Olivia: Most people assume Elon Musk bought Twitter to save free speech. But the book we're diving into today suggests there might have been a different, far pettier reason driving him. One that started with a Super Bowl tweet and ended with engineers being told to boost his posts by a factor of one thousand. Jackson: Hold on, a factor of a thousand? That can't be real. That sounds like something out of a comedy sketch, not the playbook for a multi-billion dollar tech company. What on earth is that about? Olivia: It’s a wild story, and it’s all laid out in Extremely Hardcore: Behind the Battle for Twitter by Zoë Schiffer. What makes Schiffer's account so compelling is her background. She's a journalist who has spent her career covering labor movements in Silicon Valley, so she tells this story from the inside out, through the eyes of the employees who lived through the chaos. Jackson: Wow, okay. That perspective is crucial. It’s not just about the stock price or the code; it’s about the people. So you have to tell me this Super Bowl story. It sounds completely unhinged. Olivia: Unhinged is a good word for it. It perfectly captures the central drama of the book. It’s February 2023, four months after the takeover. Musk is on his private jet, flying home from the Super Bowl, and he is fuming. Jackson: Why? Did his team lose? Olivia: Worse. He had tweeted his support for the Philadelphia Eagles, but President Joe Biden had also tweeted, and Biden's tweet got three times the number of views. On his own platform. He was furious. He landed and stormed into Twitter headquarters in the middle of the night demanding answers. Jackson: Demanding answers for… being less popular than the President of the United States? That’s a bold move. Olivia: He was convinced the algorithm was biased against him. He gathered his top engineers, and one of them, a principal engineer named Yang, tried to explain. He showed Musk data suggesting that public interest in him was simply waning after months of controversy. Jackson: That sounds like a reasonable, data-backed explanation. How did Musk take it? Olivia: He fired him on the spot. Jackson: You're kidding me. He fired an engineer for telling him the truth about his own popularity? That’s not leadership; that’s a tantrum with employment consequences. Olivia: Exactly. And it sent a shockwave through the company. The message was clear: the truth doesn't matter if the boss doesn't like it. His cousin, James Musk, then sent out a late-night Slack message to the remaining engineers. The new directive was simple: fix the "problem" of Elon's engagement. Jackson: Fix the problem of reality, you mean. So what did they do? Olivia: Around eighty engineers, including a man named Randall Lin, pulled an all-nighter. They rewrote the platform's code to create what they internally called a "power user multiplier" specifically for Musk's account. It artificially boosted his tweets by a factor of one thousand, ensuring he would show up at the top of almost every single user's feed. Jackson: That is just… astounding. So the next day, millions of people woke up and their Twitter feed was just… all Elon, all the time? Olivia: Pretty much. And people were furious. The platform became unusable for many, just a constant stream of one man's thoughts. But the book reports that as the outrage grew, Musk became ecstatic. He had become the main character again.

Jackson: This story is so revealing. It frames his entire project in a different light. He’s famous for that tweet where he said, "This is a battle for the future of civilization. If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead." But this incident doesn't sound like a principled stand for free speech. Olivia: It highlights the central conflict of the book. There's Musk's public-facing ideology—this grand, almost messianic mission to protect civilization—and then there's the private reality of an owner obsessed with his own metrics and reach. The book is filled with these moments where the lofty ideals of free speech absolutism crash into the wall of human ego. Jackson: It’s like he wanted a global town square, but only if he had the loudest microphone and everyone was forced to listen. What does that do to a company? When the boss’s personal whims dictate the product roadmap overnight? Olivia: It creates chaos. The book describes Twitter before Musk as having its own set of problems. It was often slow to innovate and struggled to turn its cultural influence into profit. It had about 192 million daily users in 2020, which sounds like a lot, but it’s tiny compared to Facebook's 1.84 billion. It was a place of what some called 'benevolent anarchy.' Jackson: I can see how that would be frustrating for a guy like Musk, who is used to a 'move fast and break things' culture at SpaceX and Tesla. He probably saw a lot of inefficiency. Olivia: He definitely did. But his solution wasn't surgical. It was a demolition. He saw a complex, nuanced system of content moderation and community trust, built over years, and in his frustration, he just yelled, "This app makes zero fucking sense," as he did on his jet. He believed he could fix it with pure force of will and engineering logic. Jackson: But a social platform isn't a rocket engine. You can't just increase the thrust. It's a living, breathing thing made of people, conversations, and cultures. Olivia: And that’s the part he seemed to consistently miss. His focus on his own experience, on being the 'main character,' meant he was blind to the experiences of millions of other users and, most critically, his own employees who were trying to keep the lights on. Jackson: Which I imagine leads to some pretty devastating consequences for the people actually working there. It can't just be about rewriting code for the boss's ego. Olivia: Exactly. And this 'main character' energy had devastating ripple effects. While Elon was focused on his own feed, the company culture was imploding. Which brings us to the deeply human side of this 'extremely hardcore' philosophy he demanded.

