can enjoy exclusive experiences just for Built members every month. When you're ready to travel, they say Built points can be converted to miles or hotel points all around the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can earn points on rent and around your neighborhood wherever you call home by joining built.com slash explained. That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If I acquire a Twitter and something goes wrong, it's my fault, 100%. Today Explained, we're back with Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge and host of The Decoder podcast.
--:-- Nilay Patel: Welcome to hell, Elon. and remind me why. I think that people are very naive about what it means to run a social network in America and the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think people think it's easy and I think it's actually going to be hell. And what about it will be so hellish?
--:-- Nilay Patel: So fundamentally, all tech executives think that the problems with society are engineering challenges. You can just build a better product. You can build a better car, an electric car. People will buy it. You'll save the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can launch a rocket and land it again. You can get yourself to the moon and expand humanity's horizons. To some extent, they're right. Like, that's true of many things in technology.
--:-- Nilay Patel: It is absolutely not true of social networks. The problems of social networks are inherently political and cultural problems. It is managing enormous groups of people and trying to get them to behave the way that you want them to behave.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And on Twitter, it's trying to get them to do what you want them to do for mostly free or in Elon's case now for them to pay you to do what you want them to do, which is totally backwards.
--:-- Nilay Patel: And Elon, I don't think, has the social skills to recognize that he is now the world's most famous politician. And he has to appease all these constituencies of people at cross purposes while not breaking the promises he has publicly made about free speech
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Let talk specifically about what he going to have to do I think a big part of this question is about advertising. Is that right? That's one of his biggest constituencies.
--:-- Nilay Patel: So Twitter makes around a billion dollars a quarter, four billion dollars a year. All of that money is advertising money. So if you want to run Twitter without destroying it in the short term, you have to keep the advertisers happy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You have to keep them on the platform buying your ads. Advertisers are pretty picky. They don't want to be around racism. They don't want to be around sexism. They don't want to be around transphobia.
--:-- Nilay Patel: Just look at ads. Like look at how advertisers message their products. They want to be in a bubble of what they call brand safety. And if you just talk to advertisers or CMOs, brand safety comes up in two seconds.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How do we participate on the internet in a way that is safe for our brand that doesn't put us next to horrible content? You might remember YouTube had something called the adpocalypse.
--:-- Nilay Patel: Google and Disney are ending business relationships with YouTube superstar Felix Shelberg, better known as PewDiePie, after he posted multiple videos that featured anti-Semitism and Nazi imagery on his YouTube channel.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This was a bunch of content on YouTube got out of control. YouTube moderation was out of control. In a video from January 11th, he paid two men to hold up an anti-Semitic sign.
--:-- Nilay Patel: In another video, he paid a man to dress like Jesus and talk in support of Hitler. Advertisers left en masse for a couple weeks. They just walked away from YouTube.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And this is YouTube, which does not have storming leaders who are constantly tweeting, right? They're very calm. Sundar Pichai is a very relaxed individual. He's very thoughtful.
--:-- Nilay Patel: So Twitter immediately, because of Elon and his public demeanor and his persona and his statements, is facing advertisers saying, we're going to wait and see.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: IPG, one of the biggest holding agencies in the world, said we're going to advise our clients to pause their spend. GM, which is a competitor at Tesla, paused its spend on Twitter.
--:-- Nilay Patel: So just from the jump, if you want to operate a social network that's supported by advertising, you have to meet the demands of the money. and the demands of the money are content moderation, like really aggressive content moderation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So Elon needs to figure out this advertiser's question. Has he addressed it thus far? So he published an open letter to Twitter advertisers. It's on his Twitter. You can read it.
--:-- Nilay Patel: And he said, we don't want Twitter to become a hellscape. We want it to be one of the best advertising platforms in the world. So that's his public statement.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He has been retweeting his policy people saying, to be clear, the rules haven't changed. He has a handful of advisors who are taking meetings with advertisers that we have heard about, and they are saying to those advertisers, the rules haven't changed.
