How Elon Musk Got Tangled Up in Blue Twitter Blue, a revamped subscription service that let users buy verified badges, was the first big test for the platform’s new owner. It didn’t go well.

Matt Chase

By Ryan Mac and Kate Conger

Ryan Mac and Kate Conger are the co-authors of “Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter,” from which this article is adapted.

Aug. 24, 2024

By Nov. 9, 2022, anxiety was high among the Twitter employees gathered at the company’s San Francisco headquarters. They had spent part of that morning trying to gently explain to their new boss, Elon Musk, that the service they had just launched was dangerous.

Twitter Blue, a subscription service that now allowed users to buy one of the platform's coveted verified badges, had been live for only a few hours when Mr. Musk — who had bought the company two weeks earlier and would later rename it X — stepped out of the glass-walled conference room with views of San Francisco City Hall to speak with an assistant. With Mr. Musk out of earshot, the welcoming, deferential mood in the room immediately changed. The employees knew that users relied on the verified check marks to ensure that information on the platform — including bus times or hurricane evacuation orders or a pop star’s musings — was indeed real.

“All these other people around the world rely on a label of some kind, a badge of some kind, to tell them this is the real account to listen to,” said Esther Crawford, a director of product management, according to three people in attendance. “And they will be hijacked.”

Christian Dowell, a company lawyer, chimed in, suggesting that accounts that bought the badges could start a harassment campaign, using the credibility of verification to, for instance, direct SWAT teams to people’s homes. “Somebody could die, actually,” he said.

When Mr. Musk re-entered the room, the chatter died. No one had expected him to be with them for so long on launch day, but he picked through the snacks — at one point eating half a doughnut in a single bite. He encouraged employees who raised concerns to be “adventurous.”

“We’re going to be shooting from the hip in real time,” Mr. Musk said, fashioning his hands into a pair of finger guns.

Previously, Blue had been a small part of the company’s business, which relied on advertising for 90 percent of its revenue. Blue allowed a few thousand die-hard users to pay for premium features, like the ability to edit their tweets and customize the Twitter app on their phones, but it never gained much traction. To Mr. Musk, a Twitter obsessive who had purchased the company for $44 billion, the service represented an untapped financial opportunity.

Soon after buying Twitter in October 2022, Elon Musk told his new employees, “We’re going to be shooting from the hip in real time.” Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

Mr. Musk’s attempt to rescue a company he saw as a sinking ship was premised on the idea that he could persuade people — millions of them — to pay for Twitter Blue. That scheme, however, was doomed from the start by the haphazard planning and capriciousness of Twitter’s owner, whose nearly two-year stewardship of the company has cratered its finances and sullied his reputation as a generational entrepreneur.

During his time at the helm, Mr. Musk has cycled through periods of supreme confidence and self-doubt, making abrupt decisions only to reverse himself. The tumult of his takeover was exemplified in his handling of Blue, which he shut down the day after its unveiling, amid a torrent of criticism, but made available once again a month later. Since then, the site’s check marks have become a hodgepodge of paid, free and fake identifiers signifying little more than confusion.

The book from which this excerpt is drawn is based on more than 100 interviews with people who worked at Twitter or for Mr. Musk. It also relies on internal company documents, contemporaneous notes, recordings and court records. Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for interviews for this book or this excerpt.

Mr. Musk’s plan for Blue centered on selling Twitter’s verification check marks as part of the subscription. The badge, which featured a check mark outlined in blue, was a status symbol on Twitter. In the past, the company gave them out at its own discretion, distinguishing high-profile accounts from impostors. Justin Bieber and Barack Obama had check marks, as did more than 420,000 other users.

Mr. Musk came to hate what he saw as Twitter’s two-tiered class system of the verified and unverified, and to him, selling off the check marks was the ultimate democratization of the site. Soon after completing his acquisition, he assigned Ms. Crawford to assemble a team and gave her a deadline of Nov. 7, 2022, for Blue’s relaunch. She had 10 days to deliver or risk being fired, three people with knowledge of the conversations said.

