Character Limit with Kate Conger and Ryan Mac
Hey. Can you hear me?
Bryan Cantrill:We can. Ryan, welcome.
Ryan Mac:Thank you.
Bryan Cantrill:And so now we're looking for Kate. If you do do you know Kate's alts?
Ryan Mac:It's their first thing on Discord. So Really? Yeah. We haven't done anything on Discord yet, but
Adam Leventhal:Bryan, you say really, like, come on. Like, aren't most legitimate podcasts done on Discord these days?
Bryan Cantrill:I I just I thought everyone was doing it that way. Am I the only 51 year old on Discord? Maybe.
Adam Leventhal:Right. We actually we started on Twitter spaces way back. Yeah.
Ryan Mac:Yeah. Yeah. Gotcha.
Adam Leventhal:The creation of Twitter space was actually the impetus to create this whole thing. Actually, that's true.
Bryan Cantrill:That is all true.
Adam Leventhal:And then the acquisition was what drove us over to Discord, and it's been it's been a minute.
Bryan Cantrill:It has been. It has been a weren't you amazed at how long it's been, Adam? Yes. But But this whole thing was two and a half years ago. That the that that Twitter has been Twitter's been gone for a long time.
Bryan Cantrill:I mean, it's been it just I don't know. It just it doesn't feel it was amazing to me that it's been that Yeah. No. For sure. I I'm I'm sure Ryan you felt every second.
Bryan Cantrill:So it's like, I could spill more like it's been more like fifty
Ryan Mac:years. It's
Bryan Cantrill:what it feels like.
Ryan Mac:Fifty years. Yeah. Kate says she's in the room.
Adam Leventhal:Kate, if you can hear us, can you raise your hand? What if you love about Discord? Thank you, Janet, for that bot.
Bryan Cantrill:Thank you. Thank you, kick fan.
Adam Leventhal:I don't know. I mean, apparently, it's like stream was streaming video games from his private jet, so I guess it's not impossible that Discord is next. But
Bryan Cantrill:Why why why are we doing this? Wait. What are you doing? No. No.
Bryan Cantrill:Don't don't do this. No. No. No. We need to we need to be able to have nice things, please.
Adam Leventhal:Chad is all fired up about Elon buying Discord now.
Bryan Cantrill:Oh, you don't get Chad, just just take a seat, Chad. Kate, welcome. And and now audio problems. You know, we do did this in the remnants of Twitter spaces. This is like however he
Ryan Mac:It's in death like Twitter spaces. Incredible. Yeah.
Adam Leventhal:I was gonna say this is like our our interview of Sarah Wood Williams who's not allowed to
Bryan Cantrill:Sarah Wood Williams not allowed to put her own book. So we we have we we are do it's kind of a ticker bell thing. Right? We kinda do like the the flashlight on the wall to interviews for our Win Williams. Sorry.
Bryan Cantrill:What what's that? Proof.
Adam Leventhal:Sarah?
Bryan Cantrill:Right. Is about what's that you say? So, Kate, you are currently muted.
Ryan Mac:It's a technology reporter. Promise you. She's don't forget this.
Bryan Cantrill:Oh my god. Goddamn it. Diet Coke came out over the mic. You know, I really I try to avoid that. That is actually that was a real spray shot of Diet Coke on the mic.
Bryan Cantrill:I'm actually a little bit worried honestly. That was that was I you know, because this is how I feel. Know, we're we're a computer company. But we've had, you know, as you can imagine, everything gone wrong with video conferencing that's possible. And I in particular, like Microsoft teams, I don't if it's Teams or us, but it's a bad relationship.
Bryan Cantrill:And we just have to kinda reassure people that, like, no. No. We actually know what we're doing even though can't see unmute ourselves or share a presentation or what have you. It's like, no. But please, please, let us build your computer.
Ryan Mac:We can just get this started and see, I'm gonna have her try another device. But Sure. Sorry about that. But
Bryan Cantrill:No. No worries. No worries. Alright. So, Leo, let's let's hop in.
Bryan Cantrill:So first of all, the it is great to have you here. We are I huge huge huge fans of this book. This is a great book. I love this book. When it first came out, we huge fans and I just cannot thank you enough for for joining us.
Bryan Cantrill:Just because I mean, book is so good. It and we're gonna talk about like many of the of the different ways in which it is terrific. But it is it is extraordinary well written, I just like to say, just to channel my own mother. And I I it is just a very well written book and that's, you know, I think we should take a take time out to actually acknowledge that because not every book is well written unfortunately. But it right.
Bryan Cantrill:It is a it is a very well written book. It is authoritative. It is so well sourced and and I mean you and you just have written a a terrific book and then on top of it all, you've got an amazing title. The title is so good. I
Adam Leventhal:don't know if this is your experience with everyone I've mentioned the title to kind of it's like pause, pause, pause, and they're like, oh, that's a great title. It's just it's like just enough one plus one that lets them figure out the two. Is it so where did you guys come up with the title? Is that like something that comes from the publisher? Like, where did
Bryan Cantrill:it come from?
Ryan Mac:Where did it come from? Unfortunately, we can't claim credit for the title because I think Kate's will come in somehow, it sounds horrible. The title, we were going to go with something completely different actually. We were very early on in the writing process and we, you know, we're like, can't we can't get started until we have an awesome title. And so we, Kate and I went on a walk soon after we sold the book and got started on the writing.
Ryan Mac:And we came up with the name Hellsight, which we thought was very clever and was, you know, an allusion to, you know, the name that everyone has for Twitter when you stay on it for too long and you feel horrible after using it, you know, also has the double entendre of, you know, being a terrible place for Elon and kind of where he met his match. And we told it to our agent and our editor, they kind of looked at each other and were like, you know, you guys don't worry about the title for now. And we were like kind of mad because, yeah, we're
Bryan Cantrill:But what do we but did you hear us? We came up with a very good title. I'm like, yes. And we just don't worry about the title right now. The title's not important right now.
Bryan Cantrill:Yeah. That's funny.
Ryan Mac:So yeah, they they kind of were just like, know, go back to the drawing board or just kind of were very nice about it. And we were kind of just like, you know, fuck you guys, this is great. And then, you know, there was a slow progression from our editor to kind of come up with other titles, and he came up with Character Limit kind of on a whim. And yeah, at first we were like,
Ryan Mac:I don't know
Ryan Mac:how I feel about it, know, it seems too obvious. And then we kind of said it more and more and you know we fell in love with it, and so Will Penguin, thanks for the title, but that's where that came from.
Bryan Cantrill:It's a really good title. I think you because I think it is actually just enough work. I think Hellsite, I would be explaining that one to my mom.
Ryan Mac:And Yeah. Exactly.
Bryan Cantrill:And then kinda like after you'd explain it to me like, I don't know. I just I still don't get it. And versus I think the also the great thing about character limit, obviously the double entendre there. It's like just enough work for the reader. And for someone who did who doesn't know anything about Twitter it just feels like an innocuous title then it's like you just learn a little bit more about both Twitter and Elon.
Bryan Cantrill:You're like, oh, okay. It's like you know, was was saying Adam it's kind of like a Monday crossword puzzle. Not too hard. But Right. To just just, you know, just enough work.
Adam Leventhal:Right. Made to be soft.
Ryan Mac:Made to be soft. Yeah. What has been
Bryan Cantrill:the reception button, by the way? I assume that that we are not the only ones that think this is a great title. I think this is a the consensus Yeah.
Ryan Mac:It's been good. And I think I think it's I think it's just that. You know, were trying to be too clever. You know, with books, you're trying to appeal to a wider audience. Know, we were thinking probably our brains are too steeped in Twitter and from using it for too long, but we were trying to be very clever and have an inside joke for the crew.
Ryan Mac:But when you're working with a book, you want something to be a little more mass appeal. And I think character limit strikes that balance of people that get it and then people that can work their way towards getting it and then also understand that it has a meaning to Twitter's founding and its purpose. But overall, the book has been great. Loved just how it's put together, the cover. I think contrasting with some of the other books that are out there about the acquisition, it's really clear that this is focused on Elon as well.
Ryan Mac:And that can have positives and negatives. If you're tired of hearing about him and don't want to read about him anymore, that could turn you off. But by and large, I think people understand that there's a greater lesson here in this book. If you're trying to understand what's going on in the government, for example, you can pick this thing up and see basically the playbook that's been rolled out within our federal government. So yeah, I think you know, it's been a little more than six months at this point that we've released the book.
Ryan Mac:It came out in September, and we've just been pleasantly surprised with the whole process. It's both of our first books, so it's been wonderful.
Bryan Cantrill:I was gonna ask because I mean it's a it's a labor of love. I mean it it it just I really shows in the details. So can take me back to when you decided to write a book because you both are reporters. You're you've been both covering Musk and Twitter for a lot. And at some point, you cross a threshold where it's like, actually, this has got to be much longer form.
Bryan Cantrill:We've got to go do a book. What what was that deliberation like? What was that moment?
Ryan Mac:So I'm gonna we're both reporters at the New York Times, and we were covering this, very unique transaction at The Times. I had done a lot of reporting on Elon in previous jobs. I was at BuzzFeed News before this and reported it on him and his companies at length. But in coming to the Times, it wasn't something I really focused on until this. This deal starts to happen in April 2022.
