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

by Nick Bilton

  To Jack it didn’t matter that Kutcher was lauding Twitter as the “front door to the Internet.” Or that Time called Twitter “a stage for humanity and connection.” Or that more than two trillion tweets had now been sent across the site since his first update. What mattered was that Jack Dorsey wasn’t mentioned more in the Time article. He wasn’t compared with the inventor of the telephone or the creator of Morse code or the genius behind the television.

  Biz and Ev had called Jack into Twitter’s office to talk through the confusion that had arisen surrounding the Time 100. Jack was starting to complain vocally to people involved with Twitter about the press supercell that had formed around the company and the lack of attention on him.

  It was rare for Ev to grow visibly annoyed with anyone. Even as the company he was running grew, he still despised confrontation and tried to avoid it at any cost. But he also had a breaking point, and Jack, who had been in a one-man media frenzy, was starting to infuriate Ev. The board had concerns as well, and began noticing that Jack often gave commentary on topics he didn’t know much about, including internal developments he was not apprised of, as he technically didn’t work for Twitter. Biz was starting to grow frustrated too, as Jack would often tell people in these interviews that he was the “inventor” of Twitter; the sole creator of an idea that actually had many creators.

  Twitter’s offices were being expanded when Jack arrived for the meeting. The trio decided to talk in private—away from the prying eyes of employees with Twitter accounts—and they walked into one of the conference rooms, which was now under construction.

  As they sat at a long square table, Ev told Jack he had to “chill out” with the deluge of media he was doing. “It’s bad for the company,” Ev said. “It’s sending the wrong message.” Biz sat between them, watching like a spectator at a tennis match. Then Ev told Jack to amend his Twitter bio, which stated that Jack was the founder and inventor of Twitter.

  “But I invented Twitter,” Jack said.

  “No, you didn’t invent Twitter,” Ev replied. “I didn’t invent Twitter either. Neither did Biz. People don’t invent things on the Internet. They simply expand on an idea that already exists.” Biz nodded in agreement with what Ev had just said, and also offered a similar commentary.

  Ev told Jack that he had not worked at the company for more than seven months and that what Jack had envisioned Twitter to be—a status-updating service—was not what Twitter had become. He reminded him that the Jack Vision of the company had always been about status, about “What are you doing?” whereas Ev’s vision had been more akin to blogging, about “What’s happening?” To Jack it was about telling stories about yourself—about Jack. To Ev, Twitter was about telling stories about other people.

  Twitter had continued to evolve in a way that none of them could have predicted. The early discussions about the service being used to share a person’s status had started to become eclipsed by Twitter’s role as a twenty-four-hour news service and a network to share what media outlets were reporting. Or, more important, for people to report what they were seeing in real life. The press pass and the a title of “journalist” had been replaced by a smart phone and a Twitter account.

  But Jack couldn’t see past his feelings to grasp Ev’s reasoning. He believed he had been pushed out in a coup over power and influence. If he wanted to tell people he invented Twitter, he would. And the bigger it became, the more he hungered to be back on the throne as its rightful owner.

  Seated at dinner with the one hundred most influential people in the world, Jack couldn’t get past the fact that Ev was being introduced as the CEO of Twitter, not Jack. That Ev was sitting at table 2, not Jack. That Ev was a few feet from the First Lady of the United States of America, who was speaking into a microphone on the stage, talking about innovation and entrepreneurship as she looked directly at Ev, not Jack.

  Ev.

  Not Jack.

  Iranian Revolution

  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton waited patiently for Alec Ross, her senior adviser on innovation, to finish drawing in his notepad.

  She was sitting on a robin’s-egg-blue silk couch in her outer office at the State Department. A large crystal chandelier hung motionless from the ceiling, overlooking the group of government officials below. Ornate white molding framed every aspect of the room: doors, windows, and the faux-candle lights that protruded from the walls.

  After drawing a number of shapes on the page, Ross stopped his pen’s erratic motion and paused to take in his masterpiece. He gave himself a slight nod of approval, smirked, then handed the page to Secretary Clinton.

  If someone had barged into the room at that moment, they might have believed the group was in the middle of a game of Pictionary with the highest-ranking diplomat in the United States. But of course they weren’t.

