Thread by @xDaily

NEWS: Walter Isaacson on what he saw at X/Twitter HQ as Elon took over last year.

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Elon had his cousins Andrew and James Musk and more from the Tesla AI team go over lines of Twitter code. Elon himself was sat with a laptop looking at the code.

This was when they decided to fire 85% of the staff - the remaining team needed to go “all in” and Twitter 2.0 would no longer prioritize “psychological safety” or remote work as 1.0 had.

One of Elon’s team came up with the idea that Elon shouldn’t simply fire all the staff. The team should be asked if they want to go all-in, because it was going to be hardcore.

Isaacson says it’s good to have companies with different styles, but Twitter 1.0 was at one extreme with Yoga studios and mental health days off.

Isaacson remembers Elon's "bitter laugh" when he kept hearing the words "psychological safety" when he entered Twitter HQ. He was saying "I prefer 'hardcore'". That he prefers an intense sense of urgency as the operating principle for the company.

At Twitter HQ, Isaacson was watching Elon as he grew more annoyed with the Twitter branding and logo. Elon's problem was that this image of birds twittering away - it wasn't "hardcore".

Isaacson says he thinks Elon is taking X in a hardcore direction - people posting hardcore takes, with hardcore views. It won't be a "polite playpen for the Bluecheck annointed elite".

Isaacson admits that as he was watching this at Twitter HQ, he thought “this is gonna be bad, the whole thing is gonna fall apart” - but while X/Twitter has had problems, “the hardcore intensity of it has also meant there’s new things happening there”.

Isaacson then went over some details about the Twitter acquisition covered in this book excerpt: archive.vn/Zrgxd

In April 2022, Isaacson observed Elon at Tesla's factory in Texas, as he considered whether to buy Twitter. Isaacson himself didn't say anything, but most around Elon were asking him why would he want to buy Twitter? A lot of people didn't even use Twitter.

Even after Elon came back from Vancouver in mid April, many around him were trying to intervene and ask him why he was offering to buy Twitter.

Isaacson says that people often ask him why did Elon want to get out of the Twitter deal? He says that it depends what Elon you're talking about and what time of day.

Elon was mercurial - there were times he'd text Isaacson saying "this will be great!". Isaacson says that by the time he learned he would be forced to close the deal, in early October, Elon had come to peace with it and was even happy about it

On why Elon pulled off a "ju-jitsu manoeuvre" to deny Parag and the other execs their compensation: it wasn't just a way to save money, but a point of principle for Elon, since these people had mislead him about the numbers and forced him to close the deal.

When Elon finally closed the deal, it was a "wild scene". He saw Elon trying to decide, in 3 different rounds, how to get the staff down to 15% of what it was. It was a "manic period", he says.

Walter gave a bit more detail on this story.

On Christmas Eve 2022, Elon's cousin James told him to remove the Sacremento server by himself. So Elon turned his plane on route to Austin around. He personally uncut the servers with a pocket knife his guard gave him.

https://twitter.com/xDaily/status/1700588722083996011

Isaacson says that Elon brought in the Twitter engineering team, and he figured that the size of the Tesla autopilot and AI team was about 1/10th of the size of the team working on software at Twitter. Elon said this can’t be the case.

The firings were done in 3 different rounds.

The first round involved a team from Tesla reviewing the Twitter code and grading the code everyone had written in the past year.

Then there was a round firing those who didn’t seem fully all-in or loyal.

Isaacson explains that at each step of the way, everyone around Elon was telling him that these cuts were enough and any more would destroy things. Even some of his closest confidants like Alex Spiro and his cousins Andrew and James were telling Elon this.

And those people were partly right, Isaacson says - there was some problems with the servers, but not that much compared to what was predicted or what happens with many other services.

Elon's algorithym for running his companies as Isaacson explains elsewhere is "to delete, delete, delete" - but his view if you don't end up having to put back in 20% of what you deleted, you didn't delete enough. This is how Elon approached running Twitter.

watch the full thing (section on X/Twitter starts at around 53 mins in)

https://twitter.com/lexfridman/status/1700951257764999237