--:-- Nilay Patel: I think the problem is the advertisers don't believe it. I think fundamentally a lot of them think you can't tell us it's business as usual when it is obviously not business as usual.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like we can see the chaos. We are aware of it. You can't tell us everything's the same, especially because all these people just got fired.
--:-- Nilay Patel: I mean, you're talking about a billion a quarter, four billion a year. You're also talking about a guy who just bought Twitter for 40-something billion dollars and who happens to be arguably the richest man on earth, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What does a billion a quarter mean to him? Well, so what's really interesting about that billion a quarter in revenue is that he has to pay a billion a year in interest on the debt he took on to buy Twitter.
--:-- Nilay Patel: Huh. So that interest payment is hanging over his head. Just the interest on the loans that he took out to buy Twitter, he could pay that interest. All of his money, he has a lot of money. All that money is tied up in Tesla stock.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So if he wants to fund Twitter indefinitely, which I don't think he wants to do, he has to continually diminish his position in Tesla, which is a huge risk for Tesla, the company.
--:-- Nilay Patel: If Elon starts selling off more and more Tesla stock, that has a huge implication for the value of Tesla stock. and it means that Elon has less and less control over Tesla, which he really does not want to have less and less control over.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is there any way that he just says to hell with advertisers, I'm smarter than this game. I'm going to find another way to monetize. Yeah, I mean, he's trying to do that now.
--:-- Nilay Patel: So his big plan is to charge people $8 for Twitter Blue and give the check marks to everybody who pays to verify people. $8 is not a lot. It's like a one-time flat fee? It's $8 a month. $8 a month. Yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So there's like 400,000 people who are verified on Twitter. You charge them $8 a month. You're making less than $100 million a year, right? If you get lots more people, maybe you're making a billion dollars a year, right?
--:-- Nilay Patel: You still haven't really moved the needle on what you need to do to get rid of advertising on the platform. No matter what, if the revenue source is advertising, the revenue source is subscription.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The thing he needs to do is get lots and lots more people using Twitter. And I don't think that he has understood this. I think his brain is poisoned by how addicted he is to Twitter.
--:-- Nilay Patel: Elon Musk thinks Twitter is important. That's true. It's just obviously true. That's why he spent $44 billion buying this thing. A bunch of reporters think that Twitter is important. A handful of celebrities think Twitter is important. No one else does.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Twitter has 200 million-some users in the world, right? Like, less than the population of the United States. Facebook has 2 billion users. There's a reason people think Facebook is a monopoly.
--:-- Nilay Patel: There isn't a person in the world with a cell phone that hasn't landed on YouTube. Right? YouTube is, like, effectively utility for video distribution on the internet. TikTok is growing massively. All these things dwarf Twitter by orders of magnitude.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: By the way, even the number we have, Elon himself has very publicly and very controversially said is fake because it's all bots. So even if you accept Twitter's number, which is like two or three hundred million people, Elon is out there being like, this is a lie. It's all bots.
--:-- Nilay Patel: My top priority I have is eliminating the spam and scam bots and the bot armies that are in Twitter. And so when Elon has these ideas he acting as though Twitter has this base of people that want to participate, that want to pay.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he's actually like talking to six people. And he's like hooped. Like he's never going to make it through unless he makes Twitter more pleasant to use to get the billion people he needs to run at Facebook or YouTube style margins.
--:-- Nilay Patel: And the only way to do that is to make Twitter nicer so more people are happy about it. And even if he gets there, which sounds like the tallest of hills to climb, he's got to deal with this whole other headache, which is regulation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. So you just see politicians are obsessed with Twitter. In our country, politicians hold hearings and they get Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai and other social network CEOs to testify.
--:-- Nilay Patel: And they end up asking Mark Zuckerberg about Twitter. Congressman, well, first, to be clear, I think what you might be referring to happened on Twitter. So it's hard for me to speak to that. But I can talk to our policies about this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because they don't really care about Facebook. They care about Twitter. It's bizarre. And that's our country, which has a First Amendment, which politicians are, quite frankly, getting sick of.
