What Is Twitter’s Legacy, 20 Years Later?

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What is Twitter’s legacy? In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel traces how Twitter, now called X, evolved from a status-update tool to one of the most culturally and politically influential—and contentious—platforms of the modern internet. Charlie is joined by early Twitter executive Jason Goldman. They explore how Twitter’s core features—many invented by users—reshaped media and politics while also enabling new forms of harassment, misinformation, and attention hijacking.

Goldman reflects candidly on the company’s key inflection points—from early free-speech-maximalist decisions and underinvestment in trust and safety to Twitter’s role in events like the Arab Spring and the election of Donald Trump. The discussion culminates in Twitter’s Elon Musk era, where its logic of attention has been weaponized more explicitly. The episode reckons with what Goldman and others ultimately built: a tool with outsize cultural influence that’s broken brains and amplified some of society’s worst impulses.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jason Goldman: When you’re that zealous about the mission that you’re on, which you almost need to be in a startup to survive, that zealotry blinds you completely to the downside risks that you’re producing.

[Music]

Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain: a show where today we are going to try to explain how Twitter, this niche microblogging site, became one the most influential social networks ever and broke countless brains in the process, including my own.

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the first tweet sent by one of its founders, Jack Dorsey. The post, which read “just setting up my Twitter,” is a pretty good example of how far the platform has come. By July 2006, Twitter was available to the public. And at the outset, Twitter was about these little status updates, a lot like the old AOL instant messages or away messages. People posted ambiently about what they were doing. And this was all pre-smartphone. It was this silly, low-stakes, localized way to communicate. But like a lot of technologies, it took off, became something almost totally unrecognizable.

My own relationship with Twitter, like a lot of journalists’, was always really tortured. In its early days, the platform was this way that young writers, reporters—they all got noticed. And to this day, I argue that I owe certain parts of my early career to early Twitter. And yet, I’ve spent the last 15 years covering its noxious effect on women, people of color, and bystanders who’ve had to endure intense trolling. The effects on our politics and our culture.

Twitter’s founders and leaders espoused this free-speech-maximalist approach, which didn’t just allow for abuse and hate speech; it helped build a platform that optimized it.

Now, you cannot tell the story of the last two decades without Twitter. The rise of Donald Trump, the mainstreaming of this trolly message-board culture, attention hijacking, the real-time radicalization of politicians and tech elites. And of course Elon Musk: the centibillionaire power user who bought the site in 2022, fired the bulk of its staff, and has since turned it into his own political weapon. Twitter, now X, is quite different.

Its worst qualities are on full display now—not as bugs of the platform, but as features. And in some spheres, especially Silicon Valley and the AI conversation, it still manages to have an outsize influence on broader discourse. For whatever reason, the platform seems unkillable.

And so, what is Twitter’s legacy? Why did things turn out this way? How did we get here? To try to get to the bottom of this, I asked Jason Goldman to join me. Jason is one of Twitter’s earliest employees—joining the company from Google, where he worked on Blogger, in 2007, and rose to the VP of product at Twitter. Goldman was influential in shaping parts of the platform, including its controversial content-moderation policies.

He was in the room for most of the platform’s early successes and its failures. And he’s somebody who’s had to watch the way the platform that he once stewarded has warped and weirded society from the outside. He was fired from Twitter in 2010 and later went on to become the White House’s first chief digital officer under Barack Obama. So together we trace the history of Twitter from its hackathon foundings to Musk’s takeover. What made Twitter special, its original sin, Goldman and the founders’ biggest and most costly mistakes, and why the platform, 20 years later, is still alive. He joins me now.

[Music]

Warzel: Jason, welcome to Galaxy Brain.

Goldman: Thanks so much for having me.

Warzel: Absolutely, I’m thrilled you’re here. 20 years of Twitter. As we’re recording this, a couple days ago was the anniversary of the first tweet. You were there at Twitter about as close to the beginning as one can be. And so I wanna start with something I think a lot of people here probably just don’t know, which is that Twitter was, before it was Twitter, a podcasting company or a podcasting idea.

Goldman: Podcast platform. Yeah.

Warzel: Yes, yes, a platform. Tell me about the early days. What is Odeo? How did it become Twitter? Take me back.

Goldman: Yeah, so I think from my perspective—and this is, you know, influenced obviously by my own history—I think you have to go back to the Web 1.0 days of blogging, which everyone loves to talk about. And so I worked on a product called Blogger that was acquired by Google in 2002; end of 2002, beginning of 2003. There were six of us. Three of us were named Jason. And all six of us went to go work at Google in 2003. Ev Williams was the CEO of Blogger, and one of the first people we hired at Google was Biz Stone. So two out of the three co-founders of Twitter come from Blogger. And one of the things that we worked on while we were at Google was this product called Audio Blogger, which was a partnership between us and this guy Noah Glass, who ran this third-party service for posting audio snippets to the web.

And then Noah, Biz, and Ev went off to do Odeo. They were interested in this idea, of There’s something here that’s interesting about posting audio to the web. Let’s make a podcasting platform. Let’s make the YouTube of podcasts in 2006. I was not very interested in podcasts; thought podcasts seemed not like a really cool idea. And so I stayed at Google while they were working on Odeo. And Odeo, you know, kind of had an interesting notion of what to do, but it was just way too early for podcasts.

Odeo kind of went sideways, and they had this idea of doing this hackathon where a bunch of different people at the company would break into teams and come up with different ideas for things that they could try, most of which were in the kind of social space. And then Jack [Dorsey], who was an engineer on Odeo, and Noah and Biz and Crystal [Taylor] were sort of the four people who worked on the team for what became Twitter. And it was an instant success internally. It was something like, from March 2006 it was clear there was a lot of interest in it. And yeah, was something that there was clearly legs, from the very beginning.

