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

by Nick Bilton

  Jack stared at Fred, not sure what to say, as Bijan started talking.

  “You know, you’re really good,” Bijan said, his eyes calm as he looked at Jack. It was clear that his role was to be good cop to Fred’s bad cop. “You’re a founder of the company, and we really believe in your vision, so we want you to stick around.”

  Fred interrupted him. “It’s effective immediately, Jack; it has to be.” Jack realized this wasn’t a hostage negotiation; this was it.

  “What? When did that happen?” Biz said, annoyed. “Come on. What the fuck? What happened?”

  Ev tried to calm him, saying it wasn’t entirely his decision, that the board had been pressing for a new leader and it was either Ev or an outside CEO. Ev had even gone on a search for a replacement, interviewing a few external candidates to run the company, but in the end Ev made the most sense. He reiterated that he had experience running a company, adding that it was going to be the job of the people sitting at that table to tell the employees and ensure that morale stayed solid through the swift transition.

  Jack rocked back and forth slightly in his chair, looking down at his untouched yogurt.

  “You’ve done amazing things for the company,” Bijan said. “But the site still keeps going down, and the SMS bills, and we just … we just can’t wait anymore.”

  “But what about the three months?” Jack interrupted, anger now taking over his voice. Most of their words were starting to sound muffled as he looked up at them. “We’re going on all cylinders and the election is coming up and …”

  Bijan and Fred continued to talk from their script, irrelevant of what Jack had to say. They explained that he wouldn’t get all of his stock options, that he had not fully vested, so they would be taking some of them back. But because they liked him, he was getting more than he deserved.

  “But what about my three months?” Jack repeated. “You said …”

  “It’s done, Jack,” Fred said apologetically.

  “You can’t tell anyone yet,” Ev told the group as a barrage of questions came in. Goldman immediately protested. He was going to tell Crystal, who was now his live-in girlfriend. “No, you can’t!” Ev’s voice was now becoming stern. “I get that she’s your girlfriend, and that she’s really close with Jack, but we can’t have all the employees finding out about this before we tell them. It’ll be fucking chaos.”

  “So I’m supposed to just lie to my girlfriend?” Goldman said with anger and sarcasm in his voice.

  “Yes. You need to learn to separate business and relationships,” Ev responded. It was one of the few moments that Goldman felt a dislike for Ev. As he was about to respond, Biz interrupted them both.

  “Have you spoken to Jack?”

  “No,” Ev said, then repeated what he had said earlier. “The board is with him now.”

  Jack was panicked as he stood on the sidewalk in front of the Clift Hotel. He peered down, scanning the legal documents. Certain words leaped out at him. Numbers. Percentages. Dollar symbols. But they were all lower than they should be. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, scrolling frantically for Greg Kidd’s number.

  Kidd was one of the few people Jack trusted in San Francisco. As of a few minutes ago, he might have become the only person he trusted in San Francisco. The two had worked together in the past, and although a business they had once started in partnership had ended with near bloodshed, Kidd had always been there for Jack.

  In 2005, after Jack had spent a week at Burning Man, traipsing through Black Rock City and dancing inebriated until sunrise to techno music, he had shown up on Kidd’s doorstep in Berkeley, jobless and essentially homeless. He had been a different Jack back then, sporting blue dreadlocks and grimy clothes. Still, Kidd had taken him in and let him stay in the guesthouse in the backyard. He also gave him a job as a nanny for his newborn baby. A blue-haired, dreadlocked nanny with a nose ring in Berkeley. He fit right in.

  “Greg, they fired me,” Jack said, his voice frantic. “They took away my stock and they fired me. They made Ev CEO and I …”

  “Just relax for a second. Hold on,” Kidd said, interrupting him. “What’s going on?”

  Jack explained the conversation, what Fred and Bijan had said, that he would technically no longer work for Twitter. After a few minutes listening, Kidd explained that there wasn’t much Jack could do. “Ev owns the majority of the company; you don’t,” he said. “You should call that lawyer.”

