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The results of billionaire Elon Musk’s 2022 purchase of the social media platform formerly known as Twitter are public knowledge. It unfolded in real time with changes in the user experience amid regular headline-making tweets from the man himself.
But the twists and turns in the story of how Musk came to own the platform — which he renamed X — are many, they are certainly unique, and the details of it all required dedicated reporting to uncover.
New York Times technology reporters Ryan Mac and Kate Conger drew on more than 100 interviews and reams of research for their new book, “Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter.” The book was published on Sept. 17.
Musk did not make himself available for interviews, but Mac and Conger spoke with numerous people who had inside knowledge of the events.
Mac is a Stanford University alumnus, who worked for a time as a reporter in the Bay Area, including as an intern at the Half Moon Bay Review. Prior to his tenure at the New York Times, Mac covered technology for Forbes and BuzzFeed News. He led BuzzFeed’s reporting on public disinformation and data collection practices at Facebook, coverage which garnered the 2019 Mirror Award and a 2020 George R. Polk Award. Mac is based in the New York Times’ Los Angeles offices, focusing on corporate accountability in tech.
He returns to his alma mater on Oct. 1 with Conger for a special event to discuss “Character Limit.”
We spoke with Mac about the book, why Elon Musk bought Twitter, how the purchase unfolded and more.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Embarcadero Media: How did “Character Limit” come about?
Ryan Mac: I’m a reporter at The New York Times. Kate is as well, and we’ve reported on the Twitter deal for the Times in our day job capacity. I came on toward the end of reporting on the deal. So, obviously, when Elon announced he was going to buy the company, Kate was all over that. She’s the beat reporter of X — or of Twitter — at the Times. I cover accountability and individuals like Elon Musk.
We just started reporting out the story. We found that some of our reporting couldn’t make it into the paper. There’s just so much of it. So we decided to write a book.
Embarcadero Media: What are the challenges of writing about a larger-than-life figure like Elon Musk?
Ryan Mac: Many. One is finding people who know enough to talk about him and want to talk to you about him. The other is, this is a guy that creates news every day, sometimes multiple times a day, and so figuring out what makes sense for us to report on, what makes sense for us to track as it relates to the book, can be, you know, sifting through a lot of b******t, for lack of a better term.
So I’m not writing up every single story on Elon Musk, but hopefully, we’re picking and choosing and being additive and finding valuable stories to cover that aren’t just whatever he tweeted for the last day.
Embarcadero Media: You conducted over 100 interviews, in addition to drawing on court documents and internal memos, correct?
Ryan Mac: We talked to more than 100 people. I think we tallied it up, and it was more than 150 hours of tape, but there’s probably more than that, because that’s just the taped interviews. So yeah, it was a lot of reporting. That’s kind of what I was talking about when I said there was so much reporting that couldn’t be confined to a newspaper or magazine story — it needed to live somewhere, and a book was appropriate for that.
Embarcadero Media: You’ve covered the tech industry for more than a decade. What did you find most unusual or surprising about this story?
Ryan Mac: I’ve covered Silicon Valley for Forbes, and for BuzzFeed, and now the Times, but I’ve never really covered a story where one person has the buying power and the will to do something like this. I think that’s pretty unprecedented. I think of someone like Jeff Bezos, who bought the Washington Post. That was a $250 million investment from him. Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion — almost 200 times the size of that Washington Post deal.
This is different orders of magnitude here, and that is what made this unique — it makes it pretty unique in the grand scheme of human history. Typically, other companies buy companies, not individuals.
Elon bought this, not necessarily as an investment, but as a plaything. This was something he coveted, like someone might have a yacht or sports team or an island or a very nice car — he bought it as a kind of a whim.
Embarcadero Media: There was a lot of financial maneuvering as Musk prepared to buy Twitter, but it also seemed a little impulsive. How did this differ from the more traditional tech deals that you’ve covered?
Ryan Mac: I don’t cover so much M&A (mergers and acquisitions), but I’ve talked to a lot of folks in the process of this deal. (Musk) wanted the deal to happen as fast as possible. He didn’t sign a non-disclosure agreement, which would have given him the ability to review non-public information before acquiring the company. That kind of lack of due diligence is ridiculous. It really set him up for a lot of the problems that happened down the road when he tried to get out of buying the company.
I mean, that is another twist and turn that we haven’t really talked about, is how he attempted to get out of the deal and be forced — he was sued — to buy the company.
Another thing that surprised me was just the amount of hubris. I think Elon has been very successful in the world because he has questioned how things are done. “Why can’t I electrify vehicles? Why can’t I privatize rockets and build a company around that?”