Many of the employees on the Blue team came to view the project as pointless at best and, at worst, something that could undermine trust. If everyone could be verified, then no one would truly be verified.

As one Blue worker later wrote in a journal: “It was such an obvious train wreck, that the main job of everyone on the team was to make sure it was the safest train wreck possible.”

The Check Mark

Before the introduction of verified check marks in 2009, impersonation on Twitter was pervasive. While the company’s founders knew it was a problem, cracking down on accounts masquerading as those belonging to famous people was always a secondary concern as the company struggled to keep the site online as it constantly crashed from growth.

Tony La Russa managing the St. Louis Cardinals in 2007, two years before he sued Twitter over a parody account.   Barton Silverman/The New York Times

In 2009, Tony La Russa, the World Series-winning manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, became fed up with a parody account that made jokes about unsavory team incidents — including the death of one of his players — and sued Twitter. In response, Twitter took down the impostor and rolled out a solution: verified accounts.

The company began slapping the blue seal on the accounts of notable people and organizations, becoming the first social network to verify its users — one of its most lasting impacts on internet culture. Other services began verifying prominent users, including Google+ in 2011, Facebook in 2012 and Instagram in 2014.

While many people saw the check mark as a designation of fame, it became an important part of Twitter’s utility. It marked the real accounts for brands like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, making the platform much more attractive to advertisers. And it signified authenticity for governments and emergency services, which provided information about train delays, elections and tornado warnings.

Among those impersonated on early Twitter was @ElonMusk. Mr. Musk, who had been pushed to try Twitter by his first wife, Justine Musk, initially dismissed the microblogging service and her constant use. When the impostor vacated the @ElonMusk handle and Mr. Musk took over the username in 2010, the entrepreneur rarely posted. “Not sure I can handle just doing 140 char missives,” he tweeted in late 2011, frustrated by the character limits on tweets.

But Mr. Musk’s Twitter habit grew as he realized the site’s power. It gave him a way of keeping everyone updated on the progress of his companies, Tesla and SpaceX, and pushing back against media outlets, which he had come to distrust. On the platform, he owned his own narrative.

By early 2022, he was secretly acquiring Twitter stock, blazing past a limit set by the Securities and Exchange Commission to prevent investors from quietly accumulating major stakes in public companies. That April, Mr. Musk made an offer to buy Twitter for $54.20 a share, eager to own his favorite megaphone. He waffled over the decision that summer and tried to call the deal off, but Twitter’s board sued him to force it through. By Oct. 26, Mr. Musk had accepted the terms and marched into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters with a vision for Blue.

‘Power to the People!’

For Ms. Crawford — who had arrived at Twitter in 2020 after it acquired Squad, her video chat start-up — Blue represented an opportunity. In private meetings, she told those working with her on the project that there was limited possibility for success, three people who were part of those discussions said. But she saw it as a chance to impress Mr. Musk and gain influence.

This is our chance to show the best of what Twitter has to offer,” Ms. Crawford told her team. If they could accomplish this task now, she suggested, they would be able to negotiate for what they wanted later, including raises, new positions and new products.

Still, the absurdity of being asked to launch a product built to Mr. Musk’s specifications in less than two weeks, amid widespread layoffs, was not lost on her. In one meeting, she presented her team with customized mugs that wouldn’t have been out of place at a tech-themed Bed Bath & Beyond. “Chance made us co-workers, crazy psycho [expletive] made us Tweeps,” read the mugs’ inscription.

Ms. Crawford and her team tried to develop safeguards. On Oct. 31, they presented options to Mr. Musk and his retinue of investors and friends. In one version of the system, there would be two badges: People who were already verified would keep their blue badges, while those who paid for the subscription program would get a different badge, this one in white.

To illustrate the differences, they created mock-ups of two tweets. One, from the legacy verified @JoeBiden account, advised people to vote. The other, from the Blue-subscribed @JoeB1den account, which replaced the “i” with a “1,” tweeted that it was “starting nuclear war with Russia.” Besides the slight change in spelling, the two accounts could be distinguished by their colored badges.

