Extremely Hardcore

On February 13, 2023, millions of Twitter users around the world experienced something unprecedented: their entire "For You" feed suddenly flooded with posts from a single account—Elon Musk's. The world's richest man had just manipulated his own platform's algorithm because his Super Bowl tweet had been outperformed by President Biden's. This wasn't just corporate vanity; it was the culmination of a chaotic transformation that began when Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion, turning the world's digital town square into his personal playground.

This extraordinary saga reveals how quickly democratic institutions can crumble when concentrated wealth meets unchecked ego. Through the experiences of engineers, content moderators, and executives who witnessed Twitter's metamorphosis firsthand, we see profound questions about power, technology, and free speech in the digital age. How does a platform that once prided itself on being the "free speech wing of the free speech party" become a tool for silencing critics? What happens when the infrastructure of global communication falls into the hands of someone who treats it as both a business venture and a personal toy? The answers illuminate the fragility of the digital commons we've come to depend on for news, connection, and democratic discourse.

By late 2021, Twitter had become a company adrift under the distracted leadership of Jack Dorsey, who seemed more interested in Bitcoin and meditation retreats than running the social media platform he had co-founded. Despite its outsized cultural influence, Twitter struggled with stagnant user growth and an inability to monetize its role as the world's digital town square. Employees described a culture of "benevolent anarchy" where good ideas often died in endless meetings, and the company's stock price reflected Wall Street's growing impatience with its underperformance.

When Dorsey abruptly stepped down in November 2021, handing control to the inexperienced Parag Agrawal, Twitter became vulnerable to exactly the kind of hostile takeover that would soon materialize. Agrawal, brilliant but naive about corporate politics, found himself managing a public company while simultaneously trying to implement cost-cutting measures that included laying off key executives. The timing couldn't have been worse—Musk had already begun quietly accumulating Twitter shares, driven by his growing obsession with what he called the "woke mind virus" that he believed was destroying free speech on the platform.

Musk's initial approach seemed almost casual when he joined Twitter's board in April 2022, promising to bring "great value" to the company. But behind the scenes, tensions were building rapidly. His demands to fire key executives like Vijaya Gadde, his public criticism of the platform's bot problem, and his increasingly erratic behavior suggested this was no ordinary board appointment. When he announced his intention to take Twitter private at $54.20 per share—a price that included a marijuana joke—many dismissed it as another Musk publicity stunt.

The legal battle that followed revealed the depth of Musk's ambivalence about the acquisition he had impulsively initiated. As markets tumbled and his Tesla stock plummeted, he desperately tried to escape the deal, claiming Twitter had misrepresented its bot problem and threatening to walk away entirely. But the airtight purchase agreement he had signed left him little room to maneuver. By October 2022, facing almost certain defeat in Delaware court, Musk had no choice but to complete the purchase. What had begun as a power play to own the libs had become a $44 billion trap, setting the stage for the chaos that would soon engulf one of the world's most important communication platforms.

Musk's entrance into Twitter headquarters on October 26, 2022, carrying a porcelain sink and tweeting "let that sink in," perfectly captured his approach to corporate leadership: performative, impulsive, and designed for maximum viral impact. Within hours of closing the deal, he fired Twitter's entire C-suite in the lobby, claiming they had committed misconduct to avoid paying their severance packages. This wasn't just corporate restructuring; it was a public execution designed to send a message that Twitter's old guard was finished and Musk would rebuild the company from scratch according to his vision.

The new owner's management style shocked Twitter's workforce, known for its collaborative culture and progressive values. Musk demanded that engineers print out their recent code for his personal review, fired employees who criticized him publicly, and instituted brutal work schedules that would have been unthinkable under the previous regime. His inner circle, dubbed "the Goons" by terrified employees, consisted of Tesla and SpaceX veterans who had little experience with social media but absolute loyalty to Musk. They began implementing sweeping changes with little regard for Twitter's existing systems or institutional knowledge.

The most visible disaster was the botched launch of Twitter Blue, Musk's plan to "democratize" verification by selling blue checkmarks for eight dollars monthly. Despite warnings from the trust and safety team about the risks of tying verification to payment rather than identity, Musk pushed ahead with a November launch that immediately descended into chaos. Impersonators flooded the platform with fake accounts for major brands, causing real-world financial damage when a fake Eli Lilly account tweeting "insulin is free now" wiped billions from the pharmaceutical company's market value. Within 48 hours, Twitter was forced to suspend new Blue subscriptions entirely.

Behind the scenes, mass layoffs decimated Twitter's workforce through a combination of immediate terminations, voluntary departures, and Musk's infamous "extremely hardcore" ultimatum demanding total commitment to his vision of Twitter 2.0. Nearly a thousand employees chose to leave rather than submit to his demands for "long hours at high intensity," reducing Twitter's workforce from 7,500 to just 2,700. Critical teams responsible for content moderation, infrastructure maintenance, and regulatory compliance were gutted, leaving skeleton crews to maintain a platform serving hundreds of millions of users. The company that had once prided itself on work-life balance and employee perks had become a pressure cooker where sleeping at the office was not just accepted but celebrated by the new regime.

The massive layoffs that continued through early 2023 revealed the fundamental contradiction at the heart of Musk's Twitter takeover: his desire to slash costs while maintaining the complex technical infrastructure that kept the platform running smoothly. The haphazard nature of the cuts—determined by hastily assembled lists and stack rankings from managers who barely knew their teams—left critical systems without anyone who understood how they worked. The company lost passwords to its own servers, eliminated most of its content moderation capacity, and gutted the compliance teams responsible for adhering to federal regulations that could result in billions in fines.