Ryan Mac:They kind of need more help reporting, and I jump on. Kate is the Twitter beat reporter, and we married what we covered together. And we're just, at some points, writing two or three stories a day. When the deal finally closes in September 2022, and then he takes over in October, you know, we were sometimes writing two or three stories a day. And it was very chaotic and a lot of work and we were talking to so many people that we were getting so much reporting that it it just didn't fit into our stories.
Ryan Mac:Yeah.
Bryan Cantrill:It really Can you give us a day off here? Could you actually like Can you just like take maybe the chaos can take the weekend here, and I just, like, need to breathe? I mean, we're at any point where you just, oh my god. I we just because it just feels like it keeps coming. I mean, at during that era, especially.
Ryan Mac:Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's the thing. I've been working weekends now with some of the Doge stuff now, and with him, you go through these cycles where it's just constant work given the amount of news that he generates. And so at that time, we realized pretty soon after he bought the company or took over the company that I think we might have enough for a book here because the details that we have are so crazy. In The New York Times, we can mention certain things in a sentence or two, maybe a paragraph if you're lucky. But with a book, you have this ability to really blow out these scenes and show details and really dive into what it meant when he cut this service or fired these people or did this crazy action.
Ryan Mac:And so, we realized pretty quickly that we should do a book. I've had opportunities to do books in the past and some stories that I've covered, and yeah, this just felt like the right moment to do that.
Bryan Cantrill:But so it was after he arrived at Twitter that he made that decision. That was because a question that I had for you was how much the trial which is kind of like this detail that is just like easy to forget that he had to be taken to court to force to buy them. And that ended up generating a bunch of like really interesting primary documents. I wondered how much that factored into the decision to to get mean, because certainly you like the JCAL text messages of you have my sword. I mean, is not something you're going to get otherwise, I would assume.
Ryan Mac:Yeah. I mean, lawsuit was a big part of our reporting process. You know, Kate was really in-depth in that and was already considering doing a book. Think this is the kind of secret we've been telling people is like she was already considering doing the book even before he bought the company, but we had the discussion of like, you know, what happens if this deal doesn't go through, and we sell this book, and maybe we're going to be stuck with writing about a deal that never happened. And so I was kind of waiting for it to happen before we went through with it, but in some ways, God for that lawsuit because it led to an incredibly rich reporting environment.
Ryan Mac:Have discovery that happens. You have depositions that get taken. Have text messages. You have emails. It was so rich that we were able to reconstruct a lot of these scenes simply from those documents.
Ryan Mac:You don't even really need to talk to the folks involved. It'd be nice to, but these documents were kind of one in a million for a deal that was like one in a million. And that's what was great about this.
Bryan Cantrill:It makes for an amazing read. Over the weekend because I read this one when first came out, but over the weekend, I wanted brush up on it. I don't know if you had the same experience like Yeah. Okay, just need to brush up on this. This book grips you so much that I mean, I've already read it, and like I'm just trying to like dip in to remind myself of things, and you just get locked into it because like the the detail is so terrific and so weird.
Bryan Cantrill:These people are just there's so many weird cats in this thing. I mean You
Adam Leventhal:mentioned like the J Cal stuff like where Kaldanis is off doing, like, his Kickstarter to, like, get the last few millions or billions or whatever. And Elon texting him, like, knock
Ryan Mac:it off. And it is it is so vivid. The special purpose vehicle
Kate Conger:that try to reach.
Bryan Cantrill:Oh my god. Kate's here. I I just heard Kate.
Kate Conger:I don't wanna jinx myself, but I think I can talk.
Bryan Cantrill:Oh my god. Kate is here. Kate is here. Oh.
Kate Conger:Hi. Sorry, guys.
Bryan Cantrill:No. Not at all. We we we blame we actually you know, we're blame Twitter spaces for this because, you know, this is this is our audio problems. Reminds Twitter spaces.
Adam Leventhal:That's right. Reminisce.
Bryan Cantrill:Alright. Twitter spaces. Kate, it is great to have you here. Have you been able to
Kate Conger:Yeah. Thank you so much for bearing with me.
Bryan Cantrill:Definitely. I so I'm not sure if you've been have have you been able to hear any of this, or have you just have we been completely silent to you?
Kate Conger:I have been able to hear the last, like, three minutes, but that's it. It was totally silent when I was first trying to join. But, yeah, I mean, just to respond to what you were saying, we really didn't want this to feel like a tech book where it was, like, really dry and academic. We wanted these scenes to come to life and to feel visceral and vivid. And I really wanted it to feel like you're reading fiction, that it had that lifelike quality to it that was really important to us.
Bryan Cantrill:And you nailed it. I mean, you nailed it so well. I mean, you you almost overshot the mark because, again, like, you can't just read a page of this thing. It's so gripping.
Kate Conger:And Well, thank you.
Bryan Cantrill:And and in terms of, so one question I've got is, like, where did you you you got so much detail in there. And the I mean, like, we just and I was I was going back into it because the first time you read it, you're so overwhelmed by it, but it was so great to be able to like just really just some of this detail really hold on to. Like, I mean, the I don't know if you I'd certainly forgotten about the fact that, know, Elon is unable to join a Google Meet properly, and he joins at one moment and, like, his Google avatar is, like, sexually explicit and inappropriate. And it's like, wait.
Ryan Mac:Just that.
Bryan Cantrill:Who has who has the Google avatar set to be a 69 or whatever? Like, it's like it that d this is those little details that you included. Where did you kinda draw how did you kinda draw the line about which detail to include? Because I kinda assume there's details on the on the cutting room floor, but maybe they're not. Maybe this is everything.
Ryan Mac:I think the line
Kate Conger:was I mean, there's so much that we wanted to include and didn't, you know, and it was what could we confirm? What did we know we could back up and report faithfully and what could we not? There's so many things that we heard that I think we wish we could have
Bryan Cantrill:put in the book and we
Kate Conger:just weren't able to lock them down well enough to publish them.
Bryan Cantrill:I'm just telling you, if you as subscribers only character limit the b sides, the unconfirmed b sides, like, you can put me
Ryan Mac:down as a subscriber
Bryan Cantrill:that way. Unconfirmed character limit gossip. We could do a whole whole other book. That I I you could actually get a whole cottage industry out of that. I'm sure.
Bryan Cantrill:So that's interesting. So I mean, there is a bunch of detail that that and I mean, that's I think what I love so much about the just the authoritative nature of this book is like for all the zany detail in here, it's all confirmed. This is all. And I assume you had in terms of like, I mean, we're talking about like the lawsuit and the importance of that as as primary material. And then it's like so much of this is happening in like this in front of a lot of people that I assume you're just getting I mean, you like you're able to get tons of sources on this stuff.
Bryan Cantrill:Mean, you must have had people just coming out of the woodwork helping you out. I mean, it must have overwhelming in terms of primary documents. Is that don't want you to review any of your sources, obviously, but
Ryan Mac:I mean, when you lay off that many people or fire that many people, those are a lot of aggrieved folks. At this point, it's 80% of the company, thousands of folks. And we reached out to a lot of them, and only a small fraction, of course, are going to respond, and a fraction of those are going to respond in a way that they want to talk, it's a rich reporting environment that we can see when people get laid off. They change their LinkedIn
Adam Leventhal:work
Ryan Mac:history. They're more receptive to receiving messages from us, And so, you know, I've never really been in a reporting environment like that where you can just, you know, reach out to someone and they might have something to say or, you know, they've seen something. Everyone had something to share basically.
Bryan Cantrill:Right. The fish are just jumping in the boat. You're like, wow, this is this is pretty easy.
Ryan Mac:Yeah. And we have Yeah.
Kate Conger:You know, this is also like, there's the perception of this book that it's like the hater's guide to the Twitter deal. But the reality is there are lot of folks coming from Elon's perspective and Elon's camp wanting to defend what he's doing and to talk about the rationale behind some of these decisions.
Bryan Cantrill:And I
Kate Conger:think we were really lucky to have those folks as well. We could kind of get inside his head a little bit and figure out, you know, what his intent or what his feelings were in these particular moments.
Bryan Cantrill:And did you feel that you were I mean, obviously, you know this guy well from a reporting perspective, but he almost feels like someone like the more you know, the less you know in term I mean, I I I find him still to be very unpredictable. Do you do you find that you're you were able to get better forward visibility into his actions the the more you knew him?
Ryan Mac:I mean, you start to see patterns for for his actions and some things, as well as the things he says, you know, they just become repetitive at at this point. You know, it's not like we could have predicted that he would have ended up in the federal government doing what he's doing now, But, you know, some of the same lines that he used at Twitter, he's using with Doge. Know, I think of something like he says, like, I see, you know, there's fraud everywhere. You know, that's what he was saying when he was talking about bots at Twitter and like trying to instill Twitter Blue and get that going. He meant to do it as a way of combating supposed fraud.
Ryan Mac:And so that's what he's talking. He's going after social security and trying to root out whatever billions of dollars he sees as in in just payments, basically. So yeah, I guess when you spend that much time with him, get sure you start to see these patterns. And it's kind of like, you know, the same dozen things that he says all the time when you really think about it.
