The Chaos At Twitter

Fresh Air

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4.3 • 36.1K Ratings

🗓️ 8 December 2022

⏱️ 45 minutes

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Summary

Tech journalist Casey Newton says Elon Musk did not inherit a company in crisis — but after massive layoffs and upheaval the social media giant is losing money and Musk is warning of bankruptcy.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for this podcast comes from the New Bower Family Foundation, supporting
0:04.7	WHY Wise Fresh Air and its commitment to sharing ideas and encouraging meaningful conversation.
0:11.1	This is Fresh Air, I'm Terry Gross.
0:14.3	Ever since Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, bought Twitter for $44 billion
0:19.7	and laid April, Twitter has been in chaos.
0:23.0	Musk has made and then withdrawn decisions, including trying to retract his offer to buy
0:27.2	Twitter. He's fired executives, cut the number of full-time employees in half, and then
0:32.6	realized maybe he'd gone too far and tried to hire a back some people he just terminated.
0:37.5	He's floated ideas for subscription services and for charging a fee to verify that your
0:42.1	account is really yours, but those ideas were met with widespread opposition.
0:47.6	The number of content moderators has been slashed, hate speech on Twitter has increased.
0:53.2	Musk offered to reinstate Trump on Twitter after polling Twitter users about whether to do
0:58.0	it, some other responders may have been bots.
1:01.8	My guest Kasey Newton says Musk has been remaking Twitter in his own image.
1:07.0	Newton is an independent tech journalist who covers the intersection of technology and
1:11.3	democracy for his newsletter platformer, which is hosted by Substack.
1:16.0	He also co-hosts the tech podcast Hard Fork with New York Times tech journalist Kevin
1:21.0	Russe from 2013 until 2020 when Newton started platformer, he reported on tech for the
1:27.2	verge.
1:28.2	We recorded our interview yesterday.
1:30.8	Kasey Newton welcome back to Fresh Air.
1:33.9	SpaceX and Tesla have been considered such big success stories and credit has gone to
	...

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