One month before
X
, former
, turns
18 years
of existence,
two brand new books
deal with the most controversial stage of the social network.
This is what began in
October 2022
when the South African-born tycoon
Elon Musk
acquired the platform and generated changes that were both debated and resisted, impacting users and employees, who agree in portraying him as a
despotic
boss who makes
unreasonable
demands .
The X logo. Photo: EFE
If the hypotheses of
"Battle for the Bird"
- the text written by journalist Kurt Wagner - and
"Extremely Hardcore"
, signed by Zoë Schiffer, coincide in something, it is in the crossroads that the two owners of the network had to face. social to date: Musk and his predecessor and founder,
Jack Dorsey.
"Battle for the Bird" is the text written by the journalist Kurt Wagner and "Extremely Hardcore", that of Zoë Schiffer.
Both books have just arrived in American bookstores one month before the network celebrates its 18th anniversary - on March 21 - and they make two complementary perspectives available to those interested in the history of the former Twitter.
While Wagner tells a
business story
paying special attention to Dorsey's discomfort with the pressures of running a
publicly traded
company , Schiffer focuses on the
capricious and changing nature of the man
who, with his space company SpaceX, launched two unsuccessfully rockets to space.
Jack Dorsey.
Former CEO of Twitter.
Photo: Reuters
Until
Donald Trump
was
banned
in January 2021 for fueling a popular insurrection, Dorsey seemed not to care that Twitter amplified the former president's inflammatory rhetoric:
"I think we need to listen to all extremes to find balance
," he maintained back in 2016.
The journalist portrays Dorsey as a businessman who begins to distance himself from Twitter when he consolidates new obsessions such as the virtual currency company
Bitcoin
and begins to encourage Musk to buy the company.
According to Wagner, "running Twitter had become less fun for Dorsey."
"Running Twitter had become less fun for Dorsey."
With Musk he is less pious: he recounts in detail how
he put the platform at risk
by firing a large part of his staff;
instructing employees who stayed to "try weird things" and then attacking them, in addition - he says - to reinstating banned accounts while he suppressed speech he didn't like.
For its part, Twitter's times from the perspective of its second owner are the focus of "Extremely Hardcore," the book where journalist Zoe recounts Musk's first dalliances with the company, since
his initial offer. of $44 billion
until his failed attempt to almost immediately cancel the operation, but what occupies greater development is the
chaos
that followed when he took over the platform.
An "extremely bad" boss
"Extremely Hardcore" takes its title from a memo the Tesla founder sent to Twitter staff shortly after acquiring the company.
"The attributes that made Musk good at tweeting - a combination of recklessness and shamelessness - made him
extremely bad at running
Twitter," Schiffer writes, according to
The Washington Post.
Schiffer, editor-in-chief of the technology publication
Platformer
, focuses in detail on the moment in November 2022, when just a month after becoming the owner of Twitter, the businessman announced that he would welcome the most notable and influential user in the world. social media company Donald Trump, who had been banned from the platform since the days after the assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, when the company said it was suspending his account "due to the risk of further incitement of violence ".
According to the author, the reinstatement of the
@realDonaldTrump
account was not easy: the social network's programs were not designed to quickly restore an account with almost
90 million followers
and most of the engineers who knew how to solve the problem had been fired, by order of Musk.
The action did not have the effect she expected: the former US president has only posted once since his account was returned.
In "Battle for a Bird", Wagner gives more details about the reasons that led Musk to buy Twitter: he says that the matter took shape when
his request to close @ElonJet,
an account run by Jack Sweeney that uses publicly available information to track the South African businessman's private jet.
From then on he began buying Twitter shares and soon after sat down to talk with its founder, Dorsey, with the idea of getting a seat on the board of directors before agreeing to buy the social media platform outright.
For his part, Schiffer also hosts the experiences of Twitter employees, whose lives were turned upside down by the change in ownership: Musk "makes
unreasonable demands,
refuses to listen to advice, and endangers his current and former employees with alarming regularity." by unleashing armies of his followers to harass those who cross him."
Musk "makes unreasonable demands, refuses to listen to advice."
It might seem like Wagner and Schiffer are competing.
However, a few days ago they got together and the confluence was fruitful.
"It may seem unusual for competing authors to interview each other about their books on similar topics. But Kurt and I have been friendly throughout this process, and I have enormous respect for their work. The history of Twitter is vast and complicated, and I find it I like to think that there is room for multiple books, particularly those that cover different angles and characters, as ours does," the author said.
With information from Télam
J.S.