Jackson: 'Extremely hardcore.' That phrase itself sends a chill down my spine. It sounds less like a corporate vision and more like a threat. Olivia: It was. He sent it in an internal email in November 2022, right after the takeover. He wrote, "Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0... we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade." Jackson: That’s a clear line in the sand. So what did that look like for the people who had been there for years, who had built the original Twitter? Olivia: The book tells this one story that is just gut-wrenching. It perfectly illustrates the whiplash. In December 2021, before Musk was even in the picture, Twitter's global design and research team held a three-day off-site event in the Bay Area. Jackson: Sounds pretty standard for a big tech company. Team building, strategy sessions. Olivia: Right. The company put them up in four-star hotels, took them wine tasting in Napa. Their boss, the Chief Design Officer Dantley Davis, had been through a tough couple of years with the team, and this was meant to be a reset. He laid out a hopeful vision for 2022, assuring them that the new CEO, Parag Agrawal, was fully behind them. Jackson: So the mood must have been pretty optimistic. Olivia: It was. The book says by the end of the retreat, the team felt unified and hopeful. They were excited about the future. Davis, their boss, flew out a bit early, but the rest of the team met up for one last goodbye brunch. They're eating pastries, making little DIY flower arrangements... and then their phones start dinging. Jackson: Oh no. I have a bad feeling about this. Olivia: A collective gasp went around the table. It was followed, the book says, by a spontaneous burst of tears. News had just broken. The CEO had fired Dantley Davis, the very man who had just painted this hopeful picture for their future. Jackson: Wow. During their farewell brunch. The timing is just... cruel. To go from that peak of hope and unity to absolute shock and uncertainty in a single moment. Olivia: It's a perfect snapshot of the pre-Musk chaos, but it also sets the stage for what was to come. That whiplash, that feeling of instability, was about to be amplified by a thousand. When Musk took over, it wasn't just one executive being fired. It was mass layoffs, executed with cold, impersonal efficiency. People locked out of their laptops overnight, finding out they were fired via a generic email. Jackson: It’s the complete dehumanization of the process. The 'hardcore' philosophy seems to strip away any sense of loyalty or shared humanity. You're either producing at high intensity, or you're gone. Olivia: And it destroyed the institutional knowledge of the company. The trust and safety teams, the people who understood the nuances of content moderation in different countries and cultures, were decimated. Musk saw them as bloated cost centers, symbols of the 'woke mind virus' he was there to eradicate. Jackson: But they were the ones doing the actual work of keeping the platform from descending into a cesspool. They were the experts. Olivia: They were. And their departure is a huge part of the story. The book makes it clear that this wasn't just a business decision; it was an ideological one. Musk was dismantling a culture he fundamentally disagreed with, and the human cost was just collateral damage in his battle for civilization.

Jackson: So when you put these two stories together—the Super Bowl ego trip and the heartbreaking design team brunch—what’s the big lesson here? Is this just a wild story about one eccentric billionaire, or is there something bigger we should be taking away from this? Olivia: I think it’s a profound cautionary tale about what happens when unchecked power and a rigid ideology collide with complex human systems. Musk came in with a belief that he could solve a deeply complicated social problem—the balance of free speech and safety—with engineering and force of will. Jackson: The same way he solves problems with rockets and cars. Olivia: Precisely. But he failed to appreciate the complexity. There's a fantastic quote in the book from Evelyn Douek, a law professor at Stanford who studies online speech. She says, "Content moderation is really hard and apparently harder than rocket science." Jackson: That’s a brilliant way to put it. Because it’s not about physics; it’s about psychology, culture, language, and ethics. There’s no clean formula. Olivia: And Musk broke the machine because he never seemed to respect the people who built it or understand the community it served. He saw employees as obstacles and content rules as bugs to be removed, not as essential features of a functioning digital society. The book received very positive reviews for its deep sourcing, for being this "fly-on-the-wall" account, and that's what lets us see this disconnect so clearly. Jackson: It’s a powerful reminder that these platforms aren't just code and servers. They're ecosystems. They're made of people—the employees who build them and the users who inhabit them. When you treat the people as disposable parts, the entire ecosystem begins to fail. It becomes toxic. Olivia: It really does. The whole saga forces you to confront a difficult question. It makes you wonder, what is the true price of 'free speech' when its definition is dictated by one person's whim? Jackson: A question I think we're all still trying to answer. This has been fascinating, Olivia. Olivia: It’s a story that’s still unfolding. Jackson: This is Aibrary, signing off.