The attempt to make clearer distinctions between legacy and paid verified users, however, was not embraced by Mr. Musk’s friends. It “feels like a second-class citizen,” David Sacks, a venture capitalist who was assisting with the takeover, wrote in an email seen by The New York Times, adding that it would “disincentivize purchase.” Eventually, Mr. Musk vetoed the move.

Mr. Musk vetoed a proposal to give Twitter Blue subscribers a white badge to distinguish them from previously verified, blue-badged accounts. Dado Ruvic/Reuters

Mr. Musk’s fixation on Blue extended beyond the design, and he engaged in lengthy deliberations about how much it should cost. Mr. Sacks insisted that they should raise the price to $20 a month, from its current $4.99. Anything less felt cheap to him, and he wanted to present Blue as a luxury good.

“Chanel could make a fortune selling a $99 bag, but it would be a one-time move,” he wrote. “A ‘promotional offer’ may not be the position we want. A luxury brand can always move down-market, but it’s very hard to move up-market once the brand is shot.”

Jason Calacanis, a friend of Mr. Musk’s, disagreed. “It should be $99 a year,” he insisted. During one meeting, he launched into a spiel about how Twitter users were more likely to open their wallets for a $100-per-year subscription if it seemed slightly cheaper at the $99 price, as though he had just watched a YouTube video explaining the basics of consumer psychology.

Mr. Musk also turned to the author Walter Isaacson for advice. Mr. Isaacson, who had written books on Steve Jobs and Benjamin Franklin, was shadowing him for an authorized biography. “Walter, what do you think?” Mr. Musk asked.

“This should be accessible to everyone,” Mr. Isaacson said, no longer just the fly on the wall. “You need a really low price point, because this is something that everyone is going to sign up for.”

To employees, the discussions were baffling. There was Mr. Musk, a man who had built multibillion-dollar companies, soliciting advice from a small inner circle of advisers who had little experience building social networks. Sure, they used Twitter, but these rich men were not representative of the hundreds of millions of people who logged in every day.

Mr. Musk had largely come to peace with a price of $100 a year for Blue. But during one meeting to discuss pricing, his top assistant, Jehn Balajadia, felt compelled to speak up.

“There’s a lot of people who can’t even buy gas right now,” she said, according to two people in attendance. It was hard to see how any of those people would pony up $100 on the spot for a social media status symbol.

Mr. Musk paused to think. “You know, like, what do people pay for Starbucks?” he asked. “Like $8?”

Before anyone could raise objections, he whipped out his phone to set his word in stone.

“Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit,” he tweeted on Nov. 1. “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.”

‘We Need to Protect the Mission’

Ms. Crawford grew closer to Mr. Musk, texting with him regularly, and members of his inner circle started opening up to her. Ms. Balajadia sat Ms. Crawford down to coach her on managing Mr. Musk. Ms. Balajadia was one of the few women Mr. Musk trusted, and while her title was “operations coordinator” for the Boring Company, his tunneling start-up, she was treated as a glorified assistant. She monitored his calendar, shadowed him at events and set up his laptop for him when Mr. Musk needed to do work that couldn’t be done on his iPhone.

“I can tell you’re going to be around for a while, so let me tell you something,” Ms. Balajadia said to Ms. Crawford. “Elon is special in this world. It is our job to protect him and make sure what he wants to have happen, happens. We need to protect the mission.”

Ms. Crawford came up with her own tactics for dealing with Mr. Musk. She quickly learned that she could challenge him in one-on-one settings. Individually, Mr. Musk could be charming, willing to engage in discussion and listen to the expertise of his counterpart. Put him in a larger group setting with people outside his inner circle or those he didn’t trust, however, and Mr. Musk’s ego ran wild. He could never be seen as inferior or uninformed.

In a meeting days after the acquisition, Mr. Musk was tuning out a discussion about product ideas and scrolling Twitter. After reading a tweet about the F.B.I. and Hillary Clinton — a constant fixation for the right-wing accounts that he began to interact with more frequently — he announced to the room that he had drafted a tweet about Ms. Clinton, hoping to elicit laughs.

