Flipping the Bird: Elon vs Twitter | Extremely Hardcore | 4
Business Wars
Wondery
4.6 • 13.2K Ratings
🗓️ 16 July 2025
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After Elon decimates the workforce in one fell swoop, chaos reigns supreme. Will Elon's dreams for a free and open Twitter turn into everyone's worst nightmare?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Business Wars Flipping the Bird. |
| 0:02.6 | Episodes will drop Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday for the next two weeks. |
| 0:06.7 | Wondery Plus subscribers can binge the entire season of Business Wars Flipping the Bird right now. |
| 0:12.3 | Start your free trial in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Jim Redmond's job at Twitter included incident management. |
| 0:32.6 | He helped the site handle things when a big moment happened. |
| 0:36.3 | Now, in the days following Elon Musk's acquisition, |
| 0:40.1 | Twitter itself was the incident, and Jim had no way to manage it. It does kind of remind me of |
| 0:46.8 | just seeing storm clouds on the horizon knowing that something's coming. We just don't know how |
| 0:51.2 | bad it's going to be yet. Jim and his more than 7,000 fellow employees were staring up at the sky, waiting for the storm to roll in. |
| 1:00.0 | The rumor mill was pretty strong. People understood pretty well that, yeah, this is going to happen probably today. |
| 1:05.0 | He went into the cave, the windowless room where he and his colleagues kept the site going, but it was hard |
| 1:12.3 | to focus. There were a lot of people who were kind of wandering around, checking in on the friends |
| 1:16.8 | they had made, the people he had worked with, and exchanging contact information. By the afternoon, |
| 1:23.0 | Twitter employees started gathering in a space called The Lodge. It was an actual 200-year-old homesteader |
| 1:29.3 | cabin from Montana that Twitter's architects had found on Craigslist and integrated into the fifth |
| 1:34.8 | floor. It was one of the most popular spaces in HQ. Employees could gather in booths to work on |
| 1:40.8 | projects together, or when they got bored, could take a break and watch sports |
| 1:44.9 | on the large screen mounted on the wall. But today, people are sitting around having a snack, |
| 1:52.0 | maybe having something to drink, just kind of being as social as possible. Someone described it |
| 1:57.6 | as like the last day of camp vibes. |
| 2:08.8 | And then, Jim and the other Twitter employees who were gathered in the lodge started getting the email. |
| 2:15.6 | Someone pulled their phone out and look at it and they'd gasp or they'd have a little shocked reaction on their face. |
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