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Jason Goldman was supposed to be an astrophysicist. Instead, he ended up dropping out of grad school and working at internet companies. I'd been extremely online before that was even a thing. I was like a nerd from way back in the early 90s. Goldman got a job at Google and eventually ended up at a dream gig for a young tech worker in San Francisco. He was head of product at Twitter. One problem, though.
Twitter barely worked at all during this time. If you used Twitter back then, you will remember the fail whale. This is a cartoon that showed a flock of birds carrying a whale, and you got it when you opened the Twitter homepage if the platform was down, which happened a lot of the time. Most of the time, Twitter went down unexpectedly. Every so often, it went down on purpose, like in June 2009.
I wrote a blog post saying, hey, we're taking a downtime. We'll be down from 2 to 3 a.m. on Saturday morning, West Coast time, in order to do this critical database upgrade, which was critical. We're telling the world we need to take a break for a couple hours to fix the thing because we're failing all the time. Yeah, because we're failing all the time. Lots of people on Twitter would complain whenever the service went down. But this time, the Twitter team got an unusual request from the State Department.
we'd like you not to do this if you can. We understand it's important, but there's this thing going on and this is really bad timing for it. Could you do it another time? The reason that the U.S. State Department wanted Twitter to stay up was that Iran had just gone through a presidential election and there were very believable accusations of fraud and protesters had taken to the streets. And people in Barack Obama's administration thought protesters were using Twitter. They felt like
Going down would negatively affect the protesters' ability to organize. When Twitter got that request from the State Department, it was not a tech giant. It was a three-year-old accidental company staffed almost entirely by inexperienced young men. But when the Obama administration looked at Twitter, it didn't see a bumbling startup. The State Department saw Twitter as a bastion of free speech, a place where journalists and dissidents and regular people shared information from all over the world.
This may be hard to remember, but back in 2009, it was totally normal for serious, important people to talk about Twitter like this. All kinds of people. Here's a 2009 quote from Mark Fifeley, a former official at the National Security Council. Quote, Without Twitter, the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy. End quote. Twitter, Fifeley argued, should win the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Obama administration's request worried Goldman and Biz Stone, one of Twitter's co-founders. If they did something the State Department asked them to do, did that mean they were taking sides in an Iranian election? We didn't want to pretend that we knew what was going on, particularly with respect to geopolitical affairs. Biz and I had a real talk about this at the time. Like a real, like, can you believe this is what we're doing right now? Like, can you believe it? Like, we're not that smart.
Goldman and Stone did what Washington asked, and Twitter stayed up. And over in Iran? Well, that's the thing. The role was minimal, and it didn't—it wasn't prominent. It was mostly word of mouth that organizers use in order to bring people in the streets. Baba Krahimi is a professor of communication, culture, and religion at the University of California, San Diego. In 2009, he went to Iran to study online political life.
And when the protests kicked off, he ended up doing lots of TV interviews from Tehran. He found that TV networks thought what the State Department thought: that Twitter was driving events inside the country.
Protesters aren't only sending video and photos, but live updates from the demonstrations using a website called Twitter. I mean, I remember one Fox News reporter asked me, you know, what's your view of, you know, Twitter in Iran? And at that time, I actually didn't know much about Twitter because I haven't really used it at that time. I didn't see any Iranians use it. I didn't encounter it much. I kept talking about Facebook, but Twitter was somehow pushed in our conversations because
And much of it had to do with, again, this basic question, how Iranians are using internet or Twitter. That was the big question everyone wanted to know. To be clear, people outside Iran were certainly using Twitter. They were trying to focus attention on what was happening inside Iran. The State Department, the media, Iranian expats, they all thought Twitter was central to protests in Iran because they were on Twitter, and that's where they learned about the protests.
