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The Realignment

434 | Ben Mezrich: Will Elon Musk Make or Break X?

The Realignment

The Realignment

Saager Enjeti, Technology, Policy, News, Marshall Kosloff, International Relations, Politics, News Commentary, Public Policy, U.s. Politics, National Security, Economics

4.82.5K Ratings

🗓️ 1 December 2023

⏱️ 57 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Ben Mezrich, author of Breaking Twitter: Elon Musk and the Most Controversial Corporate Takeover in History, returns to The Realignment. Marshall and Ben discuss Elon Musk's prospects for turning X (formerly Twitter) into not only a fundamentally sound business, but also the biggest global platform for speech, whether a profit-driven company can ever achieve free speech goals, post-acquisition successes, failures, and missed opportunities, and whether the platform can ever build the requisite subscriber base to escape its dependence on advertisers.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Marshall here, welcome back to the realignment.

0:03.0

Today's episode could not have had better timing, considering Elon's highly controversial appearance at the Dealbook conference

0:15.1

earlier this week where he literally said, F you, to the advertisers that are strangling the company's

0:21.5

business, I thought it'd be great to post this episode with

0:24.4

Ben Mezrich. He's the author of Breaking Twitter, Elon Musk, and the most controversial

0:28.8

corporate takeover in history. Ben has written a bunch of books that I know people have checked out and

0:33.6

crucially for the purposes of this conversation he wrote the book The

0:36.8

Accidental billionaires that turned into the social network one of my favorite movies.

0:41.6

In this conversation we discuss everything from the origin of the Twitter

0:45.2

acquisition what's gone right, what's gone wrong, and the challenges moving forward, challenges

0:50.1

that are no doubt going to escalate as the advertiser crisis and controversy continues.

0:55.6

Hope you all enjoy the conversation.

0:57.6

Ben Mezrich, welcome to the realignment.

1:02.4

Thank you so much for having me. Ben Mezrich, welcome to the realignment.

1:03.1

Thank you so much for having me.

1:04.7

A lot of listeners, aside from just your recent movies and books,

1:10.7

will recall the accidental billionaires.

1:14.0

It's probably being the foundational Ben Mezrich

1:16.1

tech book in this space, like the history of Facebook.

1:20.8

So as I was reading breaking Twitter, I like to think of these two books as almost book ending

1:27.0

the social media era and the moment. How in some way so much of what's going wrong, and right in the best sense of the term during

1:36.2

the Elon acquisition is an attempt to recapture the spirit of 2005 to 2009. I'm curious about how you would respond to 2009.

...

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