Warzel: So you’re working on Blogger. Obviously, I mean, if we think about it now, such a fundamental piece of media technology. We still use the name. What makes you jump over in that really, you know, exciting, energizing moment for Blogger?

Goldman: There’s two things. One was: I’d been at Blogger for almost four years. And so I’d seen I’d been able to do kind of a lot of different things there. But there I had sort of hit the bulwarks of the larger Google organization pretty hard. And Blogger was just never a good cultural fit with the rest of Google proper.

And then two: In 2004 to 2006, at least the founders and sort of the executive team of the product-management side of the engineering side, really did not get what blogging was. Like, all of the things you’re saying about it being like the “heyday of blogging,” being cool. They did not care about those things at all. And, fundamentally, we would have conversations with like, you know, Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin], and you know, the rest of sort of the executive team there. About like, hey, like, “You know, we’ve got more pages than Tthe New York Times; like we’re a huge site on the internet.” And they’re like, “Yeah, but The New York Times is where you go to get to the news.” Like, when are you going to have something that’s authoritative that people can trust? Which is not an unreasonable question. But it sort of misapprehends like what the point of all of this was. The cultural influence of blogging was not something that was well embraced by the company that we were working for. And that was, like, ultimately kind of felt annoying after a while.

Warzel: And so you’re feeling this. You are talking, I assume, to Ev and Biz.

Goldman: Ev and Biz. Yeah.

Warzel: Is that the thing that drives you over? Or is it more the broader umbrella of “These guys are smart. They’re trying to build a bunch of different things.” Is it Twitter that attracts you? Or is it—

Goldman: It’s Twitter. It’s Twitter, for sure. Like, you know, Twitter—the first tweets are from March of 2006. My account starts in May of 2006. I’m on a trip with Ev, and he’s like, “You should check out this thing.” I signed up over SMS; never see the website. Ev actually creates my username, and I was good. We had three Jasons at the company at Blogger. So I was always called Goldman, which is why my username is Goldman as opposed to … I could have had Jason. It’s just like, Ev created it for me. And I had this camping trip with Biz and Ev that summer. I was like, “How do I work on this? I want, you know, I want to work on this thing.” And they’re like, “Well, you know, we don’t really know what it means to work on this.” Because like, you know, “We’re doing this other company, and it’s not really working. This is a side project of that. And we’ve got, you know, there’s a product manager we already have there.” I was like, “All right; well, I’m going to quit my job at Google. I’ll travel for a couple of months, and hopefully by the time I’m done doing that, you’ll have cleaned all this up.” And during that summer, fall of 2006, Ev buys back Odeo from the investors, and it creates the Obvious Corporation. Of which Twitter was meant to be one of many products that would be worked on. And I’m hired as the director of product strategy for Obvious.

Warzel: Okay, what was the thing on the trip that caused the spark for you? If you have to drill down, what was the thing about the service at that time that did that?

Goldman: There were six of us. Went to Vegas, and we all had like sort of slightly different interests in Vegas. My interest in Vegas has always been very middle-aged man. I like to have a nice dinner and then go play some poker and go to bed at a reasonable hour. Even when I was in my 30s, and the ability to use Twitter to like, just see what your friends were doing. Like I would just be like, “I’m gonna play poker for a little bit.” And it wasn’t like a text update to the group thread. And I would just be able to get this, like, sort of ambient awareness of what my other friends were doing. It’s like, someone’s going out to the pool. And there’s like six of us. It was like—it felt like I think, for people who like to have a little bit of social distance and don’t feel an obligation to kind of, like, have to respond right away to “Okay, I’m coming to the pool, too.” It was just like, I know what people are doing. I don’t need to respond right away. Everyone else knows where I am. We can coordinate, and things will emerge from this. Felt like a new way of being with your friends, both online and offline, that was simply not possible before that.

Warzel: There’s some big moments in the early years. You guys win, I think, best startup at South by Southwest.

Goldman: Best blog.

Warzel: “Best blog”? That’s what you won?

Goldman: A really weird historical fact was that we go to South by Southwest in 2007, which is widely pointed to as, like, Twitter’s “coming-out party.” We weren’t even on a panel. Like, we weren’t even, you know, Ev’s doing, or Jack is doing, like, a keynote to explain what Twitter is. Like, we weren’t famous enough yet for that. We were in the hallway outside in the conference center and set up a monitor, set up a screen where you could see all the tweets that were from people at South by Southwest. But the monitor of being able to see, like, there’s all these tweets. And you could post, and you’ll see your tweet. And you’ll be able to see, like, other people’s tweets, of what they’re doing. Created as, as Biz would describe, this opportunity for emergent behavior. Where you’d be at a bar, and all of a sudden you’d see a tweet from someone.Like, you know, actually there’s, something cool happening at this bar, like, six doors down. And you’d watch everyone walk out the door of that, and move to the bar six doors down.

Warzel: What were some of those emergent behaviors to, you know, quote Biz, like that came out of it? Where you guys were like, “Whoa, this is even more than the thing that we designed it for”?

Goldman: Yeah, there’s a couple different things. I mean, of course, the important context for 2008–2009 is that the service, like, took off. And was starting to, you know, was hockey-sticking. It wasn’t consistent. People think, “Oh, it just, like, looked like the usage chart for Anthropic” or something like that. Like, that is not true. Like, there were many periods in time where growth flattened out until some, like, new cohort got it. It was not consistent growth. So one of the questions I always get asked is, like, “When did you know it was working?” And I worked there until 2010. And through 2010, we consistently thought this could go away at any time. Like, At any time people could just be tired of this, and this could just completely die. So that’s one piece of context. The other is that the service just fundamentally didn’t work. Again, remembering the era that we were in.

