“How Elon Musk Got Tangled Up in Blue: Twitter Blue, a Revamped Subscription Service That Let Users Buy Verified Badges, Was the First Big Test for the Platform’s New Owner. It Didn’t Go Well.”, 2024-08-24 (; backlinks; similar):
…“All these other people around the world rely on a label of some kind, a badge of some kind, to tell them this is the real account to listen to”, said Esther Crawford, a director of product management, according to 3 people in attendance. “And they will be hijacked.” Christian Dowell, a company lawyer, chimed in, suggesting that accounts that bought the badges could start a harassment campaign, using the credibility of verification to, for instance, direct SWAT teams to people’s homes. “Somebody could die, actually”, he said.
When Musk re-entered the room, the chatter died. No one had expected him to be with them for so long on launch day, but he picked through the snacks—at one point eating half a doughnut in a single bite. He encouraged employees who raised concerns to be “adventurous.” “We’re going to be shooting from the hip in real time”, Musk said, fashioning his hands into a pair of finger guns.
…During his time at the helm, Musk has cycled through periods of supreme confidence and self-doubt, making abrupt decisions only to reverse himself. The tumult of his takeover was exemplified in his handling of Blue, which he shut down the day after its unveiling, amid a torrent of criticism, but made available once again a month later. Since then, the site’s check marks have become a hodgepodge of paid, free and fake identifiers signifying little more than confusion.
The book from which this excerpt is drawn is based on more than 100 interviews with people who worked at Twitter or for Musk. It also relies on internal company documents, contemporaneous notes, recordings and court records.
…Musk came to hate what he saw as Twitter’s two-tiered class system of the verified and unverified, and to him, selling off the check marks was the ultimate democratization of the site. Soon after completing his acquisition, he assigned Ms. Crawford to assemble a team and gave her a deadline of 2022-11-07, for Blue’s relaunch. She had 10 days to deliver or risk being fired, 3 people with knowledge of the conversations said.
…To employees, the discussions were baffling. There was Musk, a man who had built multibillion-dollar companies, soliciting advice from a small inner circle of advisers who had little experience building social networks. Sure, they used Twitter, but these rich men were not representative of the hundreds of millions of people who logged in every day. Musk had largely come to peace with a price of $100 a year for Blue. But during one meeting to discuss pricing, his top assistant, Jehn Balajadia, felt compelled to speak up. “There’s a lot of people who can’t even buy gas right now”, she said, according to two people in attendance. It was hard to see how any of those people would pony up $100 on the spot for a social media status symbol.
Musk paused to think. “You know, like, what do people pay for Starbucks?” he asked. “Like $8?” Before anyone could raise objections, he whipped out his phone to set his word in stone. “Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bulls—t”, he tweeted on Nov. 1. “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.”
…Ms. Crawford came up with her own tactics for dealing with Musk. She quickly learned that she could challenge him in one-on-one settings. Individually, Musk could be charming, willing to engage in discussion and listen to the expertise of his counterpart. Put him in a larger group setting with people outside his inner circle or those he didn’t trust, however, and Musk’s ego ran wild. He could never be seen as inferior or uninformed.
…Still, he expected people to sign up in droves. “It’s better to have a little bit of confusion reign for a soft launch so we don’t break the system”, he told employees. And he was worried about bad actors, predicting a wave of impostors and scammers that would be like a “zombie attack” in World War Z, the 2013 action horror flick starring Brad Pitt.
…By that evening, more than 78,000 users had signed up for Blue. But many were impostors…On Nov. 10, major advertisers started to ring Twitter’s sales team, telling it that they would pull their ads unless the company did something about the fakes. In one call, executives from Nike threatened to never advertise on the platform again, two people with knowledge of the conversation said.
Those who saw Musk after these calls could sense his tension; he was clearly bothered by the threats from business leaders. By that afternoon, his jovial mood after launching Blue the previous day had disappeared. And over the coming weeks, Musk’s mood swings—one moment despondent, the next energized—would become routine.
The threats stirred Musk’s fear of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue in a snap. “Turn it off”, he told an engineer in the San Francisco office. “Turn it off!”