Sorry Jack, Elon says it just ain’t so
We previously admonished Jack Dorsey for betraying the Silicon Valley spirit by shadowbanning, censoring, and canceling Twitter members for dubious reasons. The ‘Twitter Files’ exposed the Ivy Leaguers for doing it behind Jack’s back. We apologize.
The inmates were running the asylum
New Chief Twit Elon Musk confirmed that a small circle of Twitter execs blacklisted political opinions, not in line with their own beliefs, without the knowledge and consent of the company CEO and founder, Jack Dorsey. ‘The decision (to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story) was made at the highest levels of the company, but without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey,’ independent journalist Matt Taibbi wrote after reviewing internal company communications for a report dubbed ‘The Twitter Files.’ Mr. Taibbi also reported that extensive political censorship at Twitter was led by ‘former head of legal, policy, and trust Vijaya Gadde.’ As Elon observed in a recent tweet, ‘The inmates were running the asylum.’
This could be good news for Mr. Dorsey, who could face perjury charges for insisting in his testimony to Congress in 2018 that, ‘We don’t shadowban, and we certainly don’t shadowban based on political viewpoints.’ All of these statements have been proven false by Elon’s release of the ‘Twitter files.’ To punctuate the point, a video of the former CEO dismissing shadow-banning went viral on Twitter last week. Dorsey’s false claims may have come out of ignorance, but they were echoed for years by Twitter’s Ms. Gadde. According to Mr. Taibbi’s investigative reporting, Ms. Gadde played a ‘key role’ in censoring content and banning members with differing political opinions than hers and her cohorts.
Such duplicitous actions by a dictatorial few were ultimately sniffed out by many of Twitter’s members, and trust in the old Twitter brand had been plummeting prior to the takeover. A Verge Tech Survey in 2021 showed a mere 28 percent of Twitter’s users said they would be disappointed if the company disappeared, down from 33 percent in 2020. Twitter’s corporate persona of ‘we know better for you than you know for yourself (along with that of Facebook and Google) also drove people’s trust in big technology companies into the dirt. A recent Gallup poll shows that confidence in technology companies plummeted to 26 percent in 2021, down from 29 percent the previous year.
More ominously, until Elon’s buyout rumors started spreading last April Fools Day, Twitter’s stock price was trading below its 2013 IPO price. It was the dawn of the ‘trusted network’ era, where people will own the content they create and earn revenue for their value, and Twitter was still playing ball like it was the 00s. Pre-Elon, Twitter was on the verge of becoming obsolete. Under Dorsey’s leadership (or lack thereof), Twitter was a failed enterprise.
As Elon continues to clean out the bottom of the Twitter birdcage, implement Web3 strategies to modernize its members’ experience, and tighten the company’s business model, we bet Twitter will emerge out of the recession hugely profitable. We further bet that Elon’s investment in Twitter will ultimately outperform his investments in Tesla and SpaceX over time.
The Democratization of Information and Citizen Journalism
Perhaps the greatest irony here is that Jack Dorsey has done more for the ‘democratization of information’ and ‘citizen journalism’ than almost anyone on the planet. Jack certainly deserves a bust at the Free Speech Hall of Fame, somewhere between worldwide web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and his Twitter cofounder, Ev Williams, who also invented Blogger and Medium. From its founding vision in 2006 to ‘provide a platform for friends to share messages to the public’ to its pioneering support for citizen journalism, Twitter was founded upon the unfettered freedom and power of individual expression.
The concept [for Twitter] is simple and so open-ended that people can make of it whatever they wish. They seek value, and they add value. Twitter is fundamentally recipient-controlled — you choose to listen, and you choose to leave. Twitter is whatever you make of it.’
—Jack Dorsey LA Times interview, February 19, 2009
An epic manifestation of Twitter’s original dream occurred during the summer of riots in 2020 when citizen journalists were reporting live the terror sweeping the U.S. that corporate media would not. The most violent political demonstration in U.S. history recorded 633 riots in 140 U.S. cities in 20 states resulting in 47 innocent deaths and thousands of others injured, including over 2,000 police officers. It has since been estimated that there was over $5 billion in commercial property damage — primarily minority-owned businesses — of which only $2 billion was covered by insurance. Without Twitter, Americans would have had only an inkling of the destruction, death, and pillaging that was really going on.
