'Character Limit' authors get candid about Elon Musk, the role of X on the global stage, and more

What was Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter like for the employees inside the social media company?

New York Times reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac on Tuesday published “Character Limit,” a riveting behind-the-scenes page turner detailing the chaos that unfolded when Musk acquired the company.

We caught up with Conger and Mac to discuss the consequences of Musk’s takeover, X’s standing in the global conversation, the role Linda Yaccarino plays at the social media company, and more.

Below is our conversation, entirely unedited.

OLIVER: What do you believe were Elon Musk's primary motivations for acquiring Twitter?

KATE: Musk is a true poster and loves the attention ecosystem of Twitter. He tends to think in memes — you see him making references to them in major moments, like when he arrives at the company carrying a sink — and really enjoyed being on the platform. But he also wanted full control over Twitter, and being one of several voices on the board wasn’t enough to accomplish that. He needed to buy it outright.

OLIVER: How would you describe Musk's initial strategy once he took over the social media platform? And what is the mood like now inside the organization?

KATE: Musk came in with very little strategy. He had kicked around a few ideas prior to the acquisition, like incorporating blockchain technology into the platform, that never materialized. The two plans he’s been consistent in pursuing are to turn Twitter, now X, into a payments platform (he’s still seeking the money transfer licenses he needs to do so) and to sell verification checkmarks.

RYAN: When Musk relaunched Twitter Blue, which gave users the ability to buy the once coveted verified badges, he told a room of employees who had expressed concerns about the service that they were going to “shoot from the hip in real time.” While we like to think of Musk having some grand plans for Twitter, the fact is that once he bought the company he didn’t have a solid plan on how to run the company in the short and intermediate term. He made decisions on the fly with Twitter Blue and content moderation decisions, like allowing Trump back on the platform.

Musk came into the company with the belief that the previous management was corrupt and inept. And he thought that he, as some kind of king of efficiency, could cut and institute layoffs and make Twitter’s operations more affordable. There was a certain kind of hubris in that and those cuts have decimated the workforce. Morale is horrible inside the company, and it’s only trending downward as he makes sudden decisions, like shutting the office in San Francisco and pushing those employees into offices an hour or more away.

OLIVER: Do you think, because of the changes Musk has implanted, that X now plays a diminished role in the global conversation?

KATE: I actually don’t think so. While yes, it’s certainly true that many people have shifted their attention to other platforms like Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon, lots of people are still engaging on X every day. As Musk has shifted X to be a more explicitly right-wing ecosystem, it’s become a potent way to elevate his political ideology. He’s also reinstated a number of accounts that were previously banned for spreading misinformation or hate speech, and I think we’ll likely see more conspiracy theories reaching the mainstream discourse as a result of them being spread widely on X. You could see X’s potential to influence global conversation this week, as the false rumor about people in Springfield, Ohio eating pets spread widely there. Even though former President Donald Trump has used X sparingly, he shared several images that depicted him protecting cats on Truth Social that appeared to have been generated by X’s artificial intelligence service, Grok.

OLIVER: In your eyes, has he made any good changes to the platform?

RYAN: While it existed before him, Community Notes has been an interesting product under his tenure. It’s not a perfect product and has its shortcomings in low-information settings or in high politicized events where the voting can be gamed. I don’t think it’s meant to completely replace fact-checking, but if it’s used in conjunction with more traditional fact-checking, there is a clear use case.

I also agreed with his original plan to encrypt direct messages to protect users, but thus far the efforts by the company to do this have been lackluster and onerous. I don’t know if this is even an emphasis for the company anymore.

OLIVER: How would you describe Linda Yaccarino's role at X? Do you get the sense at all that she is frustrated with Musk constantly undercutting her?

KATE: Yaccarino’s primary role has been to build the business side of X, while Musk works on the tech and policy issues. She’s had to walk this very fine line with advertisers, telling them to spend on X even as Musk tells them he doesn’t need them. She’s also leaned on her TV background, trying to develop premium video content for X. It’s enormously challenging, and many of her initiatives have yet to bear fruit.

