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

by Nick Bilton

  It might not have seemed like reality, but it was, and it was all set to take place over the next twelve hours.

  Ev’s anxiety had started with the flap of a single butterfly wing a few days earlier. Twitter had received a relatively standard e-mail from The Oprah Winfrey Show with a simple request: Could the company set up a quick call to chat about mentioning Twitter on the show?

  Kutcher and CNN were very publicly racing each other to the one-million-follower mark, and as a result, Oprah had started asking more about what this Twitter thing was. Ev and a small group of employees gathered in a conference room, huddled around the speakerphone to hear from Oprah’s producers.

  “We’re going to have Oprah send her first tweet on the show,” the voice crackled out of the speakerphone. Everyone in the room looked around, smiling. “And we’re thinking of making Twitter the feature segment of the show,” the voice said. The smiles around the Twitter office started to fade slightly.

  Twitter was once again unquenchable, each day slurping up tens of thousands of new users, all of whom were helping to feed an unstoppable organism. As a result, the site’s servers were being pushed to their limits again. The engineering team was exhausted, with some employees working twenty or more hours a day to keep the site alive. Twitter could barely handle a mere mention on the massively popular Oprah Winfrey Show, which garnered anywhere between 26 million and 42 million viewers a week. For better or worse, Oprah represented the mainstream of the mainstream, and her fans could quickly turn into a tsunami of sign-ups that Twitter simply couldn’t handle.

  The voice on the speakerphone continued: “We’re going to have Ashton Kutcher on the show to talk about his race with CNN.” More worry crept over people’s faces in the Twitter conference room. “And Oprah wants to do this segment for our Friday-morning show, which is live and our biggest audience.” That was only two days away. “It would be really helpful if someone from Twitter could come out here and work with our people, just in case something goes wrong,” Oprah’s producers continued. “Would that be possible?”

  “Of course,” Ev said as he leaned closer to the phone. “We can send one of our engineers out there.”

  “Great,” the voice on the line said, then paused and asked Ev, “Wait, who are you and what is your job?”

  Ev leaned back into the phone and nonchalantly answered, “I’m the cofounder and CEO.”

  “Well, can you come out, then?” the producer asked.

  He paused, looking around the room as he shrugged his shoulders. “Sure,” he said. “Is it possible for me to get a ticket for my wife, Sara, to come so we can both sit in the audience?”

  The producers said it was as the call ended and Ev looked around at the faces in the room.

  “What are we going to do?” an assistant asked Ev.

  “There’s not much we can do. We have to make sure the site stays up,” he replied with a smile. “I mean, it’s fucking Oprah!”

  Wednesday quickly turned into a series of internal meetings about how to make sure Twitter didn’t collapse under the weight of Oprah’s stardom. To ensure everything worked live on national television, Twitter engineers decide to create the Oprah Server: a computer server completely dedicated to Oprah, her own special Twitter, which would guarantee that even if the site went down during the live-television extravaganza, Oprah’s account would not.

  Ev’s assistant immediately sprang into action, booking flights and hotels. The itinerary noted that Ev would fly out on Thursday at lunchtime and go to the show on Friday morning. Although he would sit in the audience, he would be there to help Oprah’s producers if they had questions as the queen of daytime television strolled through the valley of social media.

  The plan was starting to come together. And then, on Thursday morning just after seven o’clock, as Ev and Sara were getting ready for the flight to Chicago, packing clothes, Ev’s cell phone rang with a Chicago number. “Ev speaking,” he said, unsure who was calling so early.

  “Hello, Evan,” said a woman who introduced herself as one of the producers from The Oprah Winfrey Show he had spoken with earlier in the week. “We’ve had a bit of a change of plan,” she said. “We’ve decided we want you on the show with Oprah tomorrow.” The butterfly wing had just turned into a hurricane.

  The producer explained that Ev would be interviewed by Oprah—in front of seven million viewers—and that Ashton Kutcher would be patched in via Skype videoconference from California. This would all follow Oprah sending her first tweet on live television.

  Ev hung up the phone, his face white.

  “Who was that?” Sara asked.