Kate Conger:He is super predictable in that way. I mean, he references the same movies, he makes the same jokes, and then he has the same hyper fixations. You know, we have like the ghost employees at Twitter, where he thought there were people on the payroll of the company that shouldn't have been there. And you kind of see him repeating that narrative now with Social Security and saying, oh, we have all these 120 year
Ryan Mac:olds on
Kate Conger:Social Security sending them checks. Like, there's these there's these same fixations that kind of run through his mind over and over again.
Bryan Cantrill:The dosing employees is crazy. Yeah. So crazy.
Adam Leventhal:You talk about this Crazy. Kind of sounding like fiction. You guys gave a great interview with Kevin Russo, like, back in September, I think, where you described it as almost being past the point of credibility where but it is all real.
Bryan Cantrill:Yeah. I mean, that was one
Kate Conger:of the craziest interviews that I had, I think, in reporting this process. I was speaking to someone and they said, you know, we're we're doing an audit to look for ghost employees. And I thought I misheard them. I was just like, what? Like, what did you just say?
Kate Conger:You know? And made them repeat it four or five times because I was like, what what are you talking about? You know? I was like, I cannot be hearing this correctly.
Bryan Cantrill:If you've ever employed anybody, like, you have to have an I nine when you employ someone. So if you have someone who is on your payroll who doesn't exist, crimes have been committed. I mean, the the there is Social Security fraud going through. This is such an outlandish idea. And, Kate Ryan, you should know that when I read that paragraph in particular, I Yelped.
Bryan Cantrill:I, like, verbally exclaimed. And it I mean, it's it's stunning to me that the and it sounds like it was it was stunning to you as well to learn about.
Ryan Mac:It it actually
Kate Conger:Oh, yeah. I mean, there's yeah. Go ahead, Ryan.
Ryan Mac:I was gonna say, it it comes from his fixation on the movie Office Space. You know, the guy that there's the character who's like put in the basement, everyone forgets about, you know, the stapler guy. And what's funny is if you look, you know, he's had plenty of Office Space memes and posts In the last couple months as he's been at Doge, you know, he had a sign in his office that Kate got a photo of. I think it was something like, What did you do today? Or What have you done today?
Ryan Mac:Which is an office space reference. Yeah. It's again, I it's office space reference.
Bryan Cantrill:Wow. You know, someone I I feel like I make I I feel like I make more than the media number of office space references. I don't know there's an office space reference because he the what have you done this week? He also says that sends that to Parag Agarwal. And he's just like the okay.
Bryan Cantrill:So this is actually so we see a bunch of these same techniques that he you know, what have you done this week? And he he he kinda uses this to Twitter and sends you the fork in the road email. And if you don't reply to this email, you're fired, which makes no sense. And you outlined in the book this incident where it's like people don't know who's working there and who's not because like they didn't they didn't reply to the email because they were on paternity leave or whatever whatever that means. The so but and then he he has applied these same techniques at Doge.
Bryan Cantrill:Does he feel that they worked at Twitter? Is he Yes.
Kate Conger:And that's the thing I find so fascinating about
Bryan Cantrill:all of it.
Kate Conger:Ryan and I did this video for the Times a while ago, where we're talking about the similarities between the Takeover and Doge. And he actually reposted it and was like, yeah, this is the playbook. So he views it as a success and perhaps maybe his biggest success, which I think is so interesting for someone who's kind of like birthed out of the VC mindset that he sees this big success in his only company that's arguably a financial failure. Right? So there's something really interesting going on there that I can't quite figure out.
Bryan Cantrill:That is wild because I think so the the we on the the the night that Musk took over, we did kind of an emergency episode, a spontaneous episode of Oxide Friends. We had chartered majors on and we kind of just forecasted into the future. And the thing that Adam, wonder if you went back and re listen. I re listen to that just and it was really interesting to re listen to it because, you know we were obviously naive in so many ways and wondering like, God, I wonder if they'll let you know the super villains back on and of course like they did all that. But the thing that I actually going back and re listening to it and then obviously with the book, I think that when he took over Twitter, I, and I think like many people, assumed that he had some level of executive competence.
Adam Leventhal:Or Not just some level, like actual, like, excellence in it. Right? Like I think Excellent. Yeah. This is something you you thought like, okay, this is not going to be the gap.
Adam Leventhal:Right? This is where he's gonna bring some real discipline.
Bryan Cantrill:And this book just goes into great detail about just managerial incompetence bluntly. And that was a surprise I think to me, but it sound guess the question is like that's amazing to me that he kind of reflect back on this being like, that was good. It's like it really wasn't. You you destroyed your own mythology. I mean, were you two I mean, you knew him better going into the the the Twitter acquisition.
Bryan Cantrill:Were you surprised I mean, the ghost employees and all this other nonsense. Were you surprised by this the sheer level of incompetence that this exhibited?
Kate Conger:I would say that I was. I think Ryan maybe knows Elon even better than I do, particularly at that time going into the deal. But I think I was as much caught up in the mythos of Elon as anyone else, thinking surely he's got a plan somewhere behind the scenes. And it was something that would come up in a lot of my interviews for this, where I was asking people, well, what was the plan and what was he thinking? And you know, it was just every time there is no plan.
Kate Conger:He's just kind of operating by instinct and sort of by sense of humor, what would be a funny outcome and then doing that. But I think it kind of caught me off guard because I kept expecting there was some master plan back there behind the scenes. I don't know, Ryan, what do you think?
Ryan Mac:I think it's also, you know, this is very unique, right? He doesn't, he's not a guy that takes over companies. He's a guy that builds them up, even Tesla, which he didn't technically found. He was very early there.
Bryan Cantrill:Right.
Ryan Mac:He built that company up. SpaceX, he built up. And these are companies built around him. You know, they they have systems in place and management teams in place that can cover for him when he's gone or, you know, they have certain areas of expertise and things that he's not an expert in. Or can
Adam Leventhal:refer him when he's there?
Ryan Mac:Exactly. But with Twitter, you know, this is something that was built, you know, with someone else's other people's visions. He came in with this kind of hubris that he could do it better, and he came in with this belief that a lot of the people there were evil. They disliked, they hated him, that they were part of this you know woke contingency. You know, again these are his own words and he wanted to you know slash and burn that.
Ryan Mac:And so when you come in with that mentality as well as this kind of hubris which you know we see throughout the book, It led him down this path where he kind of just did things to be contrarian to Twitter. You know, if they did something one way, he would go the other. And there was, I guess, just a lack of willingness to understand why processes happen this way or why they did things this way in the past. Yeah, and that's where we got to where we are now.
Bryan Cantrill:Yeah. And I mean, I think I know where kind of some of that comes from where I think it's it when you've been able to do something that other people thought you couldn't do, you begin to become that is you've been contrarian and right. Begin to think that anything contrarian is right because you think it. And you begin to like there's kind of a feedback loop that we've seen a couple people get into. And I think that he just I mean, I think anything that's kind of in his id is tautologically correct.
Bryan Cantrill:And then he seems to not have the circuitry to really follow-up on like, hey, by the way, like, you're wrong about that thing back there. Like, do you care? He doesn't Right. Mean, this is a he doesn't seem to be very reflective. Am I am I missing something People
Ryan Mac:have told him, you know, you can't you can't build a mass market electric car. You can't Right. Build reusable rockets, and he's done both those things. And and we before Twitter, we we saw this with COVID. You know, he had this conclusion that he had come to with COVID.
Ryan Mac:It wouldn't be as severe. We would be fine by April 2020. And he was wrong, you know, and I think he was, like, yelled at for being wrong. And he still, like, dug his heels in and, you know, believed he was right. And, you know, you see that pattern play out with Twitter that, you know, his way of doing things is the right way, and he's gonna continue doing that.
Bryan Cantrill:And so what incident that you that you mentioned, I think, the beginning of the book is the the the cave rescue in Thailand and him being very wrong about this where having this just ridiculous idea that he's gonna bring submarines into this thing and then ending up not reacting very well when and and obviously kind of famously disparaging the the the actual the the cave divers there. It feels like that would that because that's in what 2018. Mhmm. And it feels like that's the kind of the beginning of him being of of beginning to have a couple of high prominent misses. Is that a is that a fair read?
Bryan Cantrill:I mean, is that you featured it in the book, so you obviously you you must think that that's an important kind of incident in its history.
Ryan Mac:Yeah. The year of 2018 is very interesting for the Elon history. You have the production hell where he goes through with Tesla, they're not able to manufacture enough Model 3s to meet these kind of very high water deadlines that he's made for himself and the expectation that he set, and so he's afraid Tesla's stock price will crater. So then he's sleeping on the factory, he's spending more time on Twitter, he's very alone. That's the same summer he tries to take Tesla private with the funding secured tweet and gets sued by the SEC, And he also tries to get involved with a number of, like, public service, you know, activities on Twitter.
Ryan Mac:At one point, he said he was gonna fix the water in Flint, if you remember that. Oh my god. No. Yeah. That's that's a throwback one.
Ryan Mac:Yeah. If that's for the real That's a classic track.
Bryan Cantrill:Yeah.
Ryan Mac:Yeah. He never never did, by the way. Yeah.
Bryan Cantrill:Exactly. Find this surprising, but
Ryan Mac:Yeah. And then he says he's gonna save these kids in in Thailand. These kids that get trapped in a cave and build a submarine to get them out, and it doesn't. There's a lot of publicity around it, a lot of fanfare. He flies to Thailand, drops off sub, it never gets used, and this guy goes on CNN and says basically Elon's it was a publicity stunt, he should shove the submarine up his ass, know, we never used it, yada yada yada, and Elon gets so pissed off that he calls the guy naturally a guy, which for whatever reason.