There’s two major revolutions, paradigm shifts, that happened in this period of time in the late 2000s. One is the introduction of the iPhone, which is tremendously well-timed for Twitter and felt like a big breakthrough. The other one is the cloud-computing revolution, which we were not well-timed for. We were too early for that. So it just it simply fell over a bunch during 2008.

Warzel: Yeah. And that’s important, because this thing is having this increased cultural resonance and also developing this reputation for really being good when things are happening. Like during live moments, right? Like, you want to be a spectator.

Goldman: Yeah. Yes. Steve Jobs keynotes; Super Bowls. Like, those were things early on we saw as, like, people really like using it during these live events, and it would fall over completely during those events.

Warzel: Right. And you’d get the canonical fail whale, right? Which became its own thing.

Goldman: Yeah. It failed so much the failure became, like, an icon, like a mascot of the product. Which is I think, in miniature, sort of a pretty good shorthand for Twitter. Which is like: It is a company and a product that has failed so much that its failure is one of its most iconic mascots and images. And yet, it still existed.

That’s my context setting for 2008, 2009. You asked about, like, what were the breakout moments. I think a few, for me, the ones that felt most validating were the ones that I cared about personally. So it would be things like, my background’s in astronomy. So NASA being an early adapter of Twitter was really meaningful, because they both thought it was cool and wanted to use it to update about their missions. And came up with this genius invention, which was to tweet in the first person from the perspective of the probe going to Mars. And so the probe going to Mars would tweet, you know, I’m on my way. Like, you know, My shoots are deployed. And it felt like a live event that you were very personally connected to. And as a space nerd, it felt like the best possible use case. So that, to me, is always kind of No. 1 on the song sheet for me. I felt that was super meaningful.

Other ones include, certainly, the 2008 election. Where politics, it became clear, was going to be a dominant use case of the product. Those people, like, talking about news. The Obama campaign was using it to do engagement online in 2007, 2008, and we built a whole election site. And then, in 2009, after Obama was elected, we get called by the State Department because—this is timely—we are being told that Twitter is of use in Iran during these pro-democracy protests that are happening. And we have to stay up and not take downtime in order to help support the protesters. This turns out both, I think later, not to be particularly true. Like, it seems maybe Twitter wasn’t that important. But, and I think—at the time we internally did not want to make a big deal, or want to claim a lot of responsibility for pro-democracy movements around the world. Because we didn’t feel we understood those properly. But it became part of the media narrative about Twitter.

Warzel: Was it just a complete, like, shit moment when you get that? Like, We are in over our heads all of a sudden?

Goldman: Yes. We’re in over our heads. We don’t really know. There’s no adult in the room who’s like an expert. Like, in a contemporary company, you would at least have on the board, like, someone who came from a government background. Both Biz and I had a very strong read on that situation, which was the story is going to be that we’re being asked to like save Iran, for democracy. And we need to resist that narrative as much as possible. Both because we do not … we like the Obama administration, but we do not want to be an extension of the United States government. Like, one: We’re a private company. And two: We do not understand the particulars on the ground in Iran such that we can say whether or not what we’re doing is helping or hurting or anything else. Like this—all we know is that this is a complex, volatile situation in which we are not experts. And like, I take a lot of pride in that. Because I know for sure that it is not retroactively imposing a narrative; [we] have lot of documents that we both publish publicly as well as emails that we had internally.

I credit Biz a lot with the desire to push back on this. What you see a lot in tech right now, which is like: Any bro who has a Twitter account and a hundred thousand followers thinks that he’s an expert in international-energy economics. Or, you know, nuclear weapons, or you know. Like, everyone’s an expert in all of this shit. Like, we were not. We did not pretend to put ourselves out there as experts on the geopolitics of West Asia.

Warzel: Is this the moment where there’s this kind of a free-speech-maximalist ethos that starts to develop inside? Right? Which is this, like, “Hey, listen; we cannot, as we start to get more important, we cannot make these big, sort of hard leans on the editorial controls.” And that ends up being its own issue that Twitter has to deal with down the line. But is that sort of the genesis of it?

Goldman: One hundred percent. I think it predates that. I think it becomes tested in that moment, but the free-speech ethos for Twitter is a Blogger artifact, 100 percent. I can speak pretty definitively about this, because I was in charge of content policy for Blogger. And Blogger, we had a lot of arguments internally that went up to the executive team about wanting to maintain separate content policies for our Blogger. Separate from what were being applied to, in particular, AdWords advertisers. And we fought very hard against that, and ultimately won that argument and preserved a much more permissive view of what should be allowed. Which is, essentially, like: Unless it’s illegal, we should be very skeptical about taking it down. So then when I got to Twitter, before it was even Twitter, I wrote the first content policy for Twitter. They previously were using, in 2006, Flickr’s content policy, and Flickr’s content policy was very granola. And I was like, all right, we’ll have a few more things than that.

And we had some early tests of the content policy in Twitter in 2007, 2008, where people were being harassed on Twitter. And there was lot of—you know, there were like cases of someone being, you know, called names, and someone being kind of stalked across Twitter. Of saying, like, Oh, I know what you did with my ex. Or something like that. And we took a very hands-off approach to that. I think that’s … probably, I think we can call that a mistake. Think I made a mistake on that.

Looking back, we should have taken a more aggressive stance. I think the thing that we did not recognize until much, much later on Twitter was that Twitter was fundamentally a different product, because of the follow graph and the notifications about mentions. Once those became built into the product, it became much easier to engage in types of abuse vectors and harassment that was not possible on Blogger. Because on Blogger, you had your own little protected blog. You could just ban people from the comments or whatever. Whereas on Twitter, someone could show up in your mentions tab and actually be talking all kinds of terrible stuff to you. And even if you block them, you knew other people were seeing it.