But to protesters on the ground, Twitter was nowhere near as important as it looked from the outside. I remember this period really well. I was spending a lot of time reporting on Twitter, the company back then, and I was using Twitter a ton. And I was one of those people that felt like Twitter was important. But also, I couldn't tell you exactly why that was. Turns out the folks at the State Department were in the same boat. And to me, that is the story of Twitter, one we've been playing and replaying for more than a decade.
We know it's a big deal, but we don't really know how big a deal it is or why. And we keep getting it wrong, all of us, even now. It can still command our attention in inexplicable ways. Twitter has become kind of the de facto town square. It's important to the function of democracy. It's important to the function of the United States as a free country and many other countries and to help freedom in the world.
A year ago, in 2022, Elon Musk became the latest and most significant person to fundamentally misunderstand Twitter. He bought it for $44 billion, and we all know what happened next. If I acquire Twitter and something goes wrong, it's my fault 100%. I think there will be quite a few errors. I'm Peter Kafka, and you're listening to Land of the Giants, the Twitter fantasy. It's pretty reasonable to say we are at the end of Twitter as we know it.
For one thing, it's now called X, which virtually no one calls it, so I won't either. More important, Twitter in some form will probably still linger on for a while. But despite what you've heard, Twitter's not dead or dying because of Elon Musk. I'd argue the platform had dug its own grave long before he showed up to throw dirt on it. Long, long before. You can go all the way back to the very beginning.
Twitter began life as an accident. It started as a side project of a side project, and that afterthought quality has stuck around all of its life. But choices people in and around the company made in its earliest days, and in some cases, choices they didn't make, helped permanently shape the company's trajectory. It's a course that ends with the world's richest man buying it and instantly regretting it. Here's the quick backstory. ♪
Ev Williams, a young, idealistic Nebraska native, moved to San Francisco in the 1990s to join the first web boom. Williams co-founded a company to build workplace productivity software. But the only product they shipped was a side project called Blogger. Blogger let anyone with a keyboard and an internet connection publish their thoughts on a blog. And Google bought Blogger in 2003.
Williams went on to co-found another startup called Odeo, and that was going to do for Odeo what Blogger did for writing. But in 2006, Apple made it easy to move podcasts onto an iPod, which was exactly what Odeo was trying to do. So there was no reason for Odeo to exist. So at that point, it's like, well, you know, what are we doing here? That's Blaine Cook, one of the engineers who was working at Odeo.
Since Odeo now needed to pivot, it organized a hack day. That's a day for their developers to drop everything, dream up a new idea, and build a rough version of it. One of those developers was Jack Dorsey. He had an idea for something he called Status.
He'd borrowed the idea from instant messenger apps like AIM. Instant messaging clients had this idea of status. So you could say, like, I'm available or I'm offline, but then you could put in some other information about what you were up to. Like you might say, you know, making dinner or something like that. And so Jack's idea was really just take that core status update thing and then make it something that persists that you can actually share.
Shortly after that, Status got renamed Twitter, a word for the sounds birds make. And that prototype of Twitter, the MVP product that gets built in a day, more or less, what is the reaction internally? Oh my God, this is it? This is a gazillion dollar company? Or is it, oh, that's interesting. I think more on the, oh, that's interesting. Part of the reason Twitter wasn't an obvious winner, it worked using SMS text messages, which
And at the time, in order to send a text from most phones, you needed to tap out the letters using the number pad. Tap a key once for A, twice for B, three times for C. This was deeply annoying, and it was not something most people ever bothered with. Sending and receiving text messages also cost money, which meant that early on, Twitter lost money on every tweet. This is important. We're going to come back to it later. ♪
Some people got Twitter right away. Here's Jason Goldman. Ev signs me up for Twitter over SMS, and we are having dinner on our way to go on a trip together, to go to Vegas together. All my first tweets are from this trip that we take together to Vegas.
