Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal

by Nick Bilton

  About the Author

  Nick Bilton is a columnist and reporter for the New York Times and also leads its popular Bits Blog, where he explores the disruptive aspects of technology on business and culture, the future of technology, privacy, and the social impact of the Web. He is a regular guest on national TV and radio and the author of I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works. He lives in San Francisco.

  HATCHING TWITTER

  How a fledgling start-up became a multi-billion dollar business and accidentally changed the world.

  Nick Bilton

  www.sceptrebooks.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Sceptre

  An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Nick Bilton 2013

  The right of Nick Bilton to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  eBook ISBN 978 1 444 76196 2

  Trade paperback ISBN 978 1 444 76704 9

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.sceptrebooks.co.uk

  For Sandra, Terry, Leanne, Elissa,

  their respective families,

  and Pixel

  Author’s Note

  The author Julian Barnes once wrote, “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”

  What you are about to read is the result of several hundred hours of interviews with current and former employees of Twitter and Odeo, government officials, Twitter executives’ friends and significant others, and people at competing companies, as well as discussions with almost everyone mentioned in the book. While Twitter, the company, declined to give me official access for the book, Twitter’s current and former board members and all four cofounders of the company agreed to sit for, collectively, more than sixty-five hours of interviews. Although most interviews were recorded to ensure accuracy of dialogue, all of these conversations, while on the record to be used within this book, were conducted on “background,” with the understanding that material would not be explicitly attributed to specific sources within this book. There are only a couple of people mentioned in this book who declined to be interviewed.

  It became apparent in the interviews for the book that people’s memories of past events have changed over time. During only a select few occasions two people agreed that a meeting took place, but their recollections of the location or timing were drastically different. In every instance possible I have tried to triangulate timing and location of events using documents I obtained and, of course, social media. There may be some occurrences where this was not possible; in these instances I have done my best to estimate timing. I chose to leave out of this narrative moments of the story for which accounts were too different. In some areas of the book events are referred to a few months earlier than they occur to help the reader understand the overall significance of a moment.

  The book is also based on more than a thousand documents I obtained or reviewed during my reporting, including employee e-mails, boardroom presentations, investment filings, contracts, employee calendars, partnership documents, government-level communications, instant-messenger correspondence, newspaper articles, blog posts, and highly confidential Twitter legal notices and internal e-mails. In moments of the book where scenes are described in exact detail, I have often personally visited the location. Any instance of a character’s inner monologue or emotional state is based on interviews with that individual and not assumed.

  Even with the hundreds of hours of interviews and the internal documents, the most exact location of memory I found was strewn about the Internet on social-media Web sites. With a researcher, I pored through tens of thousands of tweets, photos, and videos.

  It became clear in the reporting of this book that the imperfections of memory of those I spoke with have sometimes become more pronounced over the past decade. But what has remained intact are the hundreds of thousands of photos, videos, and tweets they all shared over the years, helping to pinpoint exact moments in time, clothing, conversation, and mood. Unbeknownst to the people in the book at the time, their use of the tools they created, especially Twitter, ensured there were very few inadequacies of documentation to deteriorate the true events that make up this history.

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  #START

  I. #FOUNDERS

  @Ev

  @Noah

  @Jack

  @Biz

  II. #NOAH

  Troubled Waters

  Status

  Twitter

  Just Setting Up My Twttr

  The Cowboy at the Rodeo

  The Green Benches

  III. #JACK

  A Bloody Mess

  Chaos Again

  And the Winner Is …

  The First CEO

  The Hundred-Million-Dollar Offer

  Is Twitter Down?

  The Dressmaker

  Rumors

  Fuck Fuck Fuck …

  Building Sand Castles Underwater

  Calling My Parents

  IV. #EV

  The Third Twitter Leader

  Fight or Flight

  The Marathon Man

  Dinner with Al

  Oprah

  Spiraling into Iraq

  The Time 101

  Iranian Revolution

  The Accidental Billionaire

  The Coach and the Comedian

  Jack’s Gone Rogue

  Steve Jobs 2.0

  Russian-Roulette Relations

  Secret Meetings

  The Clown Car in the Gold Mine

  A Sunday Storm

  V. #DICK

  No Adult Supervision

  Jack’s Back!

  Make Better Mistakes Tomorrow

  What’s Happening?

  Acknowledgments

  Picture Section

  #START

  October 4, 2010, 10:43 A.M.

  The Twitter Office

  Get out,” Evan Williams said to the woman standing in his office doorway. “I’m going to throw up.”

  She stepped backward, pulling the door closed, a metal clicking sound reverberating through the room as he grabbed the black wastebasket in the corner of his office, his hands now shaking and clammy.