So we applied this free-speech-maximalist idea from Blogger and kept it for quite a long time at Twitter. I think mistakenly. I think that was a mistake that I had a pretty instrumental role in playing. But it was because we did not recognize that these new kind of vectors were possible.

Warzel: I’ve done a lot of reporting around Twitter and online harassment and things like that, especially early on in those days. It was real.

Goldman: Yeah, 100 percent.

Warzel: There were people who suffered very real consequences due to this non-understanding. Like, without taking away anything from the seriousness of that or absolving anyone in this thing. It is, again, speaking to this era of whatever we’ll call it, now of Web 2—where it’s like “building the plane as everyone’s flying it.” Listening to you say that, it’s like you guys didn’t seem to really understand some of these emergence behaviors of the platform, because you didn’t know it until you saw them.

Goldman: Yeah. I mean, and to put a underline on that point, one of the primary vectors for abuse and harassment became at [@] notifications, right? You could show up in someone’s notifications and, you know, be talking really heinous stuff to them. The entire at mentions, like protocol, was user-created, right? That was something that users just started doing. It wasn’t a feature that we built. We later, then, built features to like kind of pave the path around that thing that people had started doing. But it was something that just emerged from how people were using the product. So it’s not even the case that we built—like, we kind of had this idea for how at notification should work, and how a notifications tab should work. And we didn’t kind of do the due diligence to think through the abuse vectors. It’s like: People just started doing this behavior, and we kind of put up a scaffolding around it. And then realized, Oh wait; there’s all this other stuff going on around the boundaries of that.

Warzel: And this—for people who aren’t intimately familiar with the history of Twitter or weren’t there around the early days—this is yet another thing that makes Twitter so much different, I think, than almost any other platform that exists. Which is that so many of these now-canonical features were just built by users. Like the hashtag, What I think is so interesting—and this has always been very interesting to me about Twitter as a product—is you get like these at mentions, these replies. You get the ability to just sort of jump into somebody’s network and grab their attention. And that becomes this thing that, you know, is a source of serious pain and trauma for a lot of people. Or this way of instilling a different kind of brigading behavior on the internet, that becomes very foundational to how we do this thing.

At the same time, it is very much the thing that myself and other people on the service found as like—this is why this thing is revolutionary. Like, I can jump into this other journalist’s mentions. Or I can jump into … there were, you know, the celebrities who are coming on the platform. Like Ashton Kutcher is this big superpower user, and like Joe Schmo, you know, sitting at work can “at” this celebrity. And boom, they just reply, and, like, you’re now texting with a movie star.

That’s the thing, to me, that I find so fascinating about the platform. It’s like: So much of what makes this thing so useful, so great, so able to drive culture, to actually have utility for folks in breaking-news situations or just, like, whatever big cultural moments, is exactly the thing that makes it so dangerous and instills these terrible behaviors.

Goldman: 100 percent. I think you’re completely right that this flattening of status across the graph is this novel feature of the product. Where it’s like, yeah, you know, someone who has you know, 500 likes on their tweet, feels as significant in the network as the biggest celebrity in the world. If, like that biggest celebrity, they have an equal chance of having a place in the firmament. It’s the beginnings of what we see dominating the media environment right now—which is this, you know, nicheification of all media. Where, like, if you’re famous to like 500 people, you’re famous. Like that you are a dominant, influencer news source for those 500 people, and that you are more meaningful to those 500 people than Ryan Gosling or whatever.

So that all started, I think, with Twitter. And the other point—like the point about why I think we were blind to the abuse and harassment stuff in those early days—is both because we adopted a bad content model from Blogger without realizing that the product had changed fundamentally. The types of abuse and harassment that could be implemented. But I think, two, one of the fundamental blind spots of technologists and people building services is that you’re up against such odds from so many people who don’t believe that the thing that you’re doing is worth a damn. And are just like, Why would anyone spend any of their time doing this? Like, it’s what we heard when we were doing Blogger. It’s what we heard when we’re doing Twitter. You know, it’s like—“This is just where you go to, like, tell people that you’re eating a taco. How is that worth anything?” And we’re like, “No, you don’t understand. This is what’s going to connect the human hive mind and, like, bring us to a higher level of consciousness.” That was like, you know, a true belief.

And when you’re that zealous about the mission that you’re on, which you almost need to be in a startup to survive, that zealotry blinds you completely to the downside risks that you’re producing. That is a dominant idea that you see—particularly in this era of the internet, like the 2000-to-2015 era of the internet—which is just, Any use of our product is intrinsically good. More of our product in the world is intrinsically good for humanity. We are good people. And therefore, we just need to get this product in the hands of more people. And if there are downside risks, if there are things that are happening that we don’t like, those are bugs, and we can fix those bugs. But that’s not the intended use. And so we shouldn’t judge the platform based on that.

Whereas what I now believe is that those downside risks—those bad things that happen—aren’t bugs. Those are just use cases that you enabled that you may not like. Like, all of those things are equally weighted use cases and things that your product enabled. And you need to grapple with that fact. Harassment of people in 2008. Gamergate. Like, those are all things that were enabled because of the system that you built and the choices that you made.