Ryan Mac:And yeah, you start to see him become unraveled. He starts to unravel and unravel, And it's this kind of first public display of this sort of unbecoming. I don't
Bryan Cantrill:know if there's a word for it,
Kate Conger:but Well, I think we also wanted to highlight these moments, the cave diver moment, his run-in with the SEC, because these are the moments where Elon is learning that there are no consequences for what he says and does online.
Bryan Cantrill:Right. Interesting.
Kate Conger:And that those emboldening experiences are what lead him into the online persona that he's developed today. You know, he's sued for defamation in that case, and he wins. He's fined by the SEC for the Tesla tweets. And, you know, it's I think
Ryan Mac:He settles.
Kate Conger:A 20,000,000 fine
Bryan Cantrill:for
Kate Conger:him and a 20,000,000 fine for Tesla. It's like a parking ticket for someone like him. And and so I think these are really big eye opener moments for him where he realizes that he's kind of free from the tethers of most consequences.
Bryan Cantrill:That's a really interesting point.
Ryan Mac:His lawyer in the PedoGuide trial was Alex Spiro, who is now his personal lawyer, represents him throughout. You know, it was very influential in the Twitter deal. But yes, that was kind of the audition for Spiro. He goes in. Everyone thinks he's going to settle at some point or he'll definitely lose this case.
Ryan Mac:It was really interesting. I was in the courtroom and he wins. You know, he goes through the very long process. He testifies. It's obviously very painful for someone like him to to be embarrassed like that publicly.
Ryan Mac:He he ultimately wins the case, and I think there's a lot that stems from from that moment.
Bryan Cantrill:That's really interesting. If folks haven't seen it, there is a absolutely superlative documentary, The Rescue, on which actually gave me mean, because I I was kind of following that, you know, from afar, not really paying super close attention to the actual mechanics of the rescue itself. The more you know about though how those folks were actually rescued and the absolute daring that they pulled off and emphasizing these kids and just extraordinary. You also like really appreciate just how totally out of line he was. It's like and then to turn around to that, I mean, it's just it's really galling.
Bryan Cantrill:It's a galling incident and should have been something that really should have given him humility. But Kate, I think it's a very interesting point you're making that it's actually teaching him the opposite lesson. It's actually not giving him humility. It's telling him there are no consequences for you. You can actually say whatever you want.
Kate Conger:Right. And I think that was really why we wanted to talk about those specific instances in the start of the book, because those are the formative moments for the character that he's displaying today and the character that he's displaying throughout the course of this deal, where he's saying, I'm going to buy this company and do it in forty eight hours. So no, I'm not going to buy it. And I don't care if the law says I have to, to like, yes, I am going to buy it. And I'm going to get rid of all the content moderation rules, to hell with the EU.
Kate Conger:It doesn't matter that I have to have content moderation rules. You know, all of these decisions stem, I think, from these lessons that he's learning in 2018.
Bryan Cantrill:Yeah. Wow. And he I I mean, it is just just remarkable how I mean, you mentioned the diligence. I mean, it is, like, hilarious that he he does no no due diligence on the deal, basically. And then he asks for all of these things that would have been part of that diligence.
Bryan Cantrill:I mean, you you must have been laughing as you're writing about this. I mean, were were there things that he I mean, there must have been so much that was so surprising to you. But were there some things that you heard of it like this has to be fixed? I guess you mentioned this a bit with the ghost employees. But you must have heard of these things like, this can't be right.
Bryan Cantrill:And then you go to investigate, you're like, oh my god, this actually is right. But the duodenum seems like it's one of those.
Ryan Mac:Yeah, exactly. People involved with the deal were just scratching their heads. These are folks that have worked on these deals throughout their whole careers for decades, and these deals take months, if not years. You're negotiating over price, or you're looking at the books, or you're trying to understand certain details behind the scenes. And he saw he basically he got no nonpublic information.
Ryan Mac:He went off of what Twitter files in its 10 Ks and financial filings with the SEC. There was no looking under the hood at all. And I wouldn't buy a car under those standards, you know, like her home or anything. He bought a $44,000,000,000 company with that expectation. So yeah, it was shocking for a lot of people involved.
Ryan Mac:And I don't know if there's ever been a deal quite like that.
Bryan Cantrill:Well, and especially because then forcing performance, right? I mean, how often has performance been forced on a deal? I feel that's been, that's happened rarely if ever. In terms of why he settled, assume it was becoming clear to him that not only was he gonna lose, but there was gonna be yet more discovery. Do you have any I mean, you don't talk about that too much in the book, but any insight into why he settled?
Kate Conger:We don't talk about it a ton in the book, but I think that the timing of the settlement is important there. Musk had a deposition coming up Yeah. That he was supposed to be given that case. He had postponed it several times. And Twitter's executives had all almost all been deposed.
Kate Conger:The CEO had been deposed. Several other senior executives had been deposed. And I think the fact that he settled basically on the eve of his deposition indicates two things. One, that his legal team did not get the smoking gun out of those executive depositions that they were hoping for. They didn't get proof from Parag Agarwal saying, yeah, I always intended to defraud Elon, and
Bryan Cantrill:that was my secret master plan.
Kate Conger:The other thing is that they did not want Elon to sit and talk under oath about what he was thinking throughout the process of this deal and what was going on.
Bryan Cantrill:So Can imagine?
Kate Conger:I think those two things working in tandem led to the settlement.
Bryan Cantrill:I mean, there must have been a line of attorneys waiting to depo this guy. Be I mean, they they would gotta be drawings. Trust me. How do you determine I mean, because this guy is obviously so easy to depo and that you can just get him going just going off. I mean, it Well, and I was I
Kate Conger:was just reading another deposition that he gave in another court case the other day, and it's with Alex Spiro as his lawyer. And over and over again throughout that deposition, Spiro says, oh, I don't want him to answer that question. He's not gonna answer it. And then Elon proceeds to answer it anyway. And so he is a nightmare client, I think, in these deposition scenarios.
Adam Leventhal:You just you paint such a great picture of Elon, just the fragility of him of, like, telling a joke and all of his yes men kind of forcing to laugh. The new Twitter folks sort of looking around wondering why everyone's laughing. And the the like, the I was gonna say manipulated, but the way that Y'all Ralph, like, kind of convinces him of of moderation, of speech but not reach, and just the fragility of him. I would have loved to be in that room to see those lawyers convince him not to do the deposition. I mean, what would they have done to get him to believe that was his own idea to not speak under oath?
Kate Conger:Yeah, I mean, that is one room we did not report in Thailand. Think I would love
Bryan Cantrill:to answer that, but I don't know if we know. Go ahead, Ryan.
Ryan Mac:No, I was gonna say the same. You know, if you have if you're listening to this, let let us know. We're we're still reporting on it. So
Bryan Cantrill:Okay. Alright. I I guess that's the reveal. I thought the reveal was gonna be like, if you listen to this, you wanted the answer. You will find that on character limits.
Bryan Cantrill:The character limit, the unconfirmed b sides, now available for $10,000 Yeah. That's one of these bars.
Ryan Mac:You were asking about other things that we felt were just, like, unbelievable that we had reported. And one of them was you know, Elon taking the name that he had set aside for his new kid with Grimes and using it on Oh my God. One of the kids from his other baby mama, Siobhan Zillis.
Adam Leventhal:So bummed.
Ryan Mac:Without telling without telling Grimes. So that was that was also on the list
Bryan Cantrill:of things. I mean, talk about a social situation that, let's face it, most of us just don't don't find ourselves in. Like, of us don't even know the protocol. For
Ryan Mac:yourself. Yeah.
Adam Leventhal:It's like, what does this matter say?
Bryan Cantrill:What does this matter say? Dear Abby, I what is the protocol here? Yeah. That must have been it's just yeah. Again, unhinged.
Bryan Cantrill:So then we get to one thing I I definitely I mean, I I wanna talk about, obviously, about Doge because we're seeing so much so many echoes. You already mentioned it with kind of like the ghost employees and the fork in the road email. As reporters, do you feel you've got a bit of a I mean, because you must have very mixed feelings about what's happening with those and like, know, like, is terrible for the country, but boy, there's gonna be a lot of great reportage. On the other hand, this is gonna get, you know, this is gonna get dinner on the table. Do you have any kind of mixed feelings about this kind of stuff?
Bryan Cantrill:I mean, it's like it would be sorry, you don't have to confess to those if you don't want to.
Kate Conger:You know, I have a lot of friends who I would say are like, pretty light news consumers, you know, they're not people who read the news every day. They're not people who have ever used Twitter. And that category of friend are the people who I'm getting a lot of phone calls and text messages from right now, because I think what's going on with doge is like bubbled to their level of awareness. And they're like, Are you okay? Are you okay?
Kate Conger:I'm fine. I think, you know, Ryan and I both like to be busy. We like getting scoops. And like you said, this is an environment that is really rich for that. I do think that I personally feel a lot more prepared for this having written this book, because I feel like I have a good understanding of Elon's playbook, I understand how he operates.