--:-- Nilay Patel: Like, they can't regulate internet companies because the First Amendment should prohibit them from regulating speech. And all these internet companies do is manage the speech of their users.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So if you are a congressperson or a state senator or a governor and you're like, I want to put my finger on the scale of what YouTube allows, you have to write a speech regulation. The First Amendment says you shouldn't do that.
--:-- Nilay Patel: But Texas and Florida have passed speech regulations that purport to govern how content will be moderated. Now, Florida law intended to punish social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter for allegedly discriminating against conservative thought is ruled unconstitutional.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Congress is wildly interested in speech regulations. They say what they're trying to do is tweak this law called Section 230. But what they are actively trying to do is write regulations that can skirt around the boundary of the First Amendment.
--:-- Nilay Patel: Days after Twitter started fact-checking him, President Trump just signed an executive order to reduce legal protections for social media platforms.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's just in this country which has a First Amendment. You go to India or Germany or China, there is no First Amendment. Those countries have aggressive speech regulations. Some of them are good, right? Some of them people in this country think that we should have as well.
--:-- Nilay Patel: Germany has hate speech laws. It's illegal to do hate speech in Germany. We don't have those laws. Hate speech is legal in the United States. Is Elon going to say hate speech is allowed on Twitter but it's not allowed in Germany? How is he going to write that rule?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's not an engineering challenge. That's a political challenge. The Indian government demands that tweets get blocked, that accounts get restricted. And in order to make you comply with those demands, they require that you have people locally in the country that they can put in jail.
--:-- Nilay Patel: That's just a hostage negotiation. That's not an engineering challenge. That's just the Modi government saying, if you don't provide us potential hostages so we can make sure that you blocked and restrict the reach of certain tweets, you're not allowed to operate in India.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Elon wants to sell Teslas in India. There's just like all these points of leverage. So I'm not describing engineering challenges. You can't fire 50 engineers and a bunch of AI at the Modi government in India.
--:-- Nilay Patel: You have to go there and convince them to let you do what you want. and they're not going to back down. Why did he pick up this nightmare? Hubris. I think fundamentally this is a project of hubris.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think fundamentally this is a project of hubris. I don't deny that he's a smart guy. He is an extraordinarily talented manager of engineers. That much is blindingly clear. That is amazing. Like, no doubt.
--:-- Nilay Patel: He's able to shoot the rockets into space and land two of them at the same time. Amazing. That's engineering management, right? He's got great engineers that want to work on hard problems He gives them money and resources and cover to do it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He didn't write the code that lands the rockets, right? He hired engineers to do it. He has people at those companies who have the freedom to spend money on extraordinarily hard engineering problems. Great.
--:-- Nilay Patel: What I just keep coming back to is that Twitter is not an engineering problem. It is not even a product problem. It is a political problem. And I think the height of hubris is to think you can reduce political problems to first principles and try to solve them the way that you could solve an engineering problem.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Elon has a lot of fanboys and a lot of people read and shared your essay, Neelai. Did you get a lot of pushback on Welcome to Hell, Elon?
--:-- Nilay Patel: Yeah, the Elon fans came for me. I don't know that they read it. A lot of them just called me a liberal. Some people said some very anti-Semitic things to me, which seems mis-targeted.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do you think Elon read your essay? I know he read my essay because he changed the location in his Twitter bio to hell. I love it. It's pretty good. I was like, that's pretty smart of him to do.
--:-- Nilay Patel: Nilay Patel is the editor-in-chief at The Verge. You can read Welcome to Hell, Elon, at TheVerge.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They recently redid their website, and you'll love what they've done with the place.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our show today was produced by Amanda Llewellyn and Miles Bryan. Lots of help from Laura Bullard, Matthew Collette, and Paul Robert Mounsey.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram for him. This is Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Macy's Fall Fashion Guide can help you get a pulse on all the latest trends and must-haves. Try a romantic look with a sheer top from INC or mix it up with some fun textures like a faux fur bomber jacket from Karl Lagerfeld Paris.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No matter your vibe, you can explore the Macy's Fall Fashion Guide and find the perfect look for you. Shop in-store or online at nacy's.com.