And it's like me like saying I'm going to go play poker and I'm saying like, you know, he's hanging out by the pool. And like I'm like, oh, like this is like this ambient awareness of like what my friends are doing. I don't have to like text with them or make a plan. I just know what their day is like. And I just like I don't know, just like immediately made sense to me what this was going to be. Remember, this is before the iPhone and before the millions of ways our phones let us track and communicate with each other.
Facebook existed, but that was where you posted pictures from the party you went to last weekend. Twitter gave you present tense, actionable intel about what your friends were doing now. Williams hired Goldman to help decide what Odeo's parent company should do next. My first decision or like the first email I send basically as director of product strategy is we shouldn't work on anything besides Twitter. Odeo spun off Twitter as its own company.
Williams didn't want to run it day to day, so the founders held a meeting to decide who would be CEO. It's principally Jack's idea, and so Jack becomes the CEO, and basically everyone else ends up going to work there. Jack Dorsey had never run a company. He had zero management experience. And at the time, he was considering quitting tech and becoming a fashion designer. Jack was always a bit of a cypher. John Borthwick is an investor who funded several apps that Twitter ended up buying.
So he got to observe the early Twitter team and Dorsey at close range. Just very hard to read, just hard to know exactly where his head's at, and hard to know how much he's actually thinking.
Dorsey loved nightclubs, and one of his primary use cases for Twitter was to send his friends updates about his plans from a noisy bar. So it made sense that Twitter's big coming-out party happened in 2007 at South by Southwest. That's the music and culture festival that takes place in Austin, Texas, every spring. There's a tech part, too, and back then it had a real spring break vibe for a certain kind of tech person.
Who's going, what kind of nerds are going to Austin in March? Some real nerds, man. Some real nerds. It's like people who like writing on the internet, sort of in that like kind of early internet culture space. And then at the end of the tech part, you start seeing all of the cool people in leather jackets with guitars and like, you know, musical instruments show up. You're like, all right, the actually cool people are here now. It's time for us to go home.
But while the tech nerds swarmed Austin, the Twitter founders had a captive audience. They set up a big screen in the lobby with a live feed of tweets about the conference, and they gave attendees instructions about how to sign up. And the tech guys at South By used Twitter pretty much as intended. They told other tech guys about where to find free drinks. The whole structure of South By is, yes, there's the panels, but it's really about the social scene. And
You would see this emergent behavior where people would be in the bar, the scene would be kind of dying down. All of a sudden you'd see a bunch of tweets that like something else was popping off down the street and you would just, everyone, I was like, oh, we're all moving over. I saw the tweet that the thing's going on and everyone would move over. It was just like this idea that you could see people moving because of the tweets that they read. And it was just like this dominant back channel for the conference itself.
Twitter ended up being the big startup coming out of South By that year. They even won an award for best new blog. Jack Dorsey gave the acceptance speech, and he was very on brand. I would like to thank everyone in 140 characters or less, and I just did. Thank you. That's it. Thank you. For the founders, South By proved that Twitter could make a crowd of people move like a single all-knowing organism.
And that was one early idea of what Twitter was going to be. But it wasn't the only vision of what Twitter could be. Around this time, there were lots of competing ideas, even inside the company. For Ev Williams, who'd founded Blogger a decade earlier and would go on to found Medium, Twitter was another place that would make it easy for ordinary people to say what's on their mind.
Here's Williams in an interview from 2010. The way we described it on the homepage was a way to keep up with friends, family, coworkers by answering the question, what are you doing? Another version of what Twitter could be was not a platform at all, but a protocol like email. No one owns email, but it's one of the basic languages of the Internet. It allows people in different parts of the world using software and devices made by different companies to talk to each other.
Here's Jason Goldman again. Jack really believed, I think, in this protocol notion of the product and this public good notion of the product, like describing Twitter as like the public town square or like this protocol layer of the internet. But protocols don't usually make tons of money. And at that moment, right after South by Southwest, Twitter started looking like it might make some people very rich. Yahoo offered $12 million for the company. The founders turned the offer down.
