How Elon Musk transformed Twitter — and what it means for online discourse

**Sam Sanders** (0:03)
This is In Conversation from Apple News. I'm Sam Sanders, in for Shumita Basu. Today, what the transformation of Twitter to X reveals about the future of social media.
On March 21st, 2006, Jack Dorsey, one of the creators of Twitter, sent the first tweet. Back then, the platform was just a company name and a prototype, an idea about a new way to communicate online. Over time, it grew into something much, much bigger, with hundreds of millions of users all across the globe. And while it was never perfect, many people saw Twitter as an online public square, a place to share and connect with people you'd never met. In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. He then cut the staff by about 80 percent, dismantled many of the platform's content moderation systems, incorporated the AI chat bot Grok into the platform, and got rid of Twitter's name.

**Ryan Mac** (1:09)
Twitter was such a brand, but that brand died when Elon took over. It completely changed and it's X now.

**Sam Sanders** (1:17)
That's Ryan Mac. He's a tech reporter for the New York Times. He wrote the book Character Limit, How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, with his colleague at the Times, Kate Conger. Kate says that while X is a fundamentally different place now, it's still an active and important part of the Internet.

**Kate Conger** (1:34)
It's transformed into a space that really aligns with Elon and his interests, and I think that he views this as a success story. And I think for that one particular user of X, the X experience is greatly improved.

**Sam Sanders** (1:48)
It's been about 20 years since Twitter was created. So I sat down with Kate and Ryan to talk about the promise of Twitter at the beginning, how it evolved over the years, and what that evolution tells us about social media and its role in society today.
Let's talk for a minute about what Twitter was. Take folks back to that peak of Twitter, Twitter. What was this company and this platform like?

**Kate Conger** (2:17)
Well, I think in the early days, the founders created something that was just sort of a place for public chatter, and nobody really knew how to use it or what to do with it yet. And so, I mean, you look at a lot of the early tweets that even the founders were putting out, and they're kind of insane. It'll be like, I just had a sandwich for lunch, you know? And it's the kind of thing where you think if someone tweeted this now, you'd be like, wellness check, are they okay? What are they doing?
And then, you know, over time, it found its use, right? And it became a place where political movements were formed and organized. You know, it became a source of all these kind of like viral moments of humor, sort of a place to live react to anything that was going on anywhere in the world, for better or for worse. And it just kind of became this space of immediacy for people. And I think, you know, when you talk about journalists, I mean, the overlap with our business is obvious. It was just such a great place to kind of be on top of whatever was happening in the world, find out about breaking news before your competitors potentially, and sort of find sources, find people who are on the ground in places where news was happening. And so it had a really strong utility for our industry, certainly.

**Sam Sanders** (3:34)
I love that you use the word utility because I remember for years, when there were natural disasters occurring across the country or the globe, or even mass shootings, the places where survivors, responders, and journalists went for the most up-to-date news about these things, it came from Twitter. And a lot of the terminology around Twitter and what it used to be, it used the word public, a public good and a public square.

**Ryan Mac** (4:04)
There's a lot of public utility certainly. And as emergency services and government agencies realized that, they also flocked to Twitter. I live in California and in San Francisco and LA, and whenever there was an earthquake, you'd hop on and, was that an earthquake? Exactly. And people would chime in and be like, yeah, that was a 4.6 epicenter in Napa Valley. It's like, you could find that very quickly. But as we remember it, we should also remember that it wasn't this utopia either. There were plenty of issues with Twitter and it was never this perfect place.

**Sam Sanders** (4:37)
And it wasn't profitable for many, many years.

**Ryan Mac** (4:38)