Conger, Kate / Ryan Mac (2024) Character Limit. How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. London: Cornerstone Press.

Von Josef G. Böck für The Human Side of Business GmbH

The book by award-winning New York Times journalist Kate Conger and her colleague Ryan Mac on the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk is an exciting piece of American economic history with consequences for the whole world. In around 400 pages, they report on what around 100 interviewees told them in more than 150 hours about one of the biggest corporate takeovers in American history. Added to this is all the knowledge they have gathered over many years of reporting on social media in the USA. Conger and Mac are deeply immersed in the topic and substantiate their statements and interpretations in hundreds of footnotes.

The subtitle of the English edition, “How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter”, clearly states Conger and Mac’s assessment of the takeover: as a work of destruction. That could prove to be too sensationalist. They quote Elon Musk himself, who believed and still believes that it will take around five years to save and reorganise Twitter. Nevertheless, the authors believe that the social media platform is already destroyed in early 2024. According to Musk’s timeline, we are in year two of the takeover, i.e. right in the middle of it. If we now add to that the time overruns that Musk has always allowed himself for his major projects, then a judgement on whether he has ruined Twitter or made it a success will have to wait until 2030, unless X goes bankrupt before then or Musk loses interest. So at the end of the book, we only have a preliminary status.

The first part of the book tells the largely chronological story of how Jack Dorsey came up with the idea for Twitter in 2000. In 2006, the service was ready for launch and Dorsey posted his first tweet with “just setting up my twttr”. In the years that followed, we observe the permanently overwhelmed managers setting up a meaningful organisation, searching for a sustainable business model and, above all, managing the authors and their tweets. Dorsey had envisioned creating a marketplace of opinions in which thoughts could be disseminated in “real-time, up-to-date, from the road” – a medium for “stream-of-consciousness” content without filters and time lags. Those of us who use Twitter, or now X, know what this has led to, for better or worse. The first part of the book therefore offers a deep and utterly credible look at the people of Twitter, their visions, their attitudes to free speech, their problems and the limitations of their ability to solve them. In 2013, Twitter went public at a value of 18 billion.

In a second narrative strand, we follow the entrepreneur Elon Musk from around 2003 onwards as he manages his companies side by side and gradually turns Twitter into his central communication medium. This channel is certainly one of the reasons why Musk does not spend any money on traditional marketing in his companies and why he can position himself as the central spokesperson for his companies. Conger and Mac go so far as to mark 2017 as the year from which Musk must be diagnosed with a Twitter addiction. From then on, he would no longer be able to leave a stick in Twitter that anyone throws at him.

The pandemic has changed Musk’s political stance away from supporting the American Democrats because he sees the measures taken by politicians as harmful to the economy and undemocratic.  He found the closure of his companies and the restriction of people’s freedom of choice intolerable. At the same time, he opposed the Democrats’ policy of promoting diversity or advancing the revitalising of trade unions. In 2021, he called on Twitter to investigate where the “woke_mind_virus” originated and how it spread. He considered Twitter to be self- or publicly censored and untrustworthy. He believed that he could remedy this.  He started to think about taking over Twitter.

Musk envisioned a Twitter that, as an efficient and well-oiled machine, would make 3.2 billion in profits by 2025 and as much as 9.4 billion by 2028.  Musk also envisaged developing Twitter into an all-purpose app along the lines of WeChat, thereby moving the business model away from advertising and towards paid services.

Musk used this idea to solicit financial support from friends and acquaintances in order to raise the 44 billion purchase price and not have to pay everything out of his own pocket. Completely foregoing due diligence, which would have given him insight into the actual processes and results of Twitter, Musk paid the purchase price via one of his holding companies on 27 October 2022 and thus became the owner of Twitter.

On this day, Musk began an unprecedented wave of layoffs at Twitter in order to increase efficiency. He made himself the platform’s chief designer and product manager. He brought in loyal and trusted managers from his other companies, such as SpaceX and Tesla, because he did not consider the people working at Twitter to be trustworthy.  These external managers familiarised the remaining Twitter executives with Musk’s way of working: no talking back, never pretending to have an answer when you don’t and condensing every suggestion into two or three options to avoid unnecessary discussions. The more the remaining old management worked with Musk, the more the impression arose that Musk did not understand the special nature of social media management and that he therefore made most decisions based on gut feeling. This drove many of the remaining managers to resign.

As a result, Musk cut Twitter’s costs by three billion dollars by mid-2024 and advertising revenue fell by 50 %.  The value of Twitter fell from 44 billion at the time of the purchase to an estimated 11.8 billion. When asked by a journalist how one could make a small fortune quickly, Musk replied with a grin that one could, for example, “start with a large fortune”. However, it is possible that Trump’s election and Musk’s role in American politics will now give the project another decisive turn in Elon Musk’s favour.  Conger and Mac will certainly be hot on his heels and gather material for a sequel.

To open and download the PDF of the English review klick here.