In the Twitter era, people have become dependent on the ‘random acts of journalism’ that Andy Carvin of National Public Radio has talked about. The most thrilling example might be when a Pakistani programmer live-tweeted the U.S. special forces attack on Osama bin Laden’s compound. Or in 2011, when Mr. Carvin used Twitter as a crowdsourced, real-time newsroom to report on the uprisings in Egypt. By democratizing distribution, Twitter changed the world of news reporting forever and for the better.
‘Suddenly, you have all these people on the street roaming about, and they’re able to report on everything they see. A certain mass report on the earthquake they all just felt, another mass report on what they felt about the Obama inauguration, and another group on the homeless issues in San Francisco. You’ve got a further richness to add to a typical journalistic process. And when you have a mass of people providing updates to particular events, you’re exposing a trend: This is happening right now in this location or on this topic. It gives you an immediacy and relevancy for what people are talking about right now.’
— Jack Dorsey LA Times interview, February 19, 2009
The New Elite thinks there is something special about…themselves
Our view now is Jack got rolled by a small cadre of over-educated Ivy Leaguers (e.g., Ms. Gadde — NYU, Twitter’s former head of trust & safety, Yoel Roth — UPenn, and former top FBI lawyer, James Baker — Harvard) who’ve been brainwashed to believe that because they performed well on their SATs, jumped through calculated hoops prescribed by their high-priced private college counselors, and sucked up to teachers for top grades, they are something special. These folks are emblematic of a new entitlement culture amongst the so-called ‘elites.’ The ‘top schools’ represent a completely out-of-touch and deeply flawed meritocracy.
Former Yale English professor William Deresiewicz describes this zeitgeist of the minority elite in his New Republic essay ‘Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League.’ Mr. Deresiewicz explains how an elite education can lead to a cycle of grandiosity and depression. The kind of depression that Ms. Gadde, and Messrs. Roth and Baker are certainly feeling now that Elon exposed their elitist sins and sent them packing.
This [Ivy League] system is exacerbating inequality, retarding social mobility, perpetuating privilege, and creating an elite that is isolated from the society that it’s supposed to lead. The numbers are undeniable. In 1985, 46 percent of incoming freshmen at the 250 most selective colleges came from the top quarter of the income distribution. By 2000, it was 55 percent. The major reason for the trend is clear. The ever-growing cost of manufacturing children who are fit to compete in the college admissions game. Wealthy families start buying their children’s way into elite colleges almost from the moment they are born.
—William Deresiewicz joined the faculty of Yale University in 1998. He taught courses in modern British fiction, Great Books, and Indian fiction. He left academia in 2008 after being denied tenure.
The joke amongst successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs has always been that they’ve created companies that would never hire them because they would never pass the H.R. department sniff test. It is not a coincidence that company founders such as Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Travis Kalanick (Uber), Evan Spiegel (Snap), Jan Kuom (WhatsApp), Microsoft CoFounders Bill Gates and Paul Allen (RIP), and, yes, even Twitter cofounders Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Williams are all billionaire college dropouts. Founders thrive on breaking convention, taking risks, and hanging in there until the last dog dies. Ironically, the top school ‘elite’ you are expected to hire are quite the opposite. Like the inmates that took over Twitter, these folks operate in the shadows, confuse political jockeying with getting real work done, and are quick to stab their colleagues in the back if they feel threatened.