  Ev closed the door behind him as they left the apartment. Goldman was clearly upset. Biz too. Greg and Abdur, who were more employees of the company than friends to Jack, seemed almost relieved.

  They all walked to the office together.

  Jack hung up the phone with Kidd and started walking quickly. He didn’t know where to go. He couldn’t go back to the office. He walked briskly down Geary Street, then took lefts and rights and had soon trudged more than a mile. He was frantic when he paused in front of One Embarcadero, a giant concrete building near the water’s edge—the same place where Noah had ridden his bike when he had been cast out of the company two years earlier. Cast out by Jack, who had given Ev an ultimatum: “It’s Noah or it’s me.”

  Now it was Jack’s turn. He stopped and sat on the cement steps as people with jobs brushed by in suits and heels, off to work for the day. Then, the emotions too much, his throat started to itch. He started to cry. His head in is arms, he sat on the steps, sobbing. Alone.

  The door to the office opened and Ev walked in, Goldman, Biz, Abdur, and Greg in tow. Rebecca, Jack’s assistant, immediately rushed over and asked where Jack was. After a brief pause, Biz spoke: “We had an off-site executive meeting today, and Jack will be out of the office for some other meetings,” he said.

  He then looked over at Ev and said, “Hey, you got a second?” They walked into a conference room near the kitchen, the door closing behind them.

  “Look. I get this is the best thing for the company. I just wish I would have known first,” Biz said. Ev listened, agreeing while trying to explain the situation he was in with the board and the legal aspects of the transition. They sat for a brief moment in silence. A deep sigh came from Biz, then he spoke: “I should probably go talk to Jack, huh?”

  “Yeah. That’s probably a good idea,” Ev said. “He has to come into the office tomorrow to tell everyone, so we’ll have to make sure he knows what to say.”

  Biz pulled his phone out of his pocket and sent Jack a text message.

  Jack’s phone had been going all morning. His assistant was trying to reach him. Text messages, e-mails, missed calls. He didn’t respond. What could he say? “I’m not coming in today; I’ve been fired”?

  Suddenly a message from Biz popped up, saying they should talk. They arranged to meet at Samovar Tea Lounge in the Yerba Buena Gardens, near the Twitter offices. The two had spent countless hours and lunches there, often talking about Twitter or other projects they wanted to work on together one day. Jack would sip his favorite tea, masala chai, and mostly just laugh as Biz would crack jokes.

  There would be no jokes on this particular morning. No masala chai either.

  The two sat outside on a wooden bench looking out at the city. The sky had opened up, and Biz squinted as he looked at Jack in the glaring brightness. He could see his eyes were puffy and red.

  “So obviously you heard,” Jack said.

  “Yeah, Ev told us this morning,” Biz said quietly. “We’re not telling the rest of the company yet, though.”

  “What do you think I should do?”

  “I think you should come in and talk to Ev and figure out what to say to everyone.”

  They talked about the discussion at the Clift Hotel, and Jack told Biz he knew Ev was behind it all. That this was a coup by Ev, not the board.

  “You don’t know that,” Biz said.

  Like a wind changing direction, Biz could feel Jack’s tone and demeanor go from pain and sadness to anger and vindictiveness as he heard Jack say: “I’m going to
go in and tell the whole company what happened! I’m going to tell them Ev fucked me and he threw me out of Twitter because he wanted to be in control. I’m going to tell them everything.”

  “No! You can’t do that. This is about Twitter and all the people that work there,” Biz said, sensing the panic in Jack’s voice. “This isn’t about you and Ev. It’s bigger than that.”

  Biz suggested they go for a walk to cool off, hoping to calm Jack down. They strolled around the block a few times. After a while Biz needed to get back to the office, but they agreed that Jack would come in later that afternoon to talk to Ev.

  It was dark outside as Jack sat in the Twitter conference room waiting. He was drained from the day. Ted, the company’s lawyer, had explained that everything had been done by the book. Ev was the majority shareholder. Jack was not.