They thought Twitter was worth $100 million at least. Venture capitalists agreed. Twitter started raising round after round of VC money starting in 2007. They needed that money to add servers, to hire people, to pay for those SMS fees. But taking that money meant the dream of an open protocol was dead. Once you've agreed to become a VC company, the VCs have a very specific strategy.
contractual, structural idea about how this is going to play out, which is they're investing to get an outsized return, 10x or more, in the next seven plus years, or it goes to zero. Those are the outcomes they're optimizing for. It's like, we're not really interested in a double here. We're not really interested in, we put in $5 million and it comes back $10 million. It's
How seriously were those discussions happening? That maybe it could be something else? It wasn't happening at a sufficient level of detail to obviously avoid future pain. I think this is a really critical kind of hallucination on all of our parts. Like, we all kind of saw what we wanted from this thing. Twitter was a little bit like
Jack, in that you could look into its eyes and see whatever you wanted to see. That's investor John Borthwick again. Some people would look at it and say, "Oh, God, this is like short-form email." Others would look at it and say, "This is the future of communications." Others would look at it and say, "This is the public square." Twitter didn't actually state what they were, and so they could be many things to many different people.
For a while, the Twitter board looked into Jack Dorsey's eyes and saw a visionary co-founder that could run a visionary company. According to Hatching Twitter, Nick Bilton's definitive history of the company's early days, Dorsey hadn't run anything before, and it turned out he wasn't good at running Twitter back then. So Twitter's board replaced him with Ev Williams, his co-founder, in 2008. This was the beginning of a carousel of CEOs at the company.
A lot of Twitter's early adopters lived in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, and they worked in tech. Right behind them were journalists like Jay Wertham, who now writes for the New York Times Magazine and hosts the podcast Still Processing. Back then, Wertham worked at Wired. I was a research fact-checking intern, and, you know, I mean, I think the early Twitter offices, we could see from the Wired offices. Like, I think it was all in downtown San Francisco. For Wertham, like a lot of early users,
Twitter served as a kind of surrogate social life. Now I'm a little bit more of an extrovert. When I was younger, I was such an introvert. It was a much easier way for me to talk to people, to share about myself, to sort of learn about the world. The thing that Twitter replicated for me that really hooked me was the feeling of being in an AOL chat room and just always seeing what people were talking about. And it's the most intoxicating thing. And they know that.
Twitter offered a chance to join the conversation, and that distinguished Twitter from other social platforms.
most people were not able to share their thoughts in real time in any meaningful way, right? And if you're posting on Facebook, it's probably to a very small, limited group of people that you've agreed to be, quote, friends with. Twitter, on the other hand, I mean, it's just a free-for-all. So if you're someone who has any opinion or any thoughts about anything, all of a sudden you have this currency that you didn't have anywhere else, and nobody could keep you from that.
It was a way that you could be heard and seen that we've never really experienced before. Before long, actual bona fide celebrities started showing up on the site and jumping into chats with normies. And I think that was also part of the early intoxication, right? Like it was removing all these barriers between people that normally existed. And that was the buy-in. I remember...
It was a rock guy named Sebastian Bach. The lead singer from Skid Row just joined a conversation I was having once. He might have even dunked on me. I'm like, this is amazing. I don't care about Skid Row or Sebastian Bach, but he's famous. He's now participating in a conversation that I'm having. That's wild. It's wild. Yeah, it's wild. And I do think in the beginning people talked a lot about Twitter as like this cocktail party and you never really knew who you were going to meet.
Soon, some of those real-life celebrities were making pilgrimages to the Twitter offices in San Francisco. Arnold Schwarzenegger came by. Sean Combs, that's Puff Daddy to me and maybe to you, showed up and asked to become their chief marketing officer.
