Extremely Hardcore

February 5, 2024
Shafted employees, bad engineering, annoying marketing ploys, precarious financial performance, and tons of hate speech are the fruits of Elon Musk’s 2022 takeover of Twitter—now X—according to this acid-etched debut exposé. Platformer editor Schiffer tags Musk with much error, including loading the company with burdensome debt; brusquely firing thousands of workers without notice and stiffing many on severance pay; driving away advertisers with free-speech zealotry that threatened to place their ads beside unsavory content; presiding over declines in usership and revenue that brought the company close to bankruptcy; boasting of his free speech commitments while bowing to foreign governments’ demands to censor posts; and opening up the platform to bigoted content (Schiffer cites statistics indicating that appearances of the n-word tripled on Musk’s watch and homophobic slurs increased 58%). The portrait of Musk that emerges is unremittingly negative, depicting him as cold, cruel, and narcissistic. Musk’s associates also come in for opprobrium: Schiffer accuses journalist Matt Taibbi of misrepresentations in his reporting on the “Twitter Files” (internal company documents Musk gave to sympathetic reporters, Taibbi among them, after his takeover, in the hope of proving Twitter’s liberal bias) and of doxxing a blameless Twitter employee in connection with the Hunter Biden laptop story. Schiffer’s prose is savvy, punchy, and tart in narrating the platform’s “collapse into disinformation and chaos.” This will furnish Musk’s many detractors with savory red meat.