One of the hidden blessings of the COVID era is the light it shined on the negative ROI of sending your kid to a ‘top school.’ After years of raising tuition above inflation levels, soaring administrative costs, saddling students with $1.7 billion in loans, and campus-wide political indoctrination and intolerance, alumni and parents are screaming ‘enough.’ From spring 2021 to 2022, U.S. undergraduate enrollment has dropped by more than 650,000 — or over 4 percent alone, and some 14 percent in the last decade. To compete globally, Silicon Valley founders must recognize these new inadequacies by creating their own hiring tests that put a premium on real-life experiences, motivating passions, independent thinking, and straight talking. Steve Jobs once said the price of admission to the Apple product team is the willingness to risk that another member might call one of your ideas stupid. ‘Brutal honesty is a critical component of our creative process,’ he explained.
Dear Jack
We are sorry for jumping to conclusions, but you were the boss, you lost control, and you let too many Sylvesters in the cage. For Twitter to win back the trust of its members, Elon will have to return to the Twitter of Christmas past, where (borrowing from your own words) ‘people seek value and add value’, and are ‘free to make of Twitter whatever they wish.’ The platform should also ‘enhance the journalistic process with richness, immediacy, and relevancy.’ Entrepreneurs like you and Elon are comfortable with this ethos because you thrive on freedom. The people you put in charge do not because they thrive on political advantage and control.
At the end of the day, you can not escape the fact that you are a son of Silicon Valley, a world known for inventing stuff that brings power back to the individual. From engraving a CPU on a chip to putting a computer on your desk, then in your backpack, connecting everyone and everything over the Internet, and then putting the Internet in your pocket — Power to the people is our legacy. You have lived up to this tradition when you democratized expression with the original Twitter, pioneered peer-to-peer digital cash with Block (formerly Square), and with your early and ongoing commitment to bitcoin and the private web. But do the world a favor: remember your roots and watch out for those Ivy Leaguers. There is only one true elite in our business—the entrepreneurs like you and Elon, that can leap tall buildings in a single bound.
News Flash! Jack Dorsey responds to Twitter Files.
As we were about to push the publish button, Jack Dorsey posted his ‘take’ on the #TwitterFiles. His post appeared on Revue, a newsletter publishing platform the old Twitter acquired in January 2021 that the new Twitter just announced they would shut down next month.
At first glance, here is our quick take on Jack’s take:
- The elephant in the room on the Twitter Files is whether Jack lied to Congress or did the inmates truly control the asylum and never tell him about the political censoring and shadow-banning that went on. Jack avoided this elephant in his post.
- Jack whines about an ‘activist’ investor who put so much pressure on him that he ‘gave up’ on pushing for his top three principles without mentioning why he ended up in this situation. Maybe, just maybe, he created his own dilemma by delivering a doughnut (i.e., zero return) to his investors since he took Twitter public 10 years ago — while he still pocketed over a cool billion.
- Mr. Dorsey seems muddled in his thinking regarding the merits of censoring the President of the United States — especially one we could argue Twitter was responsible for creating. He says banning Trump was, ‘the right thing for the public company business at the time, but the wrong thing for the internet and society.’ What? The President of the U.S. is a person who walks around with a suitcase full of nuclear launch buttons. If ‘member security’ is the aim, then people have the right to know the thoughts and deeds of the most powerful person in the world, no matter if she/he is loved or hated by anyone. As Senator Bernie Sanders observed, ‘I don’t feel comfortable with a handful of high tech people making their own distinctions between free speech and dangerous rhetoric,’ said the Bern Man. ‘Today, you ban Donald Trump; tomorrow, it could be somebody else who has a very different point of view.’ So to answer your rhetorical question, ‘Was this correct?’ the answer is an emphatic ‘No!’
- Like a great entrepreneur, Jack’s solution to Twitter’s old problems is to sell a new solution. The only way to create an online world with absolute transparency and resilience to corporate and government influence ‘is to develop a free and open protocol for social media owned by the people, not by a single company or group of companies,’ he says. To accelerate his idea of an open internet and protocol, Jack is offering ‘cash and equity grants to engineering teams working on social media and private communication protocols, bitcoin, and a web-only mobile O.S.’ He disclosed his first bet — $1mm/yr to Signal. Jack’s initiative here will require further investigation on our part, but we applaud the effort and look forward to following Mr. Dorsey’s progress here.
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