Warzel: Is there an original sin, so to speak? Or is it just a network of, or a body of, decisions that you’re making, sort of blind to these things? As you’re building the plane as you fly it? Or do you think that there is one thing where it’s like, If we could have gone back and nipped that thing in the bud…

Goldman: I think we dramatically understaffed the trust-and-safety team. And would routinely poach their engineers, because we needed them to keep the service running. You know, it was like, again, the service was not working. It was simply being crushed under its own weight. So, in a choice between, like, “Is the service going to stand up?” or “Are we going to have more people to build the internal tools that the trust-and-safety team needs to prevent abuse?” We chose the former 100 percent of the time. And that completely kneecaps that team’s ability to enforce rules or to make good policy. So that’s definitely one choice.

I do think kind of fast-forwarding to where we are right now, and you sort of already alluded to this, which is like: Why are these choices up to these companies 100 percent of the time? Like, why are these choices vested? Why is there no devolvement of authority from beyond the company’s walls? Now that doesn’t mean I want to create, like, a ministry of content moderation somewhere. But it does mean that there should be some checks on how the job is being done by these companies, by someone outside the companies themselves There should be some system, even if it’s just a scoreboard that says, “Hey; we’re seeing all the data in real time. We’re making assessments of where harm exists. Here’s our scoreboard of harm. Like, here’s like our doomsday clock. We think it’s like two minutes to midnight in terms of CSAM, or, you know, user abuse on your platform. And it’s moved from two minutes to, you know, 90 seconds in the last six months. Like, do with that what you will. But, you know, every month, we’re going to publish an update about how we think you’re doing.” And I think just simply having that sort of transparency would be helpful.

Warzel: Well, super candidly, it’s the thing that was so frustrating to me as a reporter. Because during this time—I don’t remember exactly when it was; it was around Gamergate—you’d see these high-profile cases of harassment. And it would trickle. Sometimes it would just be regular, normal women who were getting, you know, heaps and heaps of these, like, threats or, you know—

Goldman: Yeah. Death threats, rape threats. Yeah.

Warzel: Or things like that, that maybe bleed in the world. And what would happen is, they would report them to Twitter. And then it would be sort of like, “We’ve handled your claim, and we don’t see any problem.” You know, clearly there was no human in the loop. It was just happening. So it became this thing that myself and probably, I don’t know, 20, 30 other journalists ended up doing, where it was like we were acting as sort of a trusted safety team. Like an escalator person, basically, to flag it to, you know, PR and be like, “Hey, so, is Twitter going to enforce the rules here?”

And that’s the thing. Like, the media in this moment of, let’s say, 2015, 2016, 2017 became this, de facto layer in there, of like accountability. But there was, at the same time, I think it’s been retrofitted into this idea of like, “Oh, you’re trying to act as a censor, right? You’re trying to act as a thing.” And it’s like, “No, this is what’s very basic journalism stuff.” Which was like, you guys have a slate of rules that are changing all the time. And someone is coming and saying the rules have been violated. And, you know, as a reporter, you’re like, “Well, is the company going to enforce these rules? Or have the rules changed again?” Here we go. And then you’d see, no, “Such and such user gets banned, because reporter at X brought it up.” Or whatever.

And it sort of creates this condition that then, you know, evolves throughout the first Trump presidency. And you have, up even to now, which is like, “There’s this censorious media that’s just trying to get people banned from the platform.” This is a very load-bearing argument in the whole reason why Elon Musk decides to come in and want to purchase the platform: to, quote unquote “restore free speech” you know, to the people. But part of this frustration, I think, speaks to the idea of, like, not having any way to have accountability for these platforms. Enforcing their own rules is the thing. If Twitter had said, as they do now under Elon Musk, “We’re an open sewer. It doesn’t matter. We’re 4chan. Anything goes. There’s no rules.” Wild West.

Goldman: “It doesn’t matter. There’s no rules.” Yeah.

Warzel: There wouldn’t be reporters lining up saying, like, “Well, what’s going on here?” Because it’s like, yeah, no—I don’t want to be on this website that, there’s no safety net for it. And so I think that’s a really fundamental point that undergirds all of this. You exited the company in 2010, and I’m just curious…

Goldman: I was fired, but yeah.

Warzel: Fired. Okay. Why were you fired?

Goldman: Because I support, like … you know, Jack was fired in 2008. Which is something I supported as a board member. Jack comes back in 2010; it sort of precluded my ability to be employed there any longer. Not as, like, retribution, but just it was pretty clear that I wasn’t going to support Jack as a leader at the company.

Warzel: And this is an important part of all of this, too, at this time. Like, it is a relatively chaotic managerial; like, there’s just a lot of shuffling around. And like, the drama of Twitter. There are books written about it.

Goldman: Oh yeah; no. It was total chaos. Yeah.

Warzel: What did you think, in that time, was ahead for the company?

Goldman: The big debate was the sort of debate over the business model for Twitter. Of what was the team that we needed, and what was the path that we should pursue for a business model for Twitter. And Ev had a lot of—and me as well—we had a lot of hesitancy about the ads-only approach to the business model for Twitter. Because we had worked at Google. And you know, we’re not super wild about the user experience of content-targeted ads and advertising. And social media was like, you know, all this stuff about, you know, surveillance capitalism. And “you are the product.” Like, all of that stuff is true. It’s just true. You know, we haven’t come up with a better business model to replace it. It turns out that business model is both high margin and high volume. So like, you know, they get remains the dominant way to monetize content on the Internet, whether video text or anything else. But it just seemed kind of, you know, it seemed to be having a bad effect. And that was before we fast-forward 10 years and we see some of the negative consequences that that’s had for journalism, that’s had for, you know, for audience capture. All these other effects. So the fundamental tension was: How do we convert this company, in 2010, from a cultural success to a capital success?