  “Holy shit, I’m going to be on Oprah tomorrow,” he said, petrified and excited. After e-mailing the team to tell them about the change of plan, he tweeted, “Tomorrow just became a very big day. (Sorry for the teaser—more later.)”

  As the Oprah preparations were being put in place, Twitter was still scrambling to handle the sign-ups from Ashton Kutcher’s race with CNN. Each time they secured more servers, the traffic spiked. And it was only about to get worse.

  Larry King posted a video online taunting Kutcher. “Are you putting me on? Are you kidding?” King said to the camera. “Do you think you can take on an entire network?” This led to more sign-ups. Kutcher recruited his famous friends, like Shaquille O’Neal and P. Diddy, to help spread the word. Still more sign-ups. And now here they were, as Ev and Sara watched from Chicago, just minutes away from determining the first Twitter account to reach a million followers.

  At Twitter’s offices in San Francisco, engineers monitored the site as people kept signing up, following either Kutcher or CNN. On top of that, Anonymous, the troublemaking hacker collective, had written programs creating fake accounts to try to beat both Kutcher and CNN to one million followers—creating even more traffic.

  Then, at 11:12 A.M. Chicago time, the verdict came in. As Anderson Cooper almost begged viewers to follow CNN’s account, Ashton Kutcher was sitting in his office at home wearing a white cowboy hat, surrounded by friends and other celebrities as he stared into his computer, watching his follower count swell.

  “This is bigger than the American Idol finale!” his wife, Demi Moore, said as she peered over Kutcher’s shoulder. “Fifteen people to go!” he cried out, then seconds later there was an eruption of cheers as he officially passed CNN. Kutcher screamed with excitement as he popped a bottle of champagne and the half-dozen people in the room started pouring bubbles into cups. P. Diddy, who was on speakerphone, screamed, “Congratulations! Save me a glass, baby!” CNN admitted defeat as Kutcher tweeted: “Victory is ours!!!!!!!!”

  On Friday morning Ev awoke feeling groggy from sleeping only a couple of hours. Ashton and anxiety had kept him from any real rest.

  As soon as they arrived at the Oprah studio, a few hours from broadcast, everything became a blur. Makeup, producers running around, voice-level tests, televisions, audience members filing in. As he walked out onto the set to sit in the audience and later get called up to the stage to join Oprah, Ev asked to quickly use the restroom and tripped, falling flat on his face as he ran off in the direction of the toilet.

  Ev didn’t have much time to recover from his fall. Before he knew it, he was called up to sit next to Oprah, who wore a pink blazer, as giant, boxy cameras pointed at him from every angle. Hundreds of women sat in bleachers surrounding him, and Sara smiled at him from the audience. Then a voice announced, “And, we’re on in five, four, three …”

  “Hi, it’s Friday Live and I’m on Twitter for the first time,” Oprah said cheerfully. Ev’s adrenaline was swirling as the cameras began to dance around the set like practiced ballerinas.

  Oprah gave her speech about Twitter, described her conversation with her doorman that morning about the site, and then jumped in, asking a very nervous Ev a series of questions.

  “How’d it come to light?” Oprah asked.

  “My cofounders, Biz and Jack, are supergeniuses,” Ev said. He explained to
Oprah the difference between blogging and Twitter and said that the site made it possible to disseminate information in seconds. It’s so fast, he said, that city fire and police departments are using it to publicize time-sensitive information. As Ev spoke, Oprah could see he was nervous. Ever the pro, she reached across the table and grabbed his hand, which helped calm his nerves.

  Yet Ev’s adrenaline was about to spike again. He had been warned more than a dozen times by Oprah’s staff that the queen of television was completely inept with technology. To ensure she couldn’t mess up her first tweet, the staff had set up a laptop with colored stickers that Oprah was instructed to press after typing her first 140-character missive. It was paint by numbers for a clumsy computer user.

  The live-television plan had been meticulously set in place. Oprah would write a tweet, then send it; the show would cut to commercial. As advertisements filled the screen, Oprah was then instructed to “press the button on the keyboard with a yellow sticker” which would load tweets from all her friends, including George Stephanopoulos, Ellen DeGeneres, Shaquille O’Neal, Demi Moore, and others, who had all been told by producers to reply to Oprah, welcoming her to the site.