  This was it. His last act as the CEO of Twitter would be throwing up into a garbage can.

  He knelt there for a moment, his dark jeans resting on the rough carpeted floor, then leaned back against the wall. Outside, the cold October air rustled the trees that lined Folsom Street below. Violin-like noises of traffic mingled with a muffled din of conversation near his office doorway.

  Moments later, someone informed his wife, Sara, who also worked at Twitter, “Something is wrong with Ev.” She rushed up to his corner office, her rich, black, curly hair wobbling slightly as she walked.

  Sara checke
d her watch, realizing that Ev had only forty-five minutes before he would have to address the three hundred Twitter employees and break the news. She opened the door and went inside.

  Down the hall, the Twitter public-relations team reviewed the blog post that would go up on the Web site at 11:40 A.M., the moment Ev would finish addressing the company and hand the microphone to the new CEO, passing power in a gesture as simple as handing off the baton in a relay race.

  The blog post, which would be picked up by thousands of press outlets and blogs from around the world, gleefully announced that Twitter, the four-year-old social network, now had 165 million registered people on the service who sent an astounding 90 million tweets each day. Five paragraphs down, it noted that Evan Williams, the current CEO, was stepping down of his own volition.

  “I have decided to ask our COO, Dick Costolo, to become Twitter’s CEO,” said the post, allegedly written by Ev.

  Of course, that wasn’t true.

  Ev, seated on the floor of his office with his hands wrapped around a garbage can, had absolutely no desire to say that. A farmer’s son from Nebraska who had arrived in San Francisco a decade earlier with nothing more than a couple of bags of cheap, raggedy, oversized clothes and tens of thousands of dollars in credit-card debt, Ev wanted to remain chief of the company he had cofounded. But that wasn’t going to happen. It didn’t matter that he was now worth more than a billion dollars or that he had poured his life into Twitter. He didn’t have a choice: He had been forced out of the company in a malicious, bloody boardroom coup carried out by the people he had hired, some of whom had once been his closest friends, and by some of the investors who had financed the company.

  Ev looked up as he heard Sara come in. He wiped the sleeve of his sweater across the dark stubble on his chin.

  “How are you feeling?” Sara asked.

  “Fuck,” he said, unsure if it was his nerves or if he was coming down with something. Or both.

  Down the hall, through the doors that led to the Twitter office’s main foyer, copies of the New Yorker, the Economist, and the New York Times were fanned out on the white square coffee table in the waiting area. Each publication contained articles about Twitter’s role in the revolutions now taking place in the Middle East—rebellions that, through Twitter and other social networks, would eventually see the fall of dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen and spark massive protests in Bahrain, Syria, and Iran.

  Around the corner, Biz Stone, another of Twitter’s four cofounders, finalized an e-mail telling the employees that there would be an all-hands meeting in the cafeteria at 11:30 A.M. Attendance was mandatory; no guests were allowed. There would be no hummus, just important news. He hit “send” and stood up from his desk, heading for Ev’s office to try to cheer up his friend and boss of nearly a decade.

  Jason Goldman, who oversaw Twitter’s product development and was one of Ev’s few allies on the company’s seven-person board, was already sitting on the couch when Biz arrived and dropped down next to him. Ev was now quietly sipping from a bottle of water, despondently staring off into the distance, the turmoil and madness of the past week playing over in his mind.

  “Remember when …,” Goldman and Biz chorused, trying to cheer Ev up with humorous memories of the last several years at Twitter. There were lots of stories to tell. Like the time Ev had nervously been a guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show, fumbling in front of millions of viewers. Or the time the Russian president showed up to the office, with snipers and the Secret Service, to send his first tweet, right at the moment the site stopped working. Or when Biz and Ev went to Al Gore’s apartment at the St. Regis for dinner and got “shit-faced drunk” as the former vice president of the United States tried to convince them to sell him part of Twitter. Or other bizarre acquisition attempts by Ashton Kutcher at his pool in Los Angeles and by Mark Zuckerberg at awkward meetings at his sparsely furnished house. Or when Kanye West, will.i.am, Lady Gaga, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John McCain, and countless other celebrities and politicians had arrived, sometimes unannounced, at the office, rapping, singing, preaching, tweeting (some others were even high or drunk), trying to understand how this bizarre thing that was changing society could be controlled and how they could own a piece of it.

  Ev struggled to smile as his friends spoke, trying his best to hide the sadness and defeat on his face.

  There was one person who might have been successful at making Ev smile: the man who was now pacing in the office directly next door, his bald head bowed, his phone cupped to his ear. Dick Costolo, once a well-known improv comedian who had graced the stage with Steve Carell and Tina Fey. The same Dick Costolo Ev had “decided to ask” to become Twitter’s new CEO, the third of a company that was only four years old.