And I think the fundamental mistake that we made in that time—I guess you go back to sort of the one mistake we made that I wish we could undo. The biggest mistake that we made was consistently comparing ourselves to Facebook on business terms. Like, when we were doing the run-up to the IPO, it was always like, you know. And even before the IPO, when I was there, like it was always like, “This is bigger than Facebook.” And that is just simply not true. Facebook has better data about its users, who are authenticated to be real users; they have more information; they do better surveillance across a suite of apps; they have a better ability to target them; they target on way better variables. Their ads product is just simply better than any that Twitter was gonna be able to build. And as a result, Twitter’s multiple was never actually gonna compare favorably. But its IPO story was that it was going to compare favorably.

So that was a big problem. That is what created the context for Elon to buy the company. Because, like, all of the early investors were able to get out of Twitter at the IPO time, or sometime in the intervening years, based on this idea that the multiple curve is going to be hit for Twitter’s business, and it’s going to exceed Facebook’s. The Street eventually realizes that’s not true; is under constant activist pressure from that time on to do something else. That puts a lot of pressure on Jack as the CEO, which he doesn’t enjoy. And that creates the condition for the company to be transacted to Elon. So if I had to go back to one mistake, it’s like it’s that whole run-up to the IPO and the way that the company is positioned as a business. That was the mistake.

Warzel: There’s this really important thing that happens in the 2010s after you leave, which is that this guy Donald Trump is somehow this really good power user of Twitter. He’s talking about Diet Coke, and people are like, “This is funny.” And he hosts this reality show that’s really popular on NBC.

And then he starts turning his eyes to politics. I always like to think that 2012 set the stage for politics happening on Twitter. These candidates are expected to be on Twitter. Lawmakers, when they get in, are supposed to bring people, you know, behind closed doors. Issue, you know, all sorts of their messages. The entire D.C. press corps gets so wrapped up, you know, secluded at times in this thing that, like, every micro-cycle drives editorial decisions in newsrooms, across everywhere. Donald Trump is like, “I can tap into that. I’m really good at this platform.”

Cut to, you know, November 2016. Donald Trump is elected president. This is also at a time when, as I’m covering it, the harassment stuff is really, really big. I was in contact with a lot of people who were working at the company at the time. And there was just this moment of like: I think we did this.

Goldman: I think we did this. Yeah.

Warzel: I think this is on us. What was your feeling?

Goldman: I agreed. I think Twitter was instrumental to Donald Trump’s election. I don’t think it is the only force. Or like, I’ve heard the 2016 election described, at various times, “like an airplane crash.” Like, you know, there’s multiple causes; you can’t really appoint it to just one thing. But, you know, the plane definitely crashed. It’s worth noting that on Election Day, November of 2016, I was in the Roosevelt Room of the White House when that happened. Because I was working at the White House by that time, and had been hired into the Obama administration because they had realized that they had lost the thread on using social media effectively after the 2014 midterms. I had this conversation with President Obama in the wake of the 2016 election, where he said … you know, all of the sort of, like, “Obama is very even.” He does not get very hot or very angry. And in the end, the day after the election, his role was going around to staff and bucking people up. To be like, “Hey, this is going to be okay. We’re going to be okay.” Which is pretty incredible.

And to me, he said, “You know, I’m not really happy with the results of this election.” I was like, “Yeah; me neither, sir. I think this is not good.” And he’s like, “And you know, there’s a lot of reasons for why that’s true. But one of them is because of you, because of Twitter.” And I was like, “No; I agree.” And he was doing that as a way to, like, start a broader conversation. About, like, “What do we need to do to think about the role of social media, and the role of the internet in our civic life and what it’s doing?” Which had been a topic that had interested him long before the election. But I agree with his assessment: thatt Twitter played an outsize role in that election.

What Trump realized before—you know, early, like eight years before we sort of really codified it into a thesis—was that the currency that mattered most in the contemporary environment was attention. That attention was the coin of the realm. And if you could command attention, regardless of if it was for good reasons or bad, you were winning. All you needed to do was to be able to command attention. And Twitter was very good for commanding attention, because you could say something outrageous, and that would get a lot of attention on Twitter.

And I think the way in which you need to understand things like meme coins and prediction markets are essentially derivatives on the attention economy. It is essentially ways in which people have figured out how to trade this fundamental commodity that runs the entire world now.

Warzel: So Trump’s president. And there’s this guy on the service, famous entrepreneur, Elon Musk. I think for me it was some period; it was sometime in 2017. It’s very clear in that time period of whatever, let’s just broadly say 2017 to 2020, that Musk himself, a power user of Twitter, sort of gets, and this is a very common thing that happens on the platform, is like…

Goldman: Gets captured. Yeah.

Warzel: People get captured by the platform. And they both like being good at it, affect it. And then it affects them, and the snake eats their own tail. Like, you know, it’s just an accelerationist situation, where you get to someone who is radicalized in their ways. Elon Musk then goes through this whole period of time in 2022 where he flirts with basically,, like, getting a board seat. Right?

He sort of reverses course and says, “You know what; actually, I’m going to buy this.”

Goldman: “I’m just gonna buy it.” Yeah.

Warzel: “And I’m gonna take it private, and I’m gonna totally rewire this thing. And I’m gonna bring this back to the glory days, to what the platform is supposed to be. Free-speech-maximalist ethos.”

Goldman: So I think a couple of things, for context. Elon is the best example for the “power of audience capture,” in the current environment. Because you’re talking about a person who is worth a trillion dollars, close to it. Can literally do anything. He’s got more power than most nation-states in the world. And yet, his engagement on Twitter is clearly one of the most important things to him in the world. Like, it is clearly very meaningful to him, and the feedback that he gets from his audience on Twitter is both so important to him that he not only goes to, you know, buy the product. You know, not only goes to buy the company that produces this product. But Joyce Carol Oates makes fun of him on Twitter for not liking things. The famous author Joyce Carol Oates, who’s an absolute—

Warzel: Yes, basically says he doesn’t like things that like humans like, right? Like, pets and reading and movies. Right.