If there was one moment you could point to when Twitter as celebrity magnet really got going, it was Ashton versus CNN. In April 2009, the actor Ashton Kutcher challenged CNN to a race to be the first to count on Twitter with 1 million followers. And the winner got to say they were the winner. CNN reported on the race as if it were real news. And it became a viral story. Ashton won, by the way. He live-streamed the moment he hit 1 million followers.
The whole freaking world is watching. Come on, people, we can do this. I think the fact that it was CNN versus Ashton, it was a perfect illustration of the flattening of the graph that Twitter allowed. Like, it was a place where you could become famous or talk to famous people. What's it like in the US?
in the company when that is happening. And you're only a couple years out from being, this is for nerds to tell the other nerds where they're having a margarita. Right. It would have been a lot more enjoyable if I was not one of the primary people on the hook for the thing to work. And it fundamentally did not work most of the time. Like the product just didn't work. Like it was just technically broken for the better part of two years.
Coming up, it's Twitter versus the fail whale. But even when the service was up and running, it still had an existential problem. Whether you're a founder, investor, or an executive in the innovation economy, you need a bank that truly understands your business inside and out. A bank that offers uniquely specialized solutions for your unique needs. A bank like Silicon Valley Bank.
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Having celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey sign up for Twitter was great publicity, but it put a ton of stress on the company's tech infrastructure, infrastructure that was never designed to handle tens of millions of users. Just because of the nature of the way it was built and then how we tried to scale it, it was kind of spaghetti. Dick Costolo came on as Twitter's chief operating officer in 2009. He found a platform that was constantly being rebuilt.
Twitter's code would spring a leak and the Twitter people would patch it quickly, but temporarily. I mean, there was a service in the architecture called the Ashton Kutcher service, which had been built when Ashton was getting so many followers and it rerouted fanning out the tweets to anyone who followed Ashton Kutcher through a separate service. There was all this tourist stuff that was like not the right way to write code at all.
Twitter needed a stronger tech backbone. More servers, more engineers to rebuild the plane in mid-flight, and that was going to take even more VC money. In 2009, Twitter completed a funding round that valued the company at a billion dollars. And here it's important to place Twitter in the history of social networking startups.
After the first web bubble collapsed in 2000, investors stayed far away from consumer tech. But a few years later, there was buzz around web startups that connected people with each other and that relied on those users to post, for free, things other users would find interesting. And that meant zero content costs.
These things grew fast. They didn't require much money to start. And every year, someone made one that was more popular. First, there was Friendster, which got overtaken by MySpace, which Rupert Murdoch bought for $580 million. Then MySpace got surpassed by Facebook, which was supposed to be worth billions. Investors saw a pattern. Maybe Twitter would be the next big winner. Here's investor John Borthwick again. There's this cycle that
People get into, which is expectations, following that competitor, that Facebook competitor, raising more capital expectations against that. And that people are basically chasing that tail. We want to be Facebook. Facebook's really big. In order to get really big, we need to hire a bunch of people. We need to raise money to do that. And then that then ratchets up our expectations. We have to go down that path. Right.
It wasn't crazy to expect in 2010 or 2011 that one day Twitter would have a bigger valuation than Facebook. Sean Garrett became Twitter's first PR guy around this time. Did people feel that way inside the company? At the time, like, there was no reason to believe that Twitter can be more powerful, especially in a mobile world, than Facebook. Twitter was growing fast, faster than any other online service. When Oprah Winfrey signed up in April 2009, Twitter had about 20 million users.
A year later, there were 100 million. Twitter was still small compared to Facebook, but it was catching up fast. And even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg feared Twitter might beat Facebook, or at least be a real competitor. Zuckerberg tried to buy the company in 2008. And after Twitter turned him down, Facebook spent years trying to compete with Twitter. But even if Twitter was growing faster than anything else on the internet, there was still one big problem with this scenario.