Kate Conger:And so I don't feel caught off guard, or frightened or spooked by a lot of the things that are happening. I feel like I understand them. That's not to say I think that like this is a positive outcome for our federal government. But it it it is not as stressful of an environment for me as it is for a lot of people, I think, who are consuming news about this.
Bryan Cantrill:That's right. So your friends are reaching out to you. Like, no. No. You don't understand.
Bryan Cantrill:I should be reaching out to you. I am fine. I know I actually Right. Like, Twitter. You, on the other hand, maybe are very traumatized because you are seeing him destroy the Sacramento data center for the first time.
Bryan Cantrill:Albeit now it's like, you know, whatever. It's the IRS or whatever.
Kate Conger:Right. Exactly. And like, you know, I have a lot of most of my cousins are in the military in some capacity and I think are suddenly like, we have to send a bullet point email. Like, what is this? And I'm like, boy, do I have a book for
Bryan Cantrill:you at your Christmas I was just gonna say, so I think and I really do believe this. I mean, I think that like anyone who wants to understand Doge needs to read Character Limit. I mean, the the you know so much more because it is just like, good lord, it's word for word. I mean, it it there's no it's exactly what he did. It's exactly the playbook to a shocking degree.
Bryan Cantrill:And I I think that that anyone who wants to know more about it needs to read character limit because I think you go into so much detail there. So another question that I I wanna be sure we asked because there was just this recent news about the super weird deal where x has now been sold to x AI, his other company. Yeah. And this was mean, definitely picked the right news week to to report on that one because that is like way below the fold with everything else that's going on. What he what did you make of that deal?
Bryan Cantrill:What does that deal mean? What does that deal mean for so yeah. What what what were your take what were your takes on that deal?
Kate Conger:So I think that deal is really interesting. You can slice it two ways, and they're very opposite. I think one one way to see that deal is an admission that the Twitter experiment has failed, and that the profits that he promised his investors on that deal are not going to materialize. And those were supposed to come from the subscription business, selling check marks and from payments on the platform. And, you know, as of today, I think the subscription business is negligible and payments have yet to materialize.
Kate Conger:So so those revenues that were promised to these investors are not coming.
Bryan Cantrill:And advertisers have been told to go fuck themselves. So that's important.
Kate Conger:Right. And advertisers have been told to to go fuck themselves. And so that revenue is dissipated. So I think one way to look at this deal is that it's an admission that the the Twitter experiment from a financial perspective is not working. And even with the Trump bump that Elon's receiving now, it's not going to work quickly enough.
Kate Conger:The other way to look at it, I think the more optimistic way to look at it, is that this is getting all of those investors out clean. Basically buying Twitter for the valuation that he assigned to it back in 2022. They're all getting, you know, they're breaking even basically on their investment. And they're now getting stake in this AI company that on paper is worth much more. So they're potentially hopping on another Elon rocket ship.
Kate Conger:And, you know, whether or not xAI ends up being worth anything, I guess we'll wait and see. And, you know, it is really a test of what the Twitter data is worth, right? I mean, the value of x to x AI is all of the tweets that we've all been posting for the
Bryan Cantrill:last decade and a half. Yeah.
Kate Conger:And that's potentially the edge for x AI over all these other artificial intelligence models that are training on other sources of data that that x has this sort of proprietary corpus of conversations that is perhaps more valuable than whatever OpenAI is training on. And I think, you know, who knows if that actually proves to be as valuable as Elon says it is, but that could be an edge for them.
Ryan Mac:That being said, I mean these other AI companies have trained on that data already, you know, and I don't think you need that synergy of xAI buying x to get that data. Like they were already using that anyways. You don't get anything else from one company being owned by the other because they're Elon, Inc. Anyways. So yeah, it's still very strange to me.
Ryan Mac:There's still a ton of debt that the companies have to deal with now, the $12,000,000,000 13 billion dollars in debt.
Bryan Cantrill:Yeah, we're going get to high Because that debt, I mean, I've
Kate Conger:Yeah, Ryan, there's actually a question about this in the chat that I want to put to you, because I've seen this all over social media. And I know you and I have talked about it. But it says the financial social media take on the X to XAI sale was that some of the loans Elon had funding it were predicated on the Tesla stock price, and he was getting close to getting margin called on that.
Bryan Cantrill:Yes. And?
Kate Conger:So Ryan and I have talked about this not being the case, but
Bryan Cantrill:I want Ryan to explain. Oh, on the hook for this.
Ryan Mac:So none of the loans that were used had Tesla stock as collateral. So it was he had gotten rid of all he had initially taken out debt with Tesla stock as collateral but had replaced it all by the time the deal closed. Oh, that's interesting. No longer the case, yeah.
Kate Conger:Yeah. So this is a take that's been going around social media a lot that he had loans that were leveraged against Tesla's stock. And he did initially when the deal started, but then I believe replaced all of those loans through other means of financing. And so I don't think that the the margin call was going to be an issue, but I have seen that take everywhere. And I think it's because those loans got replaced later in like June or July, maybe.
Kate Conger:And so it just wasn't as publicly covered.
Ryan Mac:He has personal loans that use Tesla shares as collateral and I think it's disclosed on his SEC forms but it's like less than $3,000,000,000 of that. So that's personal stuff but it's not involving his. Less than $3,000,000,000.
Bryan Cantrill:You know?
Ryan Mac:Yeah. Just the intuitive Well, when you're you're worth more than 300,000,000,000, you know, it's
Bryan Cantrill:Yeah. I guess that's right.
Adam Leventhal:Yeah. What's your takes on XAI, the assignment of value to that? Because it seems like
Bryan Cantrill:Yeah.
Adam Leventhal:He's choosing a number for the value of XAI XII, which sort of is giving one kind of confederate currency in exchange for a different kind to those investors.
Ryan Mac:Yeah. I mean, it's it's it's fascinating watching it go from a company that didn't exist two and half years ago to something that's worth I don't even know what the valuation is because it's just blown up, but it's like $7,080,000,000,000 dollars. But he has the backing of investors that are willing to pay that, and I think it just speaks to this theme throughout the book that he is in some ways too big to fail. Everyone that matters to him is rooting for, you know, he has the backing of Sequoia Capital and Gulf State investors and Andreessen Horowitz, and they're willing just to throw money, piles of money and piles of money after him chasing his next win because he is more powerful than ever. Know, he has he's in the White House at this point.
Ryan Mac:I just don't think those evaluations have any ties to any kind of financial fundamentals, know? Yeah, actually. It's just him.
Kate Conger:Yeah, and I think that the value proposition for Grok is interesting, right? Like right now, it's something that you can use freely on X. And I think that the business models that competitors like OpenAI are pursuing, know, I'll rely on other people sort of like licensing these chatbots or integrating them in some way. And I don't know, I mean, I think it comes back to the question of like, is that all that Twitter data valuable? Does that make for a better chatbot than what OpenAI has?
Kate Conger:And does it make such a better product that it outweighs the risks of, you know, allowing the employees at your business to type into a chatbot that's owned by Elon Musk and feed your corporate data into there? You know, I mean, there's some interesting questions about who the who the end user for this chatbot is and who's gonna want to have it.
Bryan Cantrill:Yeah. When they actually, can we talk about the bot problem for a little bit? Because the just on bots because, you know, he used this as kind of his casus belli for Twitter that like Twitter had this bot problem. And the I could never get to ground. The bots are way worse now than they were then.
Bryan Cantrill:I mean, you still get like taking my own I mean, I'm making the mistake of having open DMs on on Twitter. So I'm I'm not I no longer tweet, but I am still like active on the I'm I'm still like I log in. So I love to tell you that I never go to Twitter, but those would be lies. The but I I don't no longer tweet. And so as a result, like I get like tons of bot.
Bryan Cantrill:And Adam, you and I, the only mentions we get now on Twitter are from content that would not be on Twitter previously. No. Suffice it to say. And like the actual content on there seems to be garbage right now. And the the the bot problem seems to be so much worse.
Bryan Cantrill:Did you think did insiders at Twitter think that there was real truth to his complaints about the bot problem, or was that just always a just a casus belli for him?
Kate Conger:You know, I don't think that anyone took his complaints about the bots very seriously. And all of the work that was going into counting those bots, I talked to a lot of people who worked on that. And the consensus basically was that the 5% number was overestimate. And they were giving themselves a lot of wiggle room there because they were putting it in their financial documents, you know, and they wanted to say, okay, if we have 2% bots that we can measure, let's save 5%. And like, let's play it safe.
Kate Conger:Let's give ourselves the wiggle room. And so I don't think that there was ever the kind of overinflated problem that he was claiming or that they were intentionally misleading investors about their bot numbers.
Ryan Mac:I think with Elon too, he indexes on his own experience a lot and his experience is singular on Twitter. He is one of the most followed accounts and he was getting kind of hammered with these crypto bots. And so he saw this as like, oh, if this is happening to me, this must be happening to everyone else. Know, I need to really solve this problem. This is a real issue because every time I tweet, I get, Elon or E1ONMusk trying to sell people on some shitcoin basically.
Ryan Mac:And yeah, so that became his bugaboo for a while, but he never got anywhere. Know he got fire hose access at one point we wrote about in the book but it didn't seem like he ever proved out his hypothesis there.
Kate Conger:Yeah. And you'll notice, I mean, as soon as the deal closed, suddenly, the bot problem vanished. So, you know, seriousness of it.