“You can’t do that right now!” Ms. Crawford said, standing up. They had product matters to discuss, and she didn’t want a distraction. Then she burst out laughing. Her histrionic approach worked.

“Are you my tweet adviser now?” Mr. Musk asked, raising an eyebrow. He didn’t send the tweet.

Publicly, Ms. Crawford was seen as a cheerleader. Through the chaos of the takeover, she remained outwardly optimistic, giving others the impression that she had become Mr. Musk’s devotee.

After a colleague took a photo of Esther Crawford pretending to sleep in her office, she posted it on Twitter, with the caption, “When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork.” Evan Jones

One night, after working long hours with the Blue team, she and her colleagues decided to tweet a joke. She had brought an eye mask and a silver REI sleeping bag to the office for nap breaks, and a product designer, Evan Jones, had snapped a photo of her sleeping. Later, she asked him to retake the picture and post it. He climbed on some office furniture to get a better overhead angle of her in the sleeping bag, then tweeted the photo. Ms. Crawford then retweeted it with her own message: “When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork.”

The image rocketed around the internet. To Mr. Musk’s detractors, it symbolized the cringe-worthy hustle culture that dominated the tech world. To his supporters, the photo showed the impact that a once-in-a-lifetime innovator was having on a company that needed a revolution. In reality, it was a shrewd bit of self-promotion.

Ms. Crawford and Mr. Jones faced a maelstrom of criticism across Twitter, and the product designer wanted to delete his post. But she demanded that he keep the photo up. This was her time to shine.

An F.B.I. Inquiry

The hustle wasn’t completely fake. The Blue team stayed up late fielding requests from Mr. Musk and his transition team, and created a 24-hour rotation where projects could be passed to other employees around the globe.

Some people on the Blue team had taken to monitoring their elevated heart rates on their Apple Watches and sharing the metric with their colleagues to make light of their situations.

“I don’t want to push the team to die over this,” Ms. Crawford told Mr. Musk at one point, trying to warn about burnout.

“Well, push them to just before they die,” Mr. Musk responded, laughing.

As the new Blue came into focus, so did the fears about how it would be exploited for impersonation. What would happen if an account pretending to be a local fire department declared an emergency? Or an account posing as a politician spread a lie about an upcoming vote?

Disinformation on Twitter was a worry when Jair Bolsonaro, center, ran for re-election as Brazil’s president in 2022. Pilar Olivares/Reuters

Stopping election interference was of paramount importance to Twitter employees. Brazil, one of Twitter’s largest markets outside the United States, held its presidential runoff election the weekend after Mr. Musk walked into Twitter. The incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, was unseated by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva but immediately said he would challenge the results. Twitter employees who worked on civic integrity gamed out situations in which Mr. Bolsonaro, whom Mr. Musk claimed to sometimes speak with, could spread disinformation using paid verified accounts.

The F.B.I. also raised concerns about the U.S. midterm elections, which were set for Nov. 8. About a week before Election Day, an agent from the agency’s Foreign Influence Task Force reached out to the company to better understand its plans for Blue.

Mr. Musk was briefed on the outreach during a Nov. 3 meeting and was told that the F.B.I. was interested in whether there would be changes to currently verified state or federal government election accounts, according to three people with knowledge of that conversation. The agency also asked whether fraudulent accounts posing as government officials would be able to become verified.

Mr. Musk’s response didn’t exactly breed confidence. He wanted to push ahead with the launch of Blue before the election, but wait to make some changes, including a plan to give tweets from Blue subscribers greater reach on the platform.

Mr. Musk also said he planned to give a separate “official badge” to all government entities “of significance” to indicate that they were authentic accounts. But he didn’t define what he meant by “of significance.” Employees knew it was impossible to filter through the thousands of verified accounts that could potentially deal in official U.S. elections and determine if they should receive “official” billing, just days before the vote. (Mr. Musk later killed the effort.)

“Why are we making such a risky change one day before elections, which has the potential of causing elections interference by malicious groups that could abuse the new rules to their advantage in the spread of misinformation?” one employee wrote on a companywide Slack channel.