When Dick Costolo joined as COO in 2009, Twitter was barely generating any money. You don't have to be profitable if you're a tech startup. You're supposed to be growing at all costs. And it's okay to make zero dollars when you start. The generous term for this is pre-revenue. But you do eventually have to start showing the world how you're going to make real money someday. Investors saw a single pathway for revenue, selling ads.
But advertising was never a great fit for Twitter, according to John Borthwick.
The nature of the real-time web is that it makes it incredibly hard to, if not impossible, to be able to target intentful behavior. And so the most lucrative forms of advertising that we've seen on the internet are ones where people basically are placing intent into a search engine. You want to buy a foldable kayak? So you type foldable kayak into Google. Then Google serves you ads for foldable kayaks. That is the best ad business ever.
The second best business is Facebook's ad business. You have billions of users who tell you a lot about what they like and care about, and you can maybe guess that they're interested in foldable kayaks. Google and Facebook are marvels of modern advertising, and they are money-printing machines. But Twitter didn't have the I-would-like-to-buy-this-thing-now feature that's built into Google, and it didn't have Facebook's scale.
Twitter's investors wanted this revenue model. The founders, including CEO Ev Williams, were not so sure. Remember, Williams had founded Blogger and sold it to Google, the world's biggest advertising company. Here's Jason Goldman again. We did have ambivalence about it. I would say that Ev's ambivalence about it is one of the things that primarily got him fired at the end of 2010. This was Twitter's second leadership change in two years. It replaced Williams with Costolo, who'd been Twitter's COO.
Like Williams, Costolo had built an early web business and sold it to Google. Unlike Williams, he was actually focused on making money. We just raised money at a billion-dollar valuation. We got to start taking it seriously as a business. But Twitter didn't want to rely on banner ads, which were the standard format at the time.
The ad networks, and specifically Google's and Facebook's ads, were mostly what you would consider in the right-hand rail and the sort of demilitarized zone of content on the web. In the middle of your screen, you had a feed. On the top and on the right rail, you had ads. And that works okay on a laptop. On mobile, of course, you know, there is no right rail. There's the feed.
If you use Twitter at all in the last 10 years, or really any app that has a feed, you know the solution.
Put the ads in the feed. So the ad is a tweet. And it can be replied to, it can be retweeted, it can be favorited, etc. Then we can have a set of tweets that are content tweets and some tweets that are ad tweets and the ad tweets we can insert into the feed. And the ads are content. The ads are content and those were the first in-feed ads. This is hard to remember now that every ad is part of the feed.
But at the time, promoted tweets really were something different. They were a new solution to the problem of how to get ads in front of eyeballs. And they worked. So much so that Facebook, and later Instagram and everyone else, did exactly the same thing. So Twitter was finally making a little bit of money. But if it wanted to make real Facebook-sized money, it was going to have to keep growing at a crazy pace. And that was no longer happening. At the beginning of 2009, Twitter was growing faster than anything else on the internet.
But by the end of that year, it had already begun leveling off. The company was having to work harder and harder to find new people to sign up. This, it turns out, may be the most existential Twitter question of them all. What if this thing just isn't that interesting to most people? So why wasn't Twitter for everyone? Let's start with the obvious. To make a tweet, you have to write something. And for a lot of people, writing is no fun.
Twitter is really hard to use. Jay Wertham loved it, but Wertham is a writer and most people aren't. For all the supposed simplicity of the service, you just make an account, you can write whatever you want. It's really hard to figure out what works. Like if you're just tweeting any thought that comes into your head, it's not really going to probably land. Wertham is describing this from the perspective of someone who wants to share stuff on the internet.
Just like Twitter's earliest employees and users. Those people assume most people would feel the same way. Jason Goldman again. When we did Blogger, we fully thought that everyone was going to have a blog. So then when we do Twitter, I'm like, everyone's going to do this. Like, this is clearly going to be the one that everyone does because it's short. It's even more seductive than blogs. Like, you know, you could just say I'm eating a taco. Everyone's going to do this. It turns out not everyone's going to do this. Not everyone wants to be a content creator.