Bryan Cantrill:The bot problem vanished from his perspective, and the actual, like, bot problem like on the ground got much much worse from my perspective. I mean, I just feel like I get there's so much more garbage on Twitter than there used to be.
Kate Conger:Yeah. Well, and I think again, you know, Ryan made the really good point that that Elon goes from his own experience. And right, one of the things that has changed under his ownership, right, is that verification is for sale, and that replies on tweets are now filtered to show verified replies first. So from Elon's experience, he posts a tweet and the replies that he sees are his fanboys, and the bots are buried for him. So the problem no longer exists because the problem is no longer seen in his replies, if that makes sense.
Bryan Cantrill:So speaking of fanboys, you have this anecdote at the Super Bowl that is just wild. And this is towards the end of the book. But when he he is upset that his frankly, like, dumbass tweet does not get nearly as much traction as Joe Biden's much more interesting tweet. I mean, it's like, you know when Joe Biden has a much more interesting tweet than you have that like, it's a it's a pretty low bar that you've managed to slither under. He really failed at tweeting at that point.
Bryan Cantrill:And he is enraged by this. I mean, he seems to go out of his mind over this Super Bowl tweet issue. I mean, he and he like, appears to actually believe that there is like a a defect in the system because Joe Biden's tweet has more likes than his does. And the explanation of like, well, maybe your tweet is just like dumb and not as good is one that is not compelling to him. Like he just he fires he fires someone over that.
Ryan Mac:Yeah. He fired an engineer. Yeah.
Adam Leventhal:Yeah. This is a great scene where the engineer you describe an engineer just very cut and dried like, well, maybe it's not as good of a tweet and it's like you're fired. He starts screaming. Amazing.
Bryan Cantrill:It the and then I love that he says that I believe Musk says that you quote him in the book anyway saying, I don't know if this is incompetence or sabotage. Were you laughing yourself as you wrote that quote? You must have been like, man, you are you are right or like we humanity don't know if this whole thing is incompetence or sabotage, pal. Like, you you are that, like, that that question is is much bigger than you might realize. I mean, there's a great diary there.
Ryan Mac:I think to understand Elon is to understand that he is incredibly paranoid. One of his favorite quotes is the Andy Grove saying, Only the paranoid survive. And he repeats this. He's repeated it throughout his life. He repeats it to his family members, his life partners, his own company, people that work for him.
Ryan Mac:And paranoia is like a trait that has got him through a lot of things. But in some cases taken to like the nth degree, it's like he gets himself he gets these like really weird situations. There was a a SpaceX launch once where he believed that snipers, it exploded and he believed that snipers from a rival company were firing at the rockets, I'll be mentioned in the book. But like, you know, that's the level of paranoia we're dealing with here. So when it came to like his tweet not getting enough engagement, he was like, you know, is someone backstabbing me at the company?
Ryan Mac:We really need to do a fact finding mission. So he flies home from the Super Bowl and they do this 48 investigation into why his tweets are are, you know, getting lower engagement to the point where they write specific code to
Bryan Cantrill:I was gonna say that. Yeah. Yeah. They they they something very regrettable happens from his perspective and that they end up making the a they end up special coding him effectively to promote his tweets. And then it's like, there was a moment when I logged into the app and it was just Elon tweets.
Bryan Cantrill:That's all I saw Mhmm. Which must have been during that episode.
Kate Conger:Yes. That was really funny because it was like the For You feed was all Elon tweets and then I saw one or two that were his mom's.
Ryan Mac:God. They're just so good. Their tweets were that good. That's why they needed
Bryan Cantrill:to leave. Yeah. They're like yeah. She's got some bangers, I guess.
Adam Leventhal:Yeah. The well, he
Bryan Cantrill:and this is what I mean, there are a couple of these moments where he actually does go too far and correct. So that's obviously one of them. Another one, Ryan, is he bans you from Twitter. Right? Am I remembering that correctly?
Ryan Mac:He he yeah. I was suspended. Yep. I was suspended. Yeah.
Bryan Cantrill:I so when was that? I mean, because that is a I mean, when you you are a free speech advocate who has just suspended a journalist from Twitter. I mean, like, just look inward.
Ryan Mac:So it wasn't just me. It was it was around the time he banned the Elon jet account, and his he had a long history with with that account. You know, it's the one that tracks the whereabouts of his private plane. And when he buys the company he's like I am so pro free speech, I'm going to let this account that tracks my whereabouts continue to exist, and everyone's like okay whatever dude. And so he on a whim one day decides to ban it and reporters, including myself, decide to report on why this account has disappeared.
Ryan Mac:And so in the process of reporting, you know, its disappearance and what happened there, I myself along with I think half a dozen other journalists get banned in the process, which you know was an interesting experience and I was off the platform for about three months. They were requiring me to
Kate Conger:do the The best part of my Twitter experience was when Ryan was banned for three months.
Bryan Cantrill:He loved
Ryan Mac:it. He really thrived during that period.
Kate Conger:Yeah. I really thrived in those days.
Bryan Cantrill:You did can't were you just able to shit post him every day and stuff? He did nothing he could do about it. He's just, you know No clapbacks at all.
Kate Conger:He would actually Brian said the Twitter addict. He would, like, message me and be like, you should tweet this.
Bryan Cantrill:It was, like, drafting tweet that he wanted me to post.
Ryan Mac:It was called reporting, Kate. But yeah.
Bryan Cantrill:I did it. You but for some reason, I thought it was, like, forty eight hours, not three months. That is in that's insane.
Ryan Mac:So they required me to delete tweets that included the reporting on the Plane account, and I refused to. Oh, so every time we tried to log in it would surface, you know, please delete this tweet before continuing to use the service. I was just like, no. Eventually, you know, I did do it because I, you know, I needed to get back on the platform to report. Didn't love doing it.
Bryan Cantrill:And Pete was just sick of of you be using her as your proxy. Exactly. Delete the tweets so you get back on the stand platform. I'm getting sick of like Exactly.
Ryan Mac:That might have been it, actually. Something like that.
Kate Conger:Yeah. I was complaining about it at a certain point. I was like, I can write my own tweets. I do not need to tweet.
Adam Leventhal:No stress. Just hand me
Bryan Cantrill:your phone. I'll do Right. Exactly.
Ryan Mac:It actually illustrates our book writing process very well.
Bryan Cantrill:Is that right? But, I mean, that is that's sickening, honestly. That is I mean and I mean, the just the hypocrisy of that is just I mean, eye watering. And you're not the
Ryan Mac:I thought you're saying me tweeting tweeting through k was sickening, but no. Yeah. No.
Bryan Cantrill:No. No. That's why I I do this to Adam all the time, so I would be I would be very hypocritical to be condemning you out. No. But it's like it it the the I mean, the fact that, like, it that is just like the the the sheer level of hypocrisy is just stomach turning.
Bryan Cantrill:And I mean, yeah, how did you feel about that in terms of, like, of deleting the tweets in order to and do the other journalists do the same? I mean, you must have been tempted to ride it out.
Ryan Mac:I think so. I think, yeah. I think they all had and people had their own lengths of time that they were willing to last, I guess, before deleting that stuff. Yeah, yeah. It's definitely hypocritical.
Ryan Mac:You know, he's made other decisions as well. They're extremely hypocritical. He's throttled the New York Times traffic because he hasn't liked the New York Times. He's banned Substack, you know, a competitor of his simply for being a competitor. There's a variety of other things that he's done that fly in the face of quote unquote free speech.
Bryan Cantrill:So he banned Paul Graham at a moment and that was also one that he seemed to have walked back. I don't think he Paul Graham, but maybe Paul Graham did do a tweet in order to get back on. But that was shocking. Think that I mean, that felt like, well, mean, in terms of you're talking about him being in the good graces of kind of Sequoia and a sixteen c and so on, but like that that's a bridge too far. Think even for those folks and it was interesting that he walked that back.
Ryan Mac:That came after the policy he instituted that didn't allow people to promote other social media profiles on Twitter and he got a lot of backlash on that. And so Paul Graham, to test it, was like, you know, I'm going to he tweeted out his Mastodon link or whatever, and that was one of the banned platforms on Twitter. So he got his account taken away. He's of course back now. But yeah, it speaks to the whims of Elon and his willingness to, you know, throw people under the bus even though he knows them, you know, or get in fights with them.
Ryan Mac:Know, he has a singular focus and a singular belief that the way he does things is right. And if you don't you don't like it, then you can take a hike no matter who you are.
Bryan Cantrill:So to fast forward a bit into the present. So we I mean, it's kind of an interesting moment because, I mean, he he came in like a wrecking ball with respect to Doge. You two have got a bunch of great reportage on that. Maybe, you know, I if that's your second book, I would not be at all surprised and I can't wait to read it, but no pressure if it's not, if you're just sick of this guy. The but we're kind of in an interesting moment where Musk has effectively lost this election in Wisconsin.
Bryan Cantrill:He seems to have really got kind of got moved all in in Wisconsin and the and this was several weeks ago now and his has come out against administration on tariffs and it seems like his star may be falling with respect to the the administration. Do you are are we knowing what you know about him, how hurt is he by what happened in Wisconsin?
Kate Conger:You know, I think we've already seen him kind of try to spin it. The day after the vote, he was saying that the measure to add a voter ID requirement was actually the most important thing on the ballot and that had passed. So, you know, it was a success in his eyes.