JP Doherty, the head of Twitter's Command Center, found himself in an impossible position as one of the few experienced leaders left intact. His team was spared because Musk's advisors recognized that without them, the platform would collapse within weeks. But keeping Twitter stable with a skeleton crew meant working nineteen-hour days and constantly firefighting problems that could have been prevented with proper staffing. When Musk decided to shut down an entire Sacramento data center over Christmas weekend—personally moving servers with a pocket knife—it was Doherty and his exhausted team who had to ensure the platform didn't crash and take global communications with it.

The period also saw the emergence of Musk's growing obsession with his own engagement metrics, leading to increasingly brazen manipulation of Twitter's algorithm. When his Super Bowl tweet was outperformed by President Biden's, Musk's response revealed the petty motivations driving many of his decisions. Rather than accept that public interest in him might be waning—as Google Trends data clearly showed—he ordered engineers to work through the night artificially boosting his tweets by a factor of one thousand. Users woke up to feeds flooded with Musk's content, exposing the platform owner's vanity and willingness to manipulate the system for personal gain.

The human cost of these decisions extended far beyond Twitter's walls, affecting the broader ecosystem of users who depended on the platform for news and connection. Contract content moderators, who played a crucial role in identifying child sexual abuse material and other harmful content, were simply locked out of their systems without notice. When high-ranking privacy and security officials resigned en masse, citing concerns about FTC compliance, it became clear that Musk's cost-cutting had compromised not just Twitter's operations but its legal standing. The platform that had once been essential infrastructure for journalists, activists, and emergency responders was becoming increasingly unreliable, with major outages and service disruptions becoming routine rather than exceptional.

The final phase of Twitter's transformation under Musk has been characterized by increasingly desperate attempts to salvage both the platform's finances and his own reputation as a visionary leader. The rebranding to "X" in July 2023 symbolized not innovation but the complete erasure of Twitter's legacy—the destruction of a brand that had become synonymous with real-time global communication and democratic discourse. This wasn't creative destruction; it was simply destruction, driven by Musk's long-held obsession with creating an "everything app" that bore little resemblance to what users actually wanted from Twitter.

The platform's technical infrastructure, already strained by massive layoffs and reckless cost-cutting, began showing serious cracks that undermined its core functionality. Rate limiting became a regular occurrence, with users suddenly unable to view tweets—a restriction that would have been unthinkable in Twitter's previous incarnation as the place where news broke first. The company's advertising revenue, which had already plummeted by 50 percent in Musk's first months, continued to decline as major brands fled the increasingly unpredictable platform. What had once been valued at $44 billion was now worth less than half that amount, according to multiple independent analyses.

Perhaps most damaging has been the complete erosion of Twitter's role as a trusted source of real-time information during breaking news events. The platform that had once been essential during natural disasters, political upheavals, and global crises became increasingly unreliable as misinformation flourished and verification became meaningless. The blue checkmark, once a symbol of authenticity that helped users distinguish credible sources from imposters, became just another subscription service available to anyone with eight dollars, while actual verification was relegated to a confusing array of colored badges that few users understood or trusted.

The broader consequences of Twitter's collapse have reshaped the entire landscape of online discourse, fragmenting global conversations across multiple competing platforms. Meta's Threads gained 100 million users in five days by offering a Twitter-like experience without the chaos, while other alternatives like Bluesky and Mastodon attracted users seeking refuge from Musk's increasingly right-wing echo chamber. The human cost extends far beyond the thousands of employees who lost their jobs, often without proper severance, to include former executives who faced harassment campaigns orchestrated by their former CEO and the millions of users who lost access to what had been an essential tool for democratic participation and global communication.

The Twitter-to-X transformation reveals a fundamental truth about power in the digital age: when critical communication infrastructure falls into the hands of individuals driven more by personal grievance than public good, the results are both predictable and catastrophic. Musk's takeover demonstrated how quickly one person can dismantle systems built over decades, regardless of their importance to global democratic discourse. His belief that he could single-handedly improve Twitter through force of will and engineering prowess ignored the complex social, political, and economic factors that made the platform valuable as a digital public square in the first place.

The saga offers crucial lessons for our increasingly platform-dependent world about the concentration of power in digital infrastructure. First, the rapid degradation of Twitter's functionality and cultural influence shows how fragile our communication systems really are when they depend on the whims of individual owners rather than democratic governance structures. Second, the story illustrates the danger of conflating business success in one domain with expertise in another, as Musk's achievements in electric vehicles and space exploration didn't translate to social media mastery. Finally, the human cost of the transformation—from mass layoffs to harassment campaigns against critics—demonstrates the need for stronger protections for both workers and users in the digital economy.

The collapse of Twitter under Elon Musk represents more than just a corporate failure; it's a cautionary tale about what happens when we treat essential communication infrastructure as private property rather than public utilities. The platform's transformation from a global town square into a personal playground demonstrates the fundamental tension between individual genius and institutional wisdom in the digital age. Musk's ability to manipulate algorithms for personal gain, silence critics, and reshape global information flows based on his personal whims reveals the dangers of allowing any individual—regardless of their wealth or supposed brilliance—to wield such unchecked power over the tools of democratic participation.

For those seeking to prevent similar disasters in the future, the Twitter story offers clear guidance about the need for more resilient and accountable systems of online communication. We must develop stronger regulatory frameworks for social media platforms that treat them as the public utilities they have become, create meaningful accountability mechanisms for their leaders, and recognize that the health of our information ecosystem is too important to be left to the whims of billionaire entrepreneurs. The fragmentation of online discourse that followed Twitter's collapse shows both the dangers of platform concentration and the possibility of building more democratic alternatives. As society becomes increasingly dependent on digital platforms for news, commerce, and social connection, the Twitter transformation serves as both warning and wake-up call about protecting the digital commons that democracy depends upon.