  But instead Oprah pressed the caps-lock button first, then began typing: “HI TWITTERS. THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21ST CENTURY.” Then, rather than hit “send” on Twitter, she accidentally pressed the key with the yellow piece of tape on it. This reset the screen and erased her first tweet. Cut to commercial. Oprah hadn’t actually tweeted. Ev saw this and his throat tightened; he quickly pushed Oprah aside and grabbed the keyboard, frantically typing the same exact tweet in all caps and hitting “send,” his heart pounding as he heard the cameraman yell: “And we’re back in five, four, three …”

  At one point in the show Kutcher appeared on the screen, sitting in the same office he had been in a few hours earlier when he beat CNN to a million followers. “Congratulations!” Oprah said to him. “This is a commentary on the state of media,” Kutcher said to Oprah and the audience. “I believe that we’re at a place now with social media where one person’s voice can be as powerful as a media network. That is the power of the social Web.” He went on to explain that Twitter allowed him to control the type of images and videos that were shared about him online, specifically beating the paparazzi: He could now usurp the Us Weeklys of the world by posting pictures he had preapproved before the tabloids could.

  As the show went on, Oprah’s viewers started signing up for the site in droves. From Chicago to Clearwater, Modesto to Miami, Seattle to Statesboro, more people joined Twitter on that day than on any single day in the site’s history—nearly half a million people in the first twenty-four hours—and although the servers were battered, they managed to survive.

  After the show concluded, Ev and Sara went to the Oprah store to purchase bibs for Miles, a baby boy they were expecting Sara to give birth to in the next couple of months.

  Later Ev wrote an e-mail to the staff with the title “Holy cow.” He continued: “Just going to bed here in Chicago. Am going to get about 4 hrs sleep,” effusing about how proud he was of the thirty-five-person staff that had kept the site alive through the influx of users. “What a week for Twitter! Thanks for everyone’s hard work.”

  Ev was glowing with pride. But not everyone was happy.

  Although Kutcher had pronounced that anyone could be as powerful as a media company, there was one person whose tweets had faded into insignificance, one person who had happened upon the Oprah show and seen his former friend and coworker, Ev, on live television.

  Noah.

  Noah had watched in disbelief as he realized he’d been completely erased from the Twitter story. He tweeted: “Watching him on TV, I wondered how I became so invisible, so absent mise-en-scene. No fingerprints at all.”

  In the past, history was always written by the victors. But in the age of Twitter, history is written by everyone. The victors become the ones with the loudest voices who get to tell their version of history.

  Ev hadn’t been intentionally writing Noah out of the story. He had always been intent on trying to give credit where it was due in the creation of Twitter, thanking employees at award ceremonies like the Crunchies and talking about Jack and Biz’s role in interviews. Ev honestly believed Twitter was a different company from the days when Noah had helped form it.

  But Jack had never been forthright about the amount of collaboration that had gone on between him and Noah as they were hatching Twitter together.

  As Jack watched Oprah, he was apoplectic that Jack wasn’t the one appearing on the show. He would later voice a now familiar concern to Biz, “I’m being written out of history!”

  “No, you’re not,” Biz told Jack. “Ev talked about you on the show. He called us geniuses!”

  But it didn’t matter what Ev said. Or Biz. Jack felt he was being erased. And unlike Noah, who had faded into obscurity after being kicked out of the company, Jack had bigger plans.

  Spiraling into Iraq

  The C-130 transport plane roared on the Tarmac, its propellers ferociously slicing through the arid Middle Eastern air. Even from where he stood, several hundred feet away, Jack could see the plane was a behemoth. Next to the other aircraft on the runway it looked like a giant blue whale resting among a pool of goldfish.

  Army trucks and jeeps sporadically surrounded the plane and were, in turn, surrounded by American soldiers huddled in their fatigues, guns and large green duffel bags by their sides. The scene looked strangely like toys left on the bedroom floor of an imaginative boy.