There are some people who really do want to be content creators, like journalists who famously like the sound of their own voice, who love getting likes and retweets from their peers even more, or like certain celebrities or politicians who imagine they could use Twitter to interact directly with fans and followers, or eventually a rocket company CEO with a bottomless supply of takes and memes.
These folks were the super users, the top 10% of Twitterers who wound up producing 80% of the content on the site. And gradually, Twitter accepted that reality and landed on the idea that Twitter was a great place to read other people's tweets, even if you didn't want to write them yourself. But the next problem was getting the right tweets in front of you when you first tried Twitter, so you could see how great it could be. Here's Michael Sippy, who is VP of Product under Costolo.
If you're following the right people, it can be a magical product and it can be a ton of fun. But coming in, it takes a lot of work to actually get that follow graph correct. And so we spent a lot of time and a lot of technology to essentially help you tune
that initial set of accounts that you would follow. And that meant a bunch of different hypotheses that we had. One is like, well, we should do things like Facebook. It's a social network. So let's go scrape your address book and make sure that there are friends that are there and like you can go find. The problem is that we did not have the density of Facebook or the growth of Facebook. So like your friends weren't posting enough and then that's not good enough. And if in your first hour,
three days of usage, you're not finding value in the product and you're not willing to put in the work to go find those people to follow, you're going to churn. Churn is a term you hear a lot when you talk to Twitter veterans about the company's problems. Churn is when someone tries your service and then leaves. And Twitter had a lot of churn. But for a long time, Twitter acted like it couldn't afford to care about churn. It had to care about growing.
Here's Jason Goldman. I think we were too focused for too long on growth. And this is during the era where growth hacking became, you know, a concept and this idea that you just needed to get more people in the top of the funnel and pay less attention to the churn that is happening when people bounce out because they simply don't get it. There's a pretty good chance that you've used Twitter because you're listening to this podcast about Twitter.
But most people have never tried Twitter, and lots of those who have don't stick around. It's so hard to get them to come back. That's Michael Sippy again, the former head of product. You can get kind of occasional use of a product, right? So you'll hear people like, well, I'm really only on Twitter during the NBA finals because that's when it gets fun. I'll come on for the Olympics. I'll come on for the World Cup. I'll come on for the elections because that's my interest area and that's what it is.
Twitter did try to make itself more appealing to new users and to make it stickier for the ones that showed up. And when you look back at Twitter's history, there is a long list of coulda, woulda, shouldas.
Dick Costolo's big idea was to make Twitter more like Facebook. Everyone loves to go to Facebook and look at their friends' photos. That's like a massive use case. We don't have media at all. Twitter needed photos. And in 2010, 2011, the best place to find photos, after Facebook, was Instagram, the super buzzy photo-sharing app. We had talked to them about buying them before I was CEO. And then when I was CEO...
In February 2012, we tried to buy them aggressively. We couldn't convince them to do it. A few months later, Mark Zuckerberg convinced the Instagram team to sell to Facebook instead for a billion dollars. This is a humongous amount of money at the time. Twitter did end up buying Vine, an app that showed looping six-second clips. It was intriguing, but no one at Twitter knew exactly what to do with it.
Michael Sippy. How do we take Vine technology and put it into the Twitter product? And what's that mix? And how does that work? And what does distribution look like? And how much Twitter branding is there in Vine? All of those conversations, I think, drove that team nuts. Inside a different kind of company, Vine could have eventually become TikTok, the most powerful entertainment app today. But by the end of 2016, Snapchat and Instagram had eaten Vine's lunch and Twitter closed it down.
Twitter tried other ways to build out the platform, to give people other stuff to do besides writing and reading tweets. It launched Periscope, a live video service. It launched its own music service, except it wasn't really what users wanted out of a music service because it didn't really play music. You're supposed to use it to follow musicians or something. There was lots of talk about turning Twitter into a place where you could buy and sell stuff. To Costolo, though, the big one that got away is always going to be Instagram.