  Yet Dick wasn’t in a jovial mood either. He was talking to the board members who had been involved in the coup, confirming the wording of the blog post that would soon go out to the media, and also what he would say to the hundreds of Twitter employees when he took the mic from Ev.

  He paced as they plotted what would happen next: the return of Jack Dorsey.

  Jack had been the first CEO of Twitter and another cofounder. He had been pushed out of the company by Ev in a similar power struggle in 2008. On this particular morning, he’d been expecting to make a triumphant return to the company he had obsessively built before his own ousting.

  As Jack had been informed by the board a few hours earlier, though, his return to Twitter would not happen today; it would be delayed again. Jack was only a few blocks away as the scene unfolded that morning, pacing in his office at Square, a mobile payments company he’d recently started.

  He had woken up in his wall-to-wall-concrete penthouse apartment in Mint Plaza and dressed for work in his now-signature several-thousand-dollar outfit of fancy Dior shirt, dark suit blazer, and Rolex watch. It was a very different ensemble from the unkempt T-shirt and black beanie hat he had worn two years earlier when he was ousted from Twitter.

  But although he wore a different uniform that morning, he was equally disdainful of Ev, his once friend and forever cofounder, who had foiled Jack’s planned return to Twitter. Although Ev had been successfully removed as the CEO, he had not, as was originally supposed to unfold, been publicly fired from the company. At least not yet.

  Back in the Twitter office, Ev looked up as the clock approached 11:30 A.M. Time to go.

  Ev had no idea that within just a few months he would be completely out of a job at Twitter. Biz and Jason followed Ev out the door and down the halls, as they had for years, clueless that they would also be pushed out of the company in due time.

  They walked silently toward the company’s cafeteria, past the colorful walls and white sleigh rocking chairs and the confused employees who were grabbing their seats. None of Twitter’s staff members knew what they were about to hear from their beloved boss, Evan Williams. They had no idea that the company they worked for, a company that had changed the world in countless ways, was itself about to change forever.

  I.

  #FOUNDERS

  @Ev

  Ev’s bicycle tires crunched on the gravel as he drifted along the dirt road, past the endless rows of green and yellow grapevines. The orange glow of the morning California sun warmed his back, his bright orange sneakers pressing down on the pedals as he picked up speed to begin his dreaded daily four-mile bike ride to work.

  As he approached Sebastopol’s Morris Street, cars swooshed by, leaving pockets of moving air in their wake, which helped dry the small droplets of sweat that had gathered on his brow from the morning commute. This was the moment in the ride when he once again told himself that one day soon he would be able to afford to buy a car to get to work, rather than have to use an old bicycle borrowed from a coworker.

  Of course, he had never imagined people needed to own a car in San Francisco, where he had thought he was moving when he arrived in California earlier that year. It was 1997, the middle of the modern-day gold rush called the te
ch boom. Young, nerdy tech enthusiasts like Ev, along with designers and programmers, had set out for the area in pursuit of a new dream where, rumor had it, you could get rich by selling ones and zeros rather than nuggets of shiny yellow gold.

  He had arrived a twenty-five-year-old with empty pockets and fierce idealism, only to find that the job he had been hired for, writing marketing material for a company called O’Reilly Media, was in Sebastopol, a small, quiet hippie town fifty-five miles north of San Francisco.

  When viewed on a map spread out on his mother’s small kitchen table in Nebraska, it had looked much closer to the big city. Ev decided he didn’t have much of a choice but to keep the job. He had no college degree and no idea how to write code. The odds of finding work elsewhere were slim to none. Plus O’Reilly was paying him $48,500 a year, which would help deplete his tens of thousands of dollars in credit-card debt and student loans from the single year he had made it through college. He also reasoned that his new employer, which published technology how-to books, would be the perfect place to learn how to program. So he settled in on the outskirts of town, renting a six-hundred-dollar-a-month shoebox that sat atop a stranger’s garage.

  Ev felt a surprising sense of comfort in the solitude of Sebastopol, surrounded by the sounds of nothingness. It reminded him of the farm in Clarks, Nebraska, where he had grown up. The day he left for California, Clarks’s population went from 374 people to 373.

  At his new office, he often sat quietly at his computer, wearing baggy, cheap jeans, an oversized T-shirt—almost always tucked in—and, if the day afforded it, a strange hat.

  When your parents are farmers, style isn’t usually part of the morning breakfast discussion. Neither is talk of tech start-ups and San Francisco, which is why his father, Monte, hadn’t quite understood why young Ev was heading to California to play with computers rather than tending to the family farm. But the Williams family had never really understood Ev.