Ryan Mac:Never
Kate Conger:mind that he was campaigning very heavily in the Supreme Court race and not a lot on the ballot measure. But, you know, he sort of retconned it to be the most important thing that had been on the ballot.
Bryan Cantrill:It doesn't allow measure confirm existing Wisconsin law. It doesn't don't think it even changes anything in Wisconsin. I think they already had a measure. Yeah.
Kate Conger:Yeah. You know, he sort of moved on. But I think, you know, he's at this very complicated point right now within the Republican Party where he is the biggest funder perhaps. And, you know, that's very useful for them to have. At the same time, he's really willing to touch a lot of third rails that a lot of Republicans don't want to touch, like social security.
Kate Conger:So I think a lot of people in the party are weighing whether he's too big of a liability for them to bear or whether it's worth it.
Ryan Mac:I would talk about the Pete Navarro fight that he had over tariffs. He clearly does not like tariffs. It clearly affects his businesses like Tesla, but that fight has also evidenced the longer leash he has among, you know, Trump advisors. Know, Trump didn't go out of his way to criticize him. He was speaking out directly about tariffs, one of Trump's main policies, and didn't even get a slap on the wrist.
Ryan Mac:You know, the statement of the White House was boys will be boys, they'll fight kind of thing, even though he's speaking out directly against, you know, this main policy. That being said, I think it speaks to he's on a shorter time frame. You know he's supposed to be out of the government within a couple months, if not a month, you know by May I think. So I think you know he's starting to transition out of this doge roll, but you never know. There could be he could could say that and he could be back in full force in a couple months too.
Ryan Mac:So
Bryan Cantrill:yeah. Then another company that actually does not play a huge role in the book is Tesla kinda surprisingly. You get like Tesla's role in the book there are almost more SpaceX engineers coming across the Tesla, but you've got these kind of folks coming in from Tesla and SpaceX who kind of, I mean, you've got plenty of examples of the book of folks that that end up becoming disgusted by what's happening. This turns out like they're a lot less interested in ripping apart a Sacramento data center than they might be in in building the next generation car or launching a rocket into space. What do you I mean, he's done enormous do you think that he will end up returning to Tesla?
Bryan Cantrill:Can he run both Tesla and X? I mean, is he gonna have to choose among these
Ryan Mac:Yeah. I think he's gonna have to, at least give the impression that he's running both. The secret is like he's not day to day at these companies even when he is not doing government stuff. He has teams around him. I think it's something like SpaceX for example where he has Ben Shotwell who effectively runs that company day to day in the COO role.
Bryan Cantrill:Can I say that I came away from your book with, like, thinking even more highly of Gwen Shotwell because now I appreciate not only did she, like, launch rockets into space, but she dealt with this dude? So, like, wow, Gwen Shotwell, very impressive executive, I gotta say.
Ryan Mac:And and Tubbers for him, yeah. But you know, that that's you know, we talked to a lot of folks that said, you know, when Elon comes in, that's that's a bad sign for your for your project because he's doing damage control or he's trying to insert himself and you don't want that. You don't want to be dealing, you know, call him the sun at his companies and you don't want to be too close to the sun. But with regards to Tesla, like he's going to have to give the investors the impression that he is back in somewhere, he is engaged. Know, we've seen the stock price crater for various reasons, the tariffs being the most recent thing, and I don't think he can continue to be seen as this absentee CEO, no matter how brilliant he is viewed by the market.
Ryan Mac:That is going to have lasting effects. A lot of his finances stem from his public success with Twitter sorry, with Tesla.
Bryan Cantrill:Yeah, interesting. And then with Linda Yaccarino, what's the I mean, because she obviously, he brought her in putatively as the CEO of Twitter, but he obviously has has had a very firm hand there. Is her role in in a kind of this new x AI world? Do people know?
Kate Conger:So her role is supposedly not changing. She's gonna continue to be the CEO of X. And as of right now, does not have a role at x AI. But you know, I mean, she's been really dealing with the Elon slog for quite a while, know, she came from the advertising world, and he certainly hasn't made it easy for her to keep her relationships there. And now she's, you know, still the CEO of a company that now has a new CEO, right?
Kate Conger:That's above her. So she's sort of been layered in management. And, you know, it's never a great day, I think, be Linda.
Bryan Cantrill:It's really just I think it's just tough to be in orbit around this guy. And obviously there are some people that persist and a lot that flame out. One of the kind of question I want to ask you is that, you know, you had these folks like Esther Cross Esther Crawford who really when when Musk came in wanted to ingratiate herself to Musk. I mean they kind of and you know I I I Adam and I worked together at Sun Microsystems when it was acquired by Oracle and you know one of the things that certainly Adam, I think it's fair to speak for both of us that that we observed is that there were kind of there were very different reactions when that happened and there were many people who really wanted to kind of stay consistent to Sun's values for very inconsistent with Oracle's values. But there's a minority that really wanted to cozy up to Oracle's values and it really ended up fracturing relationships.
Bryan Cantrill:Did you see that in your reportage where people that were once coworkers together at Twitter ended up with fractured relationships over the different ways they've reacted to this?
Kate Conger:Absolutely. I mean, I think being in a situation like this is a pressure cooker, and it's hard for a variety of reasons. And, you know, I've worked in media my entire career. So most of my jobs have been acquired by private equity at one point.
Ryan Mac:I've
Kate Conger:experienced myself, and it's brutal. It's really hard. And I think that Elon is just sort of a magnifier and an intensifier of that experience. And I think that was one of kind of the sad and difficult things to see in this reporting process, the people who were close and did have these tight knit relationships, who fell out with each other or felt betrayed by each other. It's also really interesting, kind of on the flip side of that, to see the people in the company who I thought were more kind of like corporate shills and who sort of would go along with the Elon program, who went out of their way to protect people and to try to like save people from layoffs, to move people who are on visas onto non layoff lists, and really kind of stuck their necks out to protect people.
Kate Conger:Those sometimes were not the people I expected to behave like that. So it was really interesting to see the variety of different ways people responded to the unique pressure and pain that they were under in this situation.
Ryan Mac:On the flip side, there were other folks as well. Mean, you know, chaos is a lot. There was a guy, for example, who was roasted pretty openly because his Slack stopped publicized, who was talking about, you know, maybe we should bring these people back for a temporary period and then fire them again.
Bryan Cantrill:That's right. Right. I'm forgetting his because I oh, what is his name? He was definitely the main character for a day.
Kate Conger:I think.
Ryan Mac:Yeah. Yeah. That's right. That's right. Yeah.
Kate Conger:Yeah. Talk about that. It's been
Bryan Cantrill:in the book, but I definitely remember it happening.
Ryan Mac:No. It's in the book. And then the the irony is he he himself got laid off. Yeah, went out of his way to climb the ladder and show that he is the A plus student for Elon and he himself loses his job. So yeah, someone like Esther Crawford also got laid off.
Bryan Cantrill:Esther Crawford, you said, didn't tweet about it when she got laid off, when came for her.
Ryan Mac:Yeah. No sleeping bag.
Kate Conger:Guys, I do have to I'm so sorry to I do have to jump off here because I have an event tonight that I have to run to. But thank you so much for doing this with us. I'm gonna I think Ryan can go a couple more minutes, but just wanted to say thank you, and and thanks to everybody for tuning in and listening.
Bryan Cantrill:Okay. Thank you so much. And I I the we are so deeply appreciative, as we just said at the top, love this book. It is so well written, so authoritative. It is a must read.
Bryan Cantrill:It is more current than any of us could have possibly imagined. It is it is tragically current. That's true.
Kate Conger:You guys have
Bryan Cantrill:to I I set out to do this. Exactly. I would love to say that this book is great history, but unfortunately, it is more than just great history. It is a it it is a gripping read. And I think YouTube done a a terrific service to us all.
Bryan Cantrill:I think that all your many sources did a terrific service. I think one of the things that we got wrong Adam in our prediction is like I was predicting that there'll be disgruntled Twitter folks that would kind of sabotage the infrastructure. And I think actually people channel that towards a much more productive outlet of letting journalists know and YouTube in particular what was happening inside. So you could report on it. And this this really stands at there's so many lessons in this.
Bryan Cantrill:I wish it weren't quite such a roadmap to the future of the republic, but it appears to be. But again, it's a superlative book and we just cannot thank you enough for for writing it and then especially for for joining us here. Really, really appreciate it.
Kate Conger:Thank you.
Ryan Mac:See you, Kate. I'll send you those tweets for you to tweet out later.
Bryan Cantrill:Exactly. And and Ryan, we don't need to keep you much longer. We really, again, really appreciate it. And I guess the but the one question I do wanna ask that didn't get a chance to ask while Kate was here. A challenge of this must have been like, when do we like stop reporting and like where do we where does the book end exactly?
Bryan Cantrill:Because it's such a like chaotic madhouse and doesn't seem to be stopping. How did you figure out like where you needed to like stitch it up and actually get this thing done?
Ryan Mac:I would say that was our biggest challenge. So this was our first book. As I said earlier, when you go into something like this, you don't, you know, the thing hadn't ended yet, but our editor was like, You'll know when you know. And he kept saying this, You'll know when you know that something will happen and you'll be happy, you know, and this is where you'd And I've read plenty of non fiction books where the ending is not satisfying and maybe some people get that with our ending. But, you know, at some point we had written, we were on contract to do 90,000 words, which in book world is about 300 pages.