However, I don’t get the sense that she’s particularly frustrated by Musk. In my reporting on her, I’ve heard that she’s very dedicated to Musk and his mission with X, and a bit annoyed that people keep trying to draw a contrast between them. She and Musk are much more similar than the public tends to believe — they share a lot of political views and a vision for ‘free speech’ on the platform, and a tendency to go after their critics. Perhaps she’s a bit cowed by him and afraid to contradict him, but most people in his inner circle are.

OLIVER: How much has Musk actions at X influenced the rest of the tech industry in terms of both mass layoffs, but also in moving away from content moderation?

RYAN: Twitter had already been planning layoffs prior to Musk’s takeover. And in some ways, the tech world was in for a larger correction from the boom times of the pandemic, as cruel as that sounds.

But Musk made many chief executives envious by the way in which he instituted cuts. They were fast and without regard for the actual employees. He fought back against the notion that some of these folks would receive their full severance or stock packages. As we’ve seen tech workforces gain power and concessions from their employers through the pandemic, like with working from home or the push toward racial justice initiatives in the wake of George Floyd, Musk showed his fellow billionaire chief executives that actually they still held a lot of the power and that they should act accordingly.

With regards to content moderation, where Twitter/X’s cuts have happened deeply, he’s shifted the Overton Window as to what’s acceptable. Companies like Meta and Google have spent huge sums of money ramping up their content moderation in response to criticism of their platforms in the past decade. Musk has shown that he doesn’t care about most content moderation and he’ll allow hateful content to fester on the platform. That’s a massive benefit to the other platforms. They can point to the current state of X and say, “Well at least we’re doing better than those guys.”

OLIVER: What role does Musk play in the world of mis-and-disinformation?

KATE: Musk is so influential in elevating misinformation. He spends hours a day on X and a lot of that time is engaging with and elevating conspiracy theories. Sometimes he toes the line, just quote-tweeting misleading things and adding something benign like “interesting!” or “concerning!” And then other times, he’s actively generating false content, posting claims like the idea that the Democrats are importing immigrants en masse to vote for Democrats and transform America into a one-party nation. Either way, he’s elevating this kind of stuff to his nearly 200 million followers, boosting it in X’s Trending Topics, and helping misinformation accounts grow their followings by exposing them to new eyeballs.

He’s very convinced by some of the false things he reads on X, and it can be quite damaging to his reputation as a brilliant entrepreneur. We open the book with a scene in which Musk is convinced that Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked not by a stranger, but by a jilted lover — and how appalled the people around him are that he would fall for such an obvious falsehood.

OLIVER: Musk has launched ugly attacks on journalists and news organizations, including repeatedly smearing your employer, The New York Times. He has even moved to temporarily ban reporters on occasion, including you Ryan! I'm curious: Why are you all still posting on his platform?

RYAN: Powerful people have always attacked reporters and news outlets. That’s not surprising to me, and if you’re in this business, you simply have to develop a thick skin and inure yourself to it. I don’t like it, but I also don’t take it personally. When powerful people are the subject of critical, truthful reporting, they may lash out.

I try not to take moral stands on the companies or people I cover. I let the reporting speak for itself. That’s why I haven’t wholesale ruled out using X. It’s a place where I can still distribute my stories and reporting, even if there is more animosity toward it, and more importantly, it’s still a place where a good amount of sources still congregate, especially at the companies I cover. My job is to get myself in front of those people, so that they’re aware of my name and my work, and so they may potentially one day talk to me.

At the same time, I’m not blind to the greater reach of hateful content on the platform. I see it too. And that has led me to post much less on X, and go to other platforms like Threads and Bluesky. Those platforms have their own drawbacks, but I find myself posting to three or four places now just to get my message out. And if there is any lasting legacy of Musk’s Twitter takeover it’s that: the splintering of Twittersphere. X just doesn’t dominate the conversation among the right people in the way that Twitter did.