Goldman: He doesn’t know. It’s like, why doesn’t he ever talk about his family? Why doesn’t he ever talk about movies? And like, just killer. It’s one of our great, just fire, Twitters, by the way. Just unreal that she’s great at the product. And he spends the next, like, two days or two weeks posting movies that he likes, or whatever. Like it clearly, it seemingly got to him that he felt the need to kind of respond to this, in this oblique way. Very curious effect of the product.

Warzel: So, Musk buys Twitter. Immediately, he walks in with a sink as a joke; “Let this sink in.”

He slashes the workforce. Creates a lot of actual chaos; fires a ton of people. And there’s this feeling for a long period of time that Twitter is actually going to die, right?

Goldman: Going to die. Yeah.

Warzel: And Musk is alienating advertisers at this exact moment. He’s, like, walking into meetings and saying stuff that makes them feel really weird and really bad about stuff. It seems that the service isn’t gonna hold up in those really early days. He’s also just, like, letting a lot of banned people back on the service. Donald Trump can return to Twitter after being banned post–January 6th And the platform doesn’t die.

Goldman: Doesn’t die. Still doesn’t die.

Warzel: In fact, lots of power users who are in my profession or in politics and stuff…

Goldman: Come back.

Warzel: Still using it, still enjoying it. Doing everything. It leads to the 2024 election. Elon Musk, really, while he’s doing all this, he’s in the tank for Donald Trump. He’s given out million-dollar checks to people. He creates, and a lot of people don’t remember this, an election hub inside Twitter or X. Which, he renames it X; forgot about that. He renames it X. There is this feeling he has put his hands on the scale. He’s used this platform that has his outsized political power. He’s sort of turned it into this political weapon that can be directed toward his particular ideology.

What does Elon Musk fundamentally understand about Twitter? What is the thing that he truly understands and gets, in ways that maybe no one else does?

Goldman: I think it is somewhat analogous to the Trump case—which is that attention is good. Because, you know, look—and this is always the throat-clearing part about talking about Elon that I hate doing. But, like, he did build a rocket company. He has achieved; he has built some real things. There’s no one who’s understood and leveraged as well the ability to turn attention into market capitalization better than Elon Musk. Like he really is, like, the, the best who’s ever done it. And some of the techniques that he’s applied there are personal mythology. You know, there’s a lot of personal mythologizing of Elon. He never sleeps. He sleeps on the factory floor. He’s a super genius who understands everything.

Twitter was a little bit risky for him, incidentally, on the “super genius who understands everything,” because it became very obvious in the early going that he didn’t know what he was talking about with regards to global web-scale design. Like, there’s a number of high-profile incidents where, like, people who actually understand how global web systems have been built. And Elon’s not built a website since like, you know, PayPal. Like we’ll go and be like, but you know, “What do you mean, like ‘There’s too many microservices’? Like, what does that actually mean to you?” And he clearly doesn’t have, like ,a practitioner’s understanding of that problem. But like, you know, the site does still run, right? Like, you know, it makes all these changes. The site does still run.

I think Elon has managed to parlay attention into market capitalization for his companies better than anyone else, because he’s figured out how to both skirt and in some cases just go over the line of what you can do.

I’ll put myself out there: I did not think his X experiment would work. I felt he would have to, like, kind of get rid of this. And one of the reasons was, I just didn’t think the numbers … I felt like the brand risk that he was going to take on. And this is before he went all-in for Trump, I was like: That’s just going to look bad for him, and people are going to start feeling bad about his cars, and they’re going to feel bad about his actual business. Like, why is he going to want that? Additionally, Twitter was so levered, in terms of the amount of debt that it had on its book, that it completely froze.

Like, it froze the banks who are holding the debt, because they couldn’t move it off their balance sheets during a time of rising interest rates. But he’s more powerful than the Street. Like, he is able to make the largest financial institutions in the world kind of dance to his tune, because his power is so unbounded by any normal constraint. There’s no one else who would be able to do that. Anyone else would get called. But no one wants to call Elon. I think it is a unique example of how to use attention for market power.

Warzel: So this is, to kind of put a bow on it. I am curious. Some of this has to do with Elon. But I think broadly speaking, I’m interested more outside of the realm of just him and his ownership and the logistics of it. But: Why won’t Twitter die? So many things happen to it.

Goldman: Yeah, man. It’s crazy.

Warzel: There’s so many outsize elements of negative influence. I mean, there’s positive influence, obviously. But when you look at it, this is a website that was, for a very long time, its power users referred to it as “the hellsite.” So why won’t it die? And I don’t mean from a funding standpoint. But like, why won’t it die culturally?

Goldman: Brother, wish I knew. I really don’t. I do find it interesting. There’s a couple theories. Once you own a piece of real estate on the internet, it does end up being pretty durable in a lot of cases. It does end up being pretty hard to dislodge people if they’re willing to fund the losses. Facebook—despite its misadventures in the metaverse—owns the friend graph still. Like, and despite all of, like, all of the youngs don’t use it, and like, you know it’s just for Boomers or whatever, it’s still like a core, load-bearing element of the internet, right? And for all of the, like, “You have to append ‘Reddit’ to the end of search queries in order to get the good results”—because you know SEO has gotten so jacked up, like Google still owns search and has owned it for 20 years, right? Like more than 20 years at this point.

