Flipping the Bird: Elon vs Twitter | Tweets Aren't Loading Right Now | 6
Business Wars
Wondery
4.6 • 13.2K Ratings
🗓️ 18 July 2025
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Elon changes Twitter's algorithm to make himself king of the hill, but can he protect himself from public opinion?
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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. |
| 0:15.9 | Wondry. Elon Musk walked into a Twitter H.Q conference room full of engineers huddled together. |
| 0:34.7 | It was just five days before Super Bowl 57. |
| 0:39.9 | The Eagles were facing off against the Chiefs, |
| 0:44.2 | and Super Bowl Sunday was reliably one of Twitter's busiest days of the year. |
| 0:48.3 | Elon had owned the company for about four months now. |
| 0:51.7 | In addition to losing roughly three quarters of the workforce, |
| 0:54.5 | he'd ordered a major server to be shut down, |
| 0:57.8 | lost almost all of the site's reliability team, |
| 1:02.2 | and most of HQ was worrying about whether or not the site would buckle under the massive traffic on the big day. |
| 1:05.7 | But Elon was here to find out what was causing a different problem. |
| 1:15.6 | Why were fewer people seeing his tweets? Elon had close to 130 million followers. |
| 1:19.6 | He was Twitter's second most followed user after former President Barack Obama. |
| 1:24.6 | Elon was also one of its most prolific power users, firing off an average of one |
| 1:30.0 | tweet per hour. One of the features he'd insisted on rolling out was a view counter so users could |
| 1:36.3 | see how many people saw a tweet. And Elon didn't like what he was seeing. Engagement with his |
| 1:43.6 | tweets was dropping, fast. He was sure that |
| 1:47.3 | there was a bug in the algorithm that was suppressing his tweets, and he wasn't ruling out the |
| 1:52.3 | idea that one of his own employees had introduced that bug to sabotage his popularity. |
... |
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