Of the many bizarre moments that preceded Twitter’s change in ownership, one that’s always stuck out to me was Jack Dorsey’s that “Elon is the singular solution I trust.” His insistence that Musk was uniquely positioned to “extend the light of consciousness” was a strange endorsement, even by Dorsey’s usual weird-guy standards. But Dorsey had long idolized Musk and the two men had a relationship that was far deeper than what many onlookers realized.
That’s according to a new book that explores Jack Dorsey’s role in Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Written by Bloomberg reporter Kurt Wagner, tells the story of how Dorsey saved Twitter in 2015 and how his actions – or often, lack thereof— led to Musk’s acquisition and, ultimately, .
Wagner’s isn’t the first book to delve into the tumultuous events of the last two years — Musk biographer Walter Isaacson had a seat to the drama — but Battle for the Bird sheds new light on Dorsey’s side of the equation. “Jack had been bringing Elon to Twitter offsites, he’d visited him at his SpaceX launch facility, the two of them sort of had this relationship that I don’t really think people paid much attention to,” Wagner tells Engadget. So once Musk began acquiring a large stake in the company, “Jack sort of stepped in and did what he could” to make the deal happen.
The book, which began as a Dorsey biography before Musk’s takeover forced Wagner to change his plans, focuses on the enigmatic Twitter co-founder whose unusual management style sometimes worked against the company’s own interests.
Inside of Twitter, Wagner writes, Dorsey was known to “rarely speak” in meetings and disliked making decisions. Internally, this was a source of confusion as executives often had to guess what Dorsey was thinking about a particular issue. “People would be surprised at how little he was directing [Twitter and Square], he was really advising them in a weird way,” Wagner says.
These dynamics played out in Twitter’s product. Wagner reports that Dorsey had initially encouraged the product team to create the feature that was eventually known as “,” Twitter’s experiment with disappearing posts. But Dorsey “grew to despise” the feature and publicly cheered when the company less than a year after its rollout. “Even though he thought Fleets was a bad decision, he never stepped in to halt the product or move the team in another direction,” Wagner writes.
Battle for the Bird…