To understand him, he often says, “I need to break down things, down to first principles, into the basic and operating laws around them, and understand why I can’t do things.” He took that mindset into a business acquisition where he’s not an M&A lawyer, he’s not a banker. He simply asked, “Why can’t I do things the way I want to do them? I’m going to do them that way.” Well, that doesn’t really work for a complex business deal like that, and it doesn’t really work when you’re taking over a social media company, when you don’t have social media expertise, and you simply think that because you’re the most solid account on the platform you must have the best ideas. And that hubris has really hindered him through this deal, and it hinders him to this day.
Embarcadero Media: It sounds as if there were some major philosophical struggles that (Twitter co-founder) Jack Dorsey and (former Twitter CEO) Parag Agrawal were already grappling with prior to Musk’s arrival.
Ryan Mac: I mean, Parag and Jack had a lot of issues with the company. One, Parag was already going to institute a number of layoffs under his management before Elon came in. He thought that the company was bloated. There are too many costs. So there were plans to cut about 25% of the company. There were also a lot of concerns about the product. They just weren’t launching products like other Silicon Valley companies. In some ways, it’s the same product we’ve seen for years. It doesn’t change very much. There’s not much innovation. The iteration or the launching of products at the company was very slow. That was an issue, and the other major issue was content moderation.
There was a belief between both Dorsey and Agrawal that it wasn’t sustainable for the company to become the arbiter of truth or the arbiter of what (post) stays up or what stays down. They had spent most of the last decade being caught up in constant news cycles about “what should stay up, what should stay down? Should this? Does this violate our misinformation policies? Is this hate speech? Is this a racial slur?” They were trying to figure out ways to technologically solve this problem to the point where they thought about developing a new protocol, which became (social media platform) Bluesky.
Embarcadero Media: So what do you think might be in the future for X?
Ryan Mac: I’ve been using this analogy way too much, but I’ve compared it to Yahoo Mail in the way that a lot of people still use Yahoo Mail, like my grandma, your uncle or whatever. Some people have Yahoo mail, but a lot of people have moved on.
I think that is the case with X. I think there can be a subset of people that really like the experience and like Elon and like what he’s doing with it, but I don’t think that’s going to be a growing subset of people. I don’t think it’s a good business proposition — it is going to continue to lose money. He still has advertisers to court who he is driving away. He has a billion dollars in debt payments a year to pay off the debt that he used to buy the company. That is extremely tough, even for someone who’s worth that much money. It’s not a walk in the park. My prediction is it’ll continue along, but it’s not going to be of the same import and the same value as it once was.
Embarcadero Media: Do you still have an account on the site?
Ryan Mac: I do, yeah. I use it because we have support there. In some ways, it’s still a viable platform for understanding and following breaking news. There are other places like Bluesky and Threads, but I don’t think those have the kind of critical mass that you need yet to sustain a breaking news environment. So when you think of something like the Gaza protests on campus, or sports news or something that’s just breaking immediately — an earthquake, for example, that happens in L.A., Twitter was sometimes your first place to go, and still is. That experience is degrading a little bit, but I still maintain the presence. I’m not tweeting as much. A lot of my communities have left. If it is dying, it’ll be a kind of a slow death.
Embarcadero Media: How do you think the company’s move from San Francisco to Austin will affect it, financially and culturally?
Ryan Mac: I think this has been overblown, because he’s keeping a lot of the same staff in California. I mean, they’ve just moved to offices in Palo Alto and I think San Jose, right? So it’s a tax move. He’s moving his HQ to Texas. I don’t think he’s making people move there. At least, I haven’t heard of that. It’s a big for-show thing, similar to how he technically moved Tesla to be headquartered in Texas, but right after that, he opened a major engineering hub in Palo Alto, kind of acknowledging that he’s still in California and still needs the people that are there.
Embarcadero Media: What do you hope that people take away from reading “Character Limit?”
Ryan Mac: A different perspective of him (Elon Musk) and the realization that just because someone is good in one thing doesn’t make them good in another— as well as, in some ways, the book is an examination of wealth inequality and how we got here. That one man could buy a single company — what are we doing? It’s like how society has gotten to a place where there are individuals that have this much money and power and they are largely unaccountable. He’s threatening on any given day to sue the government or to not follow the law and there’s really no recourse. This is someone who the U.S. government is beholden to, to get things in space. He has a virtual monopoly on space. He controls the largest electric vehicle manufacturer in the U.S. That we haven’t reckoned with that is very interesting to me.
Ryan Mac and Kate Conger discuss “”Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter” on Oct. 1, 5:30-7 p.m., at Green Library, Hohbach Hall Presentation Room, 557 Escondido Mall, Stanford. Free admission. For more information, visit events.stanford.edu.