And so it is hard to dislodge incumbents, because there’s no regulatory pressure. That is one of the things that traditionally has prevented incumbents from reaching a certain size. And market-consolidation forces are still one of the iron laws of the land. Like, the bigger just eats the smaller. Again, absent any regulatory pressure or paradigmatic reshuffling of the deck, à la the introduction of the consumer internet, writ large, like—you just don’t see broad-based dislocations in these mature markets.

So I think that’s probably the easiest explanation. I don’t think, like, there’s one magic trick that Twitter figured out that makes it so durable. I think that I was very skeptical of all of the folks who kind of came along, whether that’s Threads or Bluesky, and were just like, “We’re going to do this, but better.” I was like, nothing but better ever replaces the old thing. That’s just not how it works in mature markets. That can work when the market is evolving, but that doesn’t usually happen in a mature media market.

Warzel: What is the legacy of Twitter, for you? We’re talking about a lot of stuff that is really negative. There’s also a lot that’s like really fascinating. It is the most influential piece of technology that’s not a phone or something like that. Pieces like social media, in my life, to my career, to all these different things, right? I have this tortured relationship with it. I’m sure you do too. But in your mind, where does it net out for you? Is the legacy of Twitter positive? Is it negative? Is it indeterminate? How do you feel about it?

Goldman: I try not to be too solipsistic about it, because the stakes are higher than just my personal experience. There’s people. I’ve benefited tremendously from Twitter’s ascendance; financially as well as the things I’ve been able to do in my life professionally. But it is informed by the fact that, you know, I worked on Twitter early, and now Elon Musk runs it. And I worked at the White House, and my transition meeting was literally with Dan Scavino, who, like, tweets for Donald Trump to this day. And so in both of those—what is the legacy of that?

It is hard for me not to see it in the context of “What is the legacy of being an American in this moment in history?” Where you are raised in an era where you believe certain ideological things about the country, and certain things that are true, and a certain belief in its core institutions. And the idea of democracy, and the idea of a pluralistic system in which, you know, we’ve gotten past and are still contending with, but have gotten past a lot of the historical injustices that defined the first 250 years of this country.

And yet, we live in a moment where we are seeing, you know, just the most venal, worst-acting, worse aspects of American society in our lifetime. And the story of Twitter is embedded in that, very deeply.

And so it’s hard for me to reconcile both things at the same time. Which is that I still believe in the ideological ideas that underpinned the beginning of Twitter and also Blogger—which is that the internet should be used as a medium of self-expression, and that if we were to embrace it as such, people around the world would understand each other better. We would be able to experience more of one another’s lived world. And that would create more empathy and understanding, and that that is a good and virtuous project to be engaged with. And I’m proud of the work that I’ve done there.

And yet, what we actually have built—and what has actually been produced—is a platform that has created tremendous harm, and is in the current moment still being used to inflict tremendous harm. You have to wrestle with both of those things. And you know, you cannot just look at the things that you don’t like and say, “Those are unintended use cases that I never meant to happen.” Your intention doesn’t really play into the answer there.

Warzel: We’ve talked a lot about the cultural relevance of Twitter, and the fact that it can’t die. There’s this way in which it was very, very important for all these different genres of niche communities. You’ve got, like, Black Twitter was an absolutely foundational one for this type of culture, that really influenced not only the platform but culture at large in general. We’re talking about, you know, Elon and Trump and these guys, and being really good at using it. And I think that there’s this way in which, especially, two dudes who have so much history with the platform, overindexing its cultural relevance now. I think there’s a feeling that the culture outside of politics, and outside of edgelord, racist, Trumpian politics has actually moved on—when you have TikTok and these ascendant platforms where these communities are going, and where sort of like the bleeding edge of culture happens. Do you think that, I don’t know, that’s a threat to Twitter going forward?

Goldman: I think there’s an optimistic version of the story there. Which is that Twitter—by, in the Elon era, foregrounding so vociferously his parochial cultural interests, by being so overt about the cultural change that he wanted to see in the world—it creates its own natural backlash. Because it ends up becoming defined as a period in time.

And I think you’re right, which is that culture is being made in other places. Like when TikTok became ascendant; felt the same way about it that I do about Twitter. I did about Twitter. Which is just: I love TikTok. I think it is so exciting, that it is a place where culture gets made, and you see these little pockets of where it’s, you know, it feels like something that was made for you and your entertainment. I think it is a much more dangerous and weaponized version of social media than what we were doing with Twitter, because it is so precise and is so weaponized.

I do think Twitter could be sort of the thing where, when I got to the White House and was working in communications, I was surprised to learn about the centrality of like Morning Joe as a show that was really important for how people—the most powerful people in the world—thought about where content was being shaped. And I was like, “I’ve never heard of this show. What is this show?” People were shocked that I’ve never heard of it. But it is very important for how narrative is shaped. And Twitter could be something like that, where it is like, you know, a version of legacy media that is, in absolute terms, very, very small. And for certain cultural-making aspects been replaced by other platforms. But for some powerful part of the demographic—older male, you know, people in politics, people in news—it still is the Morning Joe of its time for the next 15 years.

Warzel: Jason, thank you for walking me through this.

Goldman: Yeah; this is great. Did we do it?

Warzel: We speed-ran it. But I’d really—I think that this is a pretty good “how a bill becomes a law that destroys civilization and the fabric of democracy and reality.” So I think we did do it. And I appreciate your insight. And yeah; thank you.

Goldman: Thanks so much.

[Music]

Warzel: Thank you again to my guest, Jason Goldman. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday, and you could subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube channel, or on Apple or Spotify or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work, and the work of my fellow journalists at The Atlantic, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. That’s TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Thanks so much for watching, and I’ll see you on the internet.

This episode of Galaxy Brain was produced by Renee Klahr and engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.