A Twitter Founder on Elon, Trump, and the Edit Button

**Jon Favreau** (0:01)
What was your reaction to Elon becoming not only a passive investor, but now a seemingly very active investor who's on the board?

**Ev Williams** (0:07)
I think it's interesting.
I'm very impressed with what Elon has done in the world and his approach to PR and tweeting and everything else. He's fascinating. I'm fascinated like anyone else. I appreciate what he's doing with Tesla.
I have a Tesla, hope to go to Mars someday. Is he good for Twitter? I don't know. It'll make the board meetings more interesting. Who knows how Elon even has time to pay attention to Twitter and everything else. Is it a passing fancy?

**Jon Favreau** (0:42)
We'll see.
I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline.
Hey everyone. My guest today is Ev Williams, co-founder of Twitter and its former chairman and CEO. Every week, I conclude this introduction with a call to action, asking for your comments and complaints. And every week, we open the Offline inbox and see a familiar message. Jon talks about Twitter too much. Absolutely right. No argument for me on that. But there are a few reasons I talk about Twitter so much. A, I'm an addict. B, most people in media and politics, which is what I do for a living, are also addicts. And C, because most people in media and politics are on Twitter, the platform has an outsized influence on shaping our views and understanding of the world around us. And that's even true of people who don't use Twitter.
So I think the platform is fairly central to the story of what's gone wrong with the internet, which is why there's no way I could pass up an opportunity to talk to one of its founders, someone who also told the New York Times back in 2017, I think the internet is broken. Ev was in the room when some of the earliest design decisions were made about Twitter, the character limit, the retweet, the follow function, and from 2008 to 2010, Twitter's most formative years, Ev served as the company's CEO. Before Twitter, he founded Blogger, which made publishing on the internet accessible to everyone. Today, he serves as CEO of Medium, a social publishing platform he started in 2013, where articles are much, much longer than 280 characters. We talked about Twitter's earliest days, why he pivoted to a platform for long-form writing, and what he thinks about Twitter's evolution, the good, the bad, and the ugly. I also asked him about two men who have shaped Twitter more than any other, Elon Musk, who as of this week is Twitter's largest shareholder and newest board member, and of course, Donald Trump. As always, if you have any questions, comments, or complaints about how I talk too much about Twitter, feel free to email us at offline at crooked.com. And of course, please rate, review, and share the show. Here's Ev Williams.
Ev Williams, welcome to Offline.

**Ev Williams** (3:00)
Thanks for having me.

**Jon Favreau** (3:01)
So, this is a show about all the ways the Internet is breaking our brains, and just about every episode inevitably includes a discussion about Twitter, probably because I'm a long time addict being in media and politics.
I certainly won't make you answer for all the platform sins. I know you're not there anymore, but I'd love to talk about how we got to this point and where we might go from here, which I know you thought a lot about. And I guess my first question is, when you guys created Twitter, what was the dream? What were your greatest hopes for the platform?

**Ev Williams** (3:34)
Gosh, I think in the early days of these things, you don't necessarily construct a grand dream.
It sort of unfolds over time. And so, Twitter was very iterative.
And whenever you create something that seems to be bigger than you initially planned, then your ideas for it expand. So, at some point, we may have imagined world leaders and global politics playing out, but we certainly didn't think that in the beginning. In the beginning, we thought this is a fun way to stay in touch with friends.
And we thought a lot in terms of it being an information network. And we used the term real time a lot in the beginning because that was what was unique about Twitter. It was really pre-mobile, or at least pre-smartphone. And the idea of getting a notification or a message about something happening right now was interesting. And we thought there were social uses of that that we observed just in our own use. I'm like, oh, it's fun to hear what your friend's doing right now. That was novel and cool. And then there was utility. And we would talk about things like, oh, there's an earthquake, and we just felt the earthquake, or there's a fire, or there's emergency. And so, and that seemed enough on its own. That seemed worth developing. I mean, no one, I think, could claim that they knew what it would evolve to.