When news broke in April 2022 that the billionaire Tesla co-founder and SpaceX founder Elon Musk had become Twitter’s largest shareholder, and would be joining its board, few were more surprised than Twitter’s own employees. What, they wondered, was his plan?
Like most of his colleagues, Jim Redmond, a systems engineer in the company’s San Francisco office, found out about it on Twitter. But he decided to give Musk the benefit of the doubt: “I saw him as an interesting guy. I didn’t really see him as a monster or as a hero,” he says in the podcast Flipping the Bird: Elon vs Twitter. But then, a week later, Musk announced he wouldn’t be joining the board, and would in fact be making an offer to take the company private. Over the next year, a remarkable drama unfolded in boardrooms, courtrooms and online group chats, which would put the futures of Twitter’s employees, and the entire platform, in jeopardy.
Flipping the Bird chronicles the takeover in detail, drawing on the testimony of tech commentators and ex-Twitter employees who were witness to the chaos. Hosted by David Brown, the series comes from the team behind 2020’s WeCrashed, which told the story of the collapse of the “unicorn” business WeWork, and the long-running series Business Wars, about major corporate battles, among them Amazon vs Walmart, Marvel vs DC and Taylor Swift vs Scooter Braun.
As with those series, Flipping the Bird is pacy and polished, with an irreverent tone. There is a note of relish in the storytelling as we learn how, following a mass clear-out of staff after the takeover — around 3,700 people were fired, adding up to half the workforce — a further 1,200 employees resigned, leading management to send out pleading emails asking them to reconsider. Reports spread of employees marooned in the company’s parking garages as their office passes had been switched off; the hashtag #RIPTwitter spread across the platform.
The gift of this story is, of course, Musk himself, who can be found showing up days late to tech conferences, arguing with his detractors on Twitter in the middle of the night, and entering Twitter’s head office carrying a sink, thus providing a photo op for a laboured gag announcing his takeover: “Let that sink in.”
He is presented as unpredictable, egotistical, megalomaniacal and, frankly, a bit stupid. All of which points to the podcast’s slightly flawed approach. As a chronicle of a problematic business decision, Flipping the Bird is undoubtedly compelling, but the framing of it is knowingly one-sided, with an absence of different viewpoints that might reveal, with a little more seriousness, what Musk was thinking and why. Musk is still, as Redmond describes him at the start, “an interesting guy”. It’s a shame that this podcast is only interested in focusing on Musk as a monster.
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