Ryan Mac:We wrote so much that we ended up having 190,000 words, and so we had to cut and cut and cut, and we still didn't have an ending. This was like 75, you know, 75% done. We still didn't know where to end this thing, but we saw him slowly embrace Trump and obviously we saw his rightward shift. Know, he goes for DeSantis and we're like, you know, is this DeSantis Twitter space that he's hosting? Is this the endpoint?
Ryan Mac:And our editor encouraged us to go a little further. And then I was part of a reporting team with Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, who reported the first meeting that Elon had with Donald Trump, this very quiet breakfast meeting in Florida, in Palm Beach, that he had with a bunch of other Republican donors. And I wrote that story for The Times. I was off book leave. Was already back.
Ryan Mac:And I, you know, I turned to Kate and was like, I think this might be the moment, you know. This is kind of the completion of that, of this metamorphosis. Know, he's meeting with Donald Trump and he's going to go that way. Like, I was kind of convinced at that point. This was back in March of 'twenty four.
Ryan Mac:He hadn't endorsed him. That endorsement wouldn't come until July. And so we wrote the book with that ending, that meeting being the ending. And I think was the right way to end it. Like of course we could have written all the way to July.
Ryan Mac:We also had to turn the book in at some point so it could go to
Bryan Cantrill:the period.
Ryan Mac:Exactly. Like we didn't mean that was also on our consideration but like everyone knows what happens after that. We don't need to tell it, you know, we're living it right now. So we just give people that endpoint and you can extrapolate from there what happens. And so I'm actually very happy with that.
Ryan Mac:It saved us a lot of work. It saved us to having to be like, you know, and this happened and this happened and oh by the way this happened. And we I think we're going to update the conclusion for the paperback version that comes out hopefully next year. By and large, we're pretty happy with where we picked, which is March 2024.
Bryan Cantrill:Well, pay kind of a great spot because I mean it is such a, I mean, I mean, thank God you didn't wait until the end of the election because you've been like, oh my God. I gotta write this book just I I've already got an editing I get this book is now gonna double in length because I think there's another book waiting to be written. I I guess a question that I've got to and this may seem like a naive question, but I actually earnestly feel that I don't know this answer for myself. To what degree do you think that that Twitter impacted the election?
Kate Conger:I mean
Bryan Cantrill:Does it it's kinda consensus that, like, oh, like, you know, this is a genius deal by Musk because he buys Twitter and then he hands the election to Trump. And I'm like, I don't know if that's right. I don't know if that's I don't know.
Ryan Mac:I think it was influential. I I I've seen the kind of theory that he bought Twitter to to elevate Trump and and put Trump in the White House. I would push back on that pretty heavily Yeah. Especially if you know how it played out and who he supported initially. It was kind of bumbled into this endorsement of Donald Trump, similarly to how he bumbled into buying Twitter.
Ryan Mac:There was no three d chess here.
Bryan Cantrill:It's very hard to, like, play the botched DeSantis Twitter space as somehow a step on this master plan to put Trump in the White House. I'm like, wait. Walk me through that one.
Ryan Mac:Exactly. We look like idiots. Check. You know? And then, like, you move on to the next.
Ryan Mac:But, like, yeah, it's odd. He has this very like Walter Mitty quality of like bumbling into things and them turning out like to be very like, you know, the right move, I guess. And I guess when you're that powerful and that wealthy, you can do that. You can make these mistakes and turn them into great wins. Know, you can buy a company and suffer these huge losses and losses in valuation but then I'd be able to spin out another company out of it, focus on xAI that or on AI that has a valuation way more than what you raise, know, and it's this very odd quality that he has that I've never really seen with anyone else.
Bryan Cantrill:Walter Isaacson kind of bumbles across the the path of the book. The what did you make of of the because he's a biographer that has kind of inserted himself in the story a bit. Were you kind of surprised the degree to which he was the role that he was playing?
Ryan Mac:Yes and no. Obviously, we were well aware of his book when we were doing ours, and Yulan didn't talk to us for our book and gave Walter, I think, two years of access or something like that. And his book came up before ours, so it was something that really concerned us initially. When it came out, we like really dove dove deep into it and to see what he had on, you know, where we was he gonna just scoop us on our whole book?
Bryan Cantrill:Yeah. Oh, a few. Oh, thank God. It's a hagiography. Thank God.
Ryan Mac:Yeah. And I think with with regards to the Isaacson stuff, you have to understand, he goes into these books with this great man theory, like what drives these great men and sometimes women to do the things that they do, and he finds justifications for them. But ultimately the moral is they've done these amazing things and there's things we can learn from them. I thought that Steve Jobs book was really good and we saw that with the Jobs book, and he tried to do the same with Musk, except Musk was living, so I think he had few more concessions to him. In our reporting we found out that he became a character, you know, he was advising Elon on business decisions specifically around Twitter Blue, And that's just like a place that, you know, I don't really want to be as a journalist if my subject is asking me for advice and Really?
Ryan Mac:You know? And I thought that was really weird and also very telling.
Bryan Cantrill:And then there is this moment with with Esther Crawford where he tells her, like, you're gonna be important. I can tell. It's like, wait. Aren't you the biographer? Like, what's going here?
Bryan Cantrill:We can just, like Yeah. Just kind of shocking.
Ryan Mac:I think it also speaks to the quality that Elon has around him, people get drawn into his orbit and they want to impress him or they want to be close to him or provide him advice or their guidance. And it happened with his biographer. And, you know, we didn't put this in the book, but Walter is now investing in companies alongside some of Elon's investors. You know, there's an AI company. Yeah.
Ryan Mac:I've said about it a couple times. You know, it's it's a you know, I've never this in the book.
Bryan Cantrill:But Walter bought bought Apple calls on Friday on the advice of Donald Trump.
Ryan Mac:Yeah. That was it. I don't can neither confirm nor deny, but the, you know, the, yeah, the investment stuff is true. And, yeah, it's a weird place to be as a as a journalist, and I think you sacrifice your
Bryan Cantrill:Objectivity. Credibility as journalists when
Ryan Mac:you do that. Yeah.
Bryan Cantrill:Yeah. Well, so it it just like on that noting maybe to kind of close out because I I would like to say that there has been one of the things that Musk represents and is not the only one. There's this whole Silicon Valley coterie that really has served to villainize journalism and really inappropriately so. Because great journalism and Adam, obviously, you and I very much believe in that great journalism is essential to a free society. It doesn't feel like that's like doesn't feel like it doesn't feel like that's a hot take.
Bryan Cantrill:But I think in 2024, it apparently needs to be said. But I I mean, I really am disgusted, frankly, by this kind of vilification of journalism because it is so important to get these stories out and authoritative and sourced and that you I mean, you didn't publish you're not publishing your unconfirmed b sides. This is a story that that you have very thoughtfully and part of the reason people read the book is just like for the references and the sources. And I mean you are you both did such a thoughtful job of getting the story right. And that is a really really important and the the you know, these other folks, know, the Isaacson's of the world are not serving that role.
Bryan Cantrill:They are they they they kind of they have, you know, walked through and they've kind of gone through the wall and they are now becoming a they've kind of broken the fourth wall if you will and they've kind of like become part of the play and it's like that's not what journalism is. So, you know, just know that that I and I I you would be right to think that that Silicon Valley holds journalism and and journalists with total disdain, but that does not represent most of us. And I would dare say that like most folks in Silicon Valley are very very grateful for the hard work of journalists. And it's it's a shame that we've got some loud mouths at the top that are giving the rest of us a bad name. So
Ryan Mac:Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that. You know, it's always comforting to hear that. And, yeah, it's a it's an interesting time to be a journalist, especially as, you know, I think the time is doing alright and but we're seeing some of our colleagues lose their jobs at other places and it's tough.
Ryan Mac:Know, I think right before signing on to this, I saw a push alert about the Trump administration trying to pull back funds from things like PBS and NPR. You know, that's pretty frightening, you know, but it makes the work more important and I'm glad that folks take value out of it and really thankful that you guys have read our book and our work.
Bryan Cantrill:I would love it and really extend very, very appreciative of it. I think it's a terrific book. I know a lot of folks have read it. If you haven't read it, it's definitely a must read. I think this is character limit is gonna would Adam, I think there's like the bad blood character limit careless people kind of Troika, the trilogy.
Bryan Cantrill:The Silicon Valley trilogy. And it's it's it's a it's a must read. It's a good company. Watch over. Yeah.
Bryan Cantrill:It's good. What's good well, it's good company. Yeah. It's good company from a journalism perspective. It's a pretty terrible company from a subject perspective, but but Ryan, thank you so much for joining us.
Bryan Cantrill:And I I thank you Kate in absentia as well. But really, thanks again. Really appreciate it. And now I've got to get Morris Chang somehow on this podcast. I don't know how to do it.
Ryan Mac:So I'm No. Thanks everyone and thanks everyone for listening. If you wanna reach out to me, I'm I'm on blue sky and or just ryan.mac@nytimes.com.
Bryan Cantrill:Awesome. Alright. Thank you. Thank you everyone and see you next time.
Creators and Guests