  Twenty minutes had already gone by as Jack sat there. He was growing angrier by the minute. Biz was at his desk nearby, writing the blog post that would go online the following day announcing Jack’s departure from the company. “Meet Our CEO and Chairman, Again,” the title of the post would read. It would praise Jack for his “artful minimalism and simplicity, combined with great vision and ambition.” And it would say that Jack and Ev had decided to make the switch. That it was the best thing for the company. “We took a good look at our path forward and saw the need for a focused approach from a single leader,” the blog post would say.

  But it wasn’t the focused single leader Jack wanted.

  As Biz wrote an e-mail to the employees telling them to meet for an all-hands meeting the following morning, the door to the conference room where Jack had been waiting opened and Ev finally walked in. “What the fuck!” Jack said, pronouncing the k as if this were the last word he would ever utter. Jack’s adrenaline was pounding.

  “I’m sorry. These things aren’t always easy,” Ev said calmly. He had fired a dozen people before, but never a CEO.

  “No. They’re not fucking easy when you go behind someone’s back to have them thrown out of their own company,” Jack said. “You had the opportunity to tell me exactly what you wanted, to tell me exactly what I was supposed to be doing, but instead you went behind my back!”

  Ev was silent.

  “And I don’t think it’s right, or fair, that you took my stock away,” Jack said. “This is my company; you can’t take my stock away.”

  “We’re not taking your stock away; you haven’t fully vested yet,” Ev said. “You’ve only been a full-time employee for two years, and your stock hasn’t fully vested, so no, we’re not taking anything away. We’re actually giving you more than you deserve.”

  Jack laughed maniacally. “You’re giving me more than I deserve?! Please. You guys are fucking me and you know it.”

  Ev tried again to explain the vesting time frame, but Jack interrupted. “This is my company!” Jack slammed. “I’ve put so much more into it than you have.”

  After Jack railed for a while, Ev calmly responded that it wasn’t Jack’s company.

  The following morning, Friday, Twitter employees shuffled in and grabbed their spots in the lounge, unsure what the announcement might be. Some people sat on the gray sofas in the meeting area, which was designed to look like a living room. A huge flat-screen TV hung on the wall. Others pulled over white office chairs. The company was still small, with just under thirty employees and freelancers.

  Ev was clearly fretful as he stood to the side with a worried-looking Biz. Ev was peering down, his feet shuffling back and forth on the concrete floor, fidgety, as if he were trying to kick away a piece of gum that wasn’t actually there. People could immediately sense something was off.

  A few minutes later Jack arrived, walking out in front of the employees to deliver his brief address. His hands were shaky, his heart pounding. It was clear to everyone he was nervous.

  “The board has decided,” he said, then paused. “And I agree.” Another pause. “That I’m going to step down as CEO.” The last pause. “Ev will take over.”

  The employees were stunned by what they had just heard. Jack went on to talk about how much he would miss everyone. And for the first time he told a story he would repeat for years, that he would still be around, as the “executive chairman,” involved in a larger role at Twitter. He didn’t explain that the chairman title gave him no real power. That he was no longer part of the power base of the company he had cofounded. That he had been fired from his role.

  When he was done, he walked away, past Ev, whose turn it was to walk to the center of the living-room area and greet employees. The two didn’t make eye contact.

  “I know that some of you have felt like the company has sometimes been run like a two-headed monster,” Ev said, now fidgety and anxious too. “Like you didn’t know who to go to with questions, or who was in charge.” He went on to say that the decision was the best thing for the company, that he and Jack agreed. Biz spoke too, trying to quell any concerns employees had.

  Secretly, some of the employees were elated. Although they wouldn’t say anything to Jack, they knew he was in over his head and had been for a long time. And they believed Ev, who had managed and sold Blogger, would be able to provide better leadership for the shaky start-up.

  But two people were clearly distraught: Jeremy and Crystal. Jack was in the kitchen with them as Ev wrapped up his sermon. Crystal was sobbing. After Noah had left a couple of years earlier, he had disappeared as a friend. She worried that the same would happen with Jack.