Do you replay like the coulda woulda, like what happens if Twitter buys it? Oh yeah, I think we would have won. The fact that they had built this just gorgeous, beautiful photo sharing application that was becoming the dominant photo sharing application, which is why we wanted to buy it and why Mark did buy it.
And we owned, if you will, the text space and would go on to acquire Vine, which was, you know, number one in the app store for weeks and weeks and weeks right before Instagram launched video and sort of knocked it out. Would have been positioned to have these three apps that are perfectly suited to their media types. We just didn't get Instagram. And, you know, that probably would have changed the course of the Internet in some important way. Maybe. Maybe.
Or maybe none of those features really mattered. People who were on Facebook wanted to use Facebook, not Twitter. In 2009, Zuckerberg had been so freaked out by Twitter that he wanted to own it or bury it. But eventually, Zuckerberg and crew learned to stop worrying about Twitter. In Nick Bilton's book, Hatching Twitter, Zuckerberg describes Twitter's team as lucky incompetence. It's as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in.
This wasn't a unique assessment, and there's a lot of evidence that supports it. Take Twitter's CEO musical chairs, for instance. In the 15 years before Elon Musk bought the company, Twitter had five different CEOs, two of whom were Jack Dorsey. Lots of startups swap out leaders at different times, but that's the kind of instability that indicates a company fundamentally can't decide what it should be.
To be fair, Twitter did make it to an IPO in 2013, where Twitter's private shares turned into public stock and made tons of money for its investors and its early employees. But ever since then, Twitter's stock lurched and stalled as various managers tried, unsuccessfully, to convince Wall Street that Twitter was going to be the next Facebook. Twitter did build an ad business worth nearly $5 billion a year.
That sounds like a lot until you compare it to Facebook, which does $113 billion a year, or Google, which does $224 billion. Another reason Elon Musk could buy Twitter in 2022 is that unlike tech companies like Facebook and Google and Snap, the founders didn't control the company's stock, so they couldn't fend off an unwanted buyer.
But the main reason is that Twitter had been public for nearly a decade and investors didn't care about it anymore. They'd heard Twitter's story over and over and they weren't buying it. So when the world's richest man showed up and wanted to pay way more than Wall Street thought it was worth, they had no choice but to take the deal. So let's spell this out. Deciding to take venture money, deciding to be an ad business, deciding to compare yourself to Facebook and losing out on that comparison—
Those are all decisions that led to the real-life scenario where Elon Musk owns Twitter. And why should we care about what happens to Twitter? Objectively speaking, it's a tiny company compared to real tech giants. But... Twitter, for better or for worse, has completely shaped...
And participated in a cultural conversation for the last 10 years, you know, and probably will for the next 10 years. And I think that alone is worth just looking at. Like, what is this thing that had so much power in shaping national politics from elections to social movements to even our understanding of gun violence? I mean, Twitter has played a massive role in that and there's no denying it.
This series is called Land of the Giants. But Twitter was never a giant, not by market cap, not by user numbers, but it could exert an influence totally disproportionate to its size or its value. Figuring out how exactly Twitter commanded that power and what exactly that influence was, those are questions that have flummoxed a lot of smart people. And that's why we're here, to try our best to provide some answers. Because there is one thing I'm certain about.
Twitter, for all its flaws and in all its glory, could only exist in a certain time, and that time is winding down. So while it's still here, let's talk about why Twitter mattered and what that tells us about what comes next. Audio clips from Al Jazeera, the TED conference, South by Southwest, and Marketplace. Land of the Giants, the Twitter fantasy, is a production of Vox and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Matt Frasica is our lead producer.
I'm Peter Kafka. If you like this episode, as always, please share it. Follow the show by clicking the plus sign in your podcast app.
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