  Jack watched through dark sunglasses as the bright sun penetrated the massive windows of the lounge area in the Queen Alia International Airport in Amman, Jordan. Waiting to board the plane gave him a nervousness he hadn’t felt in a while, and it diverted his attention from Ev’s appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show just three days earlier. Now he was obsessing about something else: Iraq, where he would be in a few hours.

  As he tried to calm his nerves, there was a tap on his shoulder. Turning, he saw Jared Cohen, the State Department liaison who was responsible for the trip Jack was about to embark on.

  “Did you see the article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal today?” Cohen asked him.

  “No, what article?”

  “It’s about Twitter,” Cohen said, already walking away to talk to someone else. “Look it up. It’s called ‘The Twitter Revolution.’” Jack pulled his iPhone out of his pocket and searched for the story, landing on the Wall Street Journal Web site a few seconds later.

  Cohen looked like an actor in a low-budget spy movie, which was fitting considering he worked for the U.S. State Department. He had dark, messy hair and smooth skin. Even though he was large and lean, his suits always seemed to hang off his shoulders a little more than they should. His tie, always undone just a hair and pulled slightly in one direction, imparted a sense of constant busyness. And busy he was.

  Cohen had joined “State,” as it was called by insiders, under Condoleezza Rice in late 2006. He was just twenty-five years old at the time but came with a résumé more impressive than those of most people twice his age. He had highfalutin degrees from Stanford and Oxford universities; he was fluent in Swahili and Arabic; and he had written two books: one on genocide in Rwanda, the other on silent revolutions and Muslim youth in Iran and Syria.

  When Hillary Clinton had become the Obama administration’s new secretary of state, she had given Cohen—and his boss, Alec Ross, another young State official—the authority to promote diplomacy with the new technologies available to everyday citizens. In other words, they had a License to Social Media.

  One of Ross’s and Cohen’s boldest ideas was to take an entourage of highly influential tech denizens, including people from Google, YouTube, Meetup, Howcast, AT&T, and, of course, Twitter, to war-torn Iraq. The hope was that they could offer input on how to rebuild the decaying country with technology and cell phones rather than bricks and cement.

&n
bsp; Cohen had explained the objective during the group’s stopover in Amman. They’d be meeting with both the president and the prime minister of Iraq. He had reminded them to wear suits for the flight to Iraq so the group could go directly to some meetings when they landed.

  Now here they were, five hundred miles from entering a war zone.

  Ev had been invited on the trip, but he was too busy to attend, as were Biz and Goldman. At first they had planned to decline the invitation, but they reasoned that Jack could go if he wanted to; what harm could he cause in Iraq? And now here he was, standing in the airport in Jordan, nearing the end of reading the Wall Street Journal article. Cohen soon announced that it was time to board the plane.

  They crossed the hot Tarmac and received protective army gear at a staging area. They then shuffled into the C-130, immediately noticing there were no windows. Everyone was strapped securely into red mesh seats, army helmets fixed on their heads, bulletproof flak jackets wrapped around their torsos. Jack, sitting close to Cohen and Scott Heiferman, the founder of Meetup, looked to the rear of the plane, where army personnel sat holding machine guns, clearly heading to Iraq for different reasons.

  For the tech delegation it was a difficult scene to comprehend. The dark, round hull of the military plane exposed its metal innards—except for an American flag that hung from the ceiling, proudly proclaiming which team its passengers were on. The heat inside the plane made the scene even more unnerving. There would be no peanuts on this flight.

  A ripple of fear and excitement undulated across the group as the plane began the long, steady climb to twenty-eight thousand feet. As Jack sat dripping sweat, he wasn’t thinking about the fact that he would soon be meeting with the Iraqi president. Instead he was obsessing about the last line of the Wall Street Journal article he had read on the ground in Jordan.

  The piece had been a profile of Twitter and, as the subtitle suggested, “the brains behind the Web’s hottest networking tool.” But it wasn’t the title or subtitle of the article that vexed him. Or the illustration of Biz and Ev, sans Jack. Or the mere mention of Jack’s involvement in Twitter. It was, instead, the last line that sent a now-familiar anger through his veins.