  Jeremy, normally not one for tears, was choked up too—partially thankful Ev was taking over but deeply disappointed that Jack would no longer be working at the company. They all hugged, and Jack could feel tears welling up in his eyes, but he held them back. He couldn’t cry in front of his employees. That is not what ex-CEOs do.

  When Ev and Biz wrapped up their speeches, they told everyone a blog post would be going up on the site to announce the changes and instructed them not to speak to the press or tweet about it.

  Ev walked over to the kitchen where Crystal and Jeremy were talking to Jack, motioning for Jeremy to come in his direction. “I need you to go and disable all of Rebecca’s accounts,” Ev ordered, as Jeremy stood with a shocked look on his face. “I need you to do it now. Disable her e-mail, login, computer,” Ev repeated. “Everything.” Then he told Rebecca she was fired too.

  Jack looked over at Ev and Jeremy as they spoke outside the kitchen. “I’ll be right back,” Jack said to Crystal. “I have to make a couple of calls before the blog post goes up.”

  As Jack walked out of the kitchen, he looked up at the silver and white clock on the wall, which read 11:59 A.M. He reached into his pocket for his phone, opened up the Twitter application, and tweeted, “Calling my parents.”

  His mother started crying on the phone when she heard that he was stepping down. But Jack convinced his parents that it was his decision, that he agreed it was best for the company. Then he hung up.

  Compared with the next call he had to make, talking to his parents had been easy.

  He turned around to make sure no one was within earshot. Then he opened the address book on his phone, scrolled down past the people’s names that began with the letter J, then past K, then L, and finally arrived at the number he was looking for: Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook. He peered over his shoulder again as Crystal and Ev and others stood talking by the kitchen, then looked back at his phone as he pressed the phone number next to Mark Zuckerberg’s name.

  IV.

  #EV

  The Third Twitter Leader

  Jack sat glaring at Ev, not a word coming out of his mouth, his eyes so steady and precise you’d have thought he was in the middle of a staring contest. Except his opponent, Ev, was trying his best—as difficult as it was—to ignore him.

  “People hear about Twitter a lot but don’t know what it is or why they’d want to use it,” Ev read aloud from his slide deck, periodically glancing as Goldman, Bijan, and Fred, who tried to listen attentivel
y, though they, too, were distracted by Jack’s silence. Still, Ev went on.

  It was October 22, 2008, Ev’s first board meeting as CEO—just three weeks after Jack had been ousted. Ev was explaining that the 2008 elections Web site, which Jack had previously put all of his efforts behind, was the wrong approach for Twitter.

  “On average, it only generated thirty-five thousand page views a day,” Ev said, pointing to a jagged graph to back up his statement. Next to the chart were sample tweets from the site that were more high-school jokes than intellectual punditry: “Palin is a S.M.I.L.F.,” one read, as Ev noted that a S.M.I.L.F. was a “sexy mom I’d like to fuck.”

  Then Ev moved on to more important matters, patiently going through the agenda: venture debt, finances, burn rates, hiring plans, revenue (which was still at zero), spam, and how to reduce Twitter’s now infamous downtime. It was clear to everyone in the room that there was now an experienced CEO running the company, one who had a plan to fix all of the above.

  Although some employees had been sad to see Jack go as a friend, they were relieved they no longer had to report to him as a boss. In the months leading up to Jack’s departure, employees had complained to senior staffers that Jack had acted like a “cowboy” when he was CEO, sometimes ordering people around and rarely trusting those who worked below him. When Ev stepped up to take charge of the company, he took a completely different approach to management, always trusting employees from the get-go, which gave them a sense of pride and, in turn, a loyalty to Ev and Twitter.

  Jack’s stare was interrupted when the following words came out of Ev’s mouth: “Mark Zuckerberg” and “Facebook.”

  In the weeks leading up to Jack’s firing, Facebook had been trying to buy Twitter. Mark had made it his personal mission to woo Jack into selling the little blue bird to Facebook. After Jack was let go, it was the two other Twitter cofounders who now needed romancing.