The weekend before U.S. voters headed to the polls, Ms. Crawford made one last attempt in a private chat with her boss. “Do you want to be blamed for the outcome of this election?” she asked.

“Well, when is it?” Mr. Musk replied.

“It’s in two days,” Ms. Crawford said, stunned that he hadn’t clocked the date that she and her team had been warning him about since the start of the project.

Mr. Musk paused, processing. “Oh, I didn’t realize,” he said after a moment. “OK, yeah, it’s fine. We can wait. Why don’t we wait?”

The launch was moved to Nov. 9, the day after the election.

‘A Little Bit of Confusion’

On the morning of Nov. 9, Mr. Musk joined the Blue launch team in the conference room overlooking the city, according to three people who attended the meeting. The engineers and designers in the room straightened up.

“There are a whole bunch of people dying to show what a huge idiot I am,” Mr. Musk said. He decided to keep the launch quiet, worried that a press announcement would lead to an overload of Twitter’s systems.

Still, he expected people to sign up in droves. “It’s better to have a little bit of confusion reign for a soft launch so we don’t break the system,” he told employees. And he was worried about bad actors, predicting a wave of impostors and scammers that would be like a “zombie attack” in “World War Z,” the 2013 action horror flick starring Brad Pitt.

For more than six hours, Mr. Musk kept a watchful eye as users began to notice the service and spread the word. This was his game-changing Twitter service, one that he believed would wean the company off its dependence on advertising, and he was there to shepherd it through, like the liftoff of a SpaceX rocket. He warned the team against taking drastic actions like adding more labels or pausing the service.

“We should consider what is the magnitude of the thing that happens before we take action,” Mr. Musk said. “I want to pay close attention and react with agility, but not react with a fear of a thing that may or may not occur.”

A software engineer calling in to the meeting posed a question to Mr. Musk: “What would you consider a serious incident that would require us to put back such a label or some other differentiation between accounts?”

Mr. Musk intertwined his fingers and paused for a few seconds.

“If there’s like death or serious injury or something like that, um, you know, uh,” he said, fidgeting. “Something beyond annoyance or mild confusion — that would be enough.”

Turning It Off

By that evening, more than 78,000 users had signed up for Blue.

But many were impostors: One user pretended to be the video game company Nintendo and then shared an image of Mario, the lovable plumber, giving the middle finger. The fake verified accounts caused so much confusion that the stepmother of Kyrie Irving, the basketball superstar, called Twitter’s Partnerships Team to get the company to take down a tweet from an account spoofing an ESPN reporter that claimed the Brooklyn Nets had released him.

In 2022, a fake verified Twitter account that claimed to be Kari Lake’s falsely stated that she was conceding the Arizona race for governor. Ash Ponders for The New York Times

Then came the election meddling. Some results were still being tallied, including in the hotly contested Arizona governor’s race between Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state, and Kari Lake, a Trump-backed Republican who had offered to welcome Twitter if Mr. Musk moved the company to the state. With Ms. Lake half a percentage point behind in the vote count the day after the election, a fake account with a new verified badge purporting to be hers tweeted, “It is with heavy heart that I must concede to my opponent, @katiehobbs.”

On Nov. 10, major advertisers started to ring Twitter’s sales team, telling it that they would pull their ads unless the company did something about the fakes. In one call, executives from Nike threatened to never advertise on the platform again, two people with knowledge of the conversation said.

Those who saw Mr. Musk after these calls could sense his tension; he was clearly bothered by the threats from business leaders. By that afternoon, his jovial mood after launching Blue the previous day had disappeared. And over the coming weeks, Mr. Musk’s mood swings — one moment despondent, the next energized — would become routine.

The threats stirred Mr. Musk’s fear of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue in a snap. “Turn it off,” he told an engineer in the San Francisco office. “Turn it off!”

Ryan Mac covers corporate accountability across the global technology industry. More about Ryan Mac

Kate Conger is a technology reporter based in San Francisco. She can be reached at kate.conger@nytimes.com. More about Kate Conger

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 25, 2024, Section BU, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: How Twitter Got All Tangled Up in Blue.

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