  There was a momentary stillness in the room as Clinton studied the page. The scene could have been straight from an old painting hanging in the National Gallery of Art a few blocks away. Seeing such a scene without knowing the people in the room, one would would have had a hard time determining what era it was from. Although the group surrounding Clinton were all tech and innovation advisers, there were no cell phones out on the oval oak coffee table sitting like a fire pit in front of them. No laptops or iPads, either. Just a single coffee-table book and small, decorative beige bowl.

  Every single gadget belonging to the group sat about forty feet away, sleeping behind the “crash doors” of the secretary of state’s office. All forms of technology, with the exception of paper, are strictly forbidden inside any high-level Top Secret Sensitive Compartmentalized Information, or TS/SCI area, to ensure that no one can record a sensitive conversation or snap pictures of a top-secret document.

  This was why Ross was drawing Twitter on a piece of paper, explaining to Secretary Clinton, in the abstract, how it worked.

  “So people type what they want to say into a box,” Ross explained, pointing to the top of the page as he scooted his chair forward on the large blue and peach oriental rug beneath him. “They can then send the tweet pressing this button,” he said, pointing to the right of the page, “and then it’s distributed to their followers, who can then reshare it with the people who follow them.” He paused midsentence, realizing that he would now need to explain the concept of “following” to Clinton.

  He looked over at the other State Department officials, including Anne-Marie Slaughter, director of policy planning at State, who had been summoned to a private meeting with Clinton to explain how Twitter worked.

  As they continued explaining the importance of the service, Slaughter jumped in. “A seventeen-year-old with a smart phone can now do what it used to take an entire CNN crew to do,” she said. “It’s bringing transparency to opaque places.”

  Ross, who was thirty-eight years old at the time, had thick, brown, wavy hair and a boyish demeanor that made him look like a teenager. During his first year at State, he had been nicknamed the Obama Guy after he was hired from the Obama campaign, where just a year earlier he had helped the current president beat Hillary Clinton in the democratic primaries. One of the tools in his arsenal had been the same technology he was now explaining to her: Twitter.

  “It’s allowing us to see inside places like Syria and Iran, places where the media can’t go,” Ross said.

  The meeting was taking place now because of something that had happened a few days earlier.

  On June 12, 2009, Biz had noticed a few green Twitter avatars fall into his feed that looked slightly alien, like colored sprinkles landing on vanilla ice cream. Ev saw them too, then Goldman and other Twitter employees. But at the time, no one knew what they meant. That was, until Twitter engineers started noticing spikes in the amount of activity coming from Iran.

  A few hours later news reports, some citing Twitter, began surfacing that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, had announced that he had won the majority vote in the Iranian presidential election. But accusations w
ere being whispered around the country that Ahmadinejad had rigged the election. Hours after the vote was announced, Iran’s opposition candidates took to Twitter and Facebook to voice their disapproval, and small pockets of protest began in the streets. By the following day, as information spread on Twitter, the protests had grown to dozens of major cities across Iran. Seas of people wearing green bandanas and waving green flags, which reflected the color of the losing opposition party, took to the streets demanding a recount.

  Although Ahmadinejad dismissed the protests, equating them to “passions after a soccer match,” he cut off text messaging, Facebook, Twitter, and a variety of other forms of communication in the country, hoping to quell the protests. But the tech-savvy Iranian youth began using work-around Web sites to one-up the government, continuing to get information out to the rest of the world with Twitter and other social tools.

  “#iranelection,” “#iran,” “#stopahmadi,” and a long list of other Iran-related hashtags became the top-trending topics on Twitter. People shared videos of protesters being beaten, attacked, and sometimes shot by Iranian government forces. Before long those sporadic green avatars started to meld together, and Twitter streams soon looked like the Chicago River on Saint Patrick’s Day.

  As real-time news percolated out of Iran, America was mounting its own protest on Twitter.

  The hashtag “#CNNFail” quickly started to rise through Twitter. Instead of reporting on the violent protest in Iran, CNN had been reporting the “news” that seminude photos of Miss California had surfaced online. But as Ashton Kutcher had demonstrated two months earlier, with the rise of social-media sites like Twitter, CNN was increasingly becoming irrelevant.

  In recent months, governments around the globe had started to monitor the site, making Twitter a panopticon that was now being watched from every corner of the planet. The White House, Ten Downing Street, the Kremlin; scholars, activists, and dictators; the CIA, the FBI, and the State Department were all watching, collecting information about the protests in Iran, and using Twitter as one of their tools to get a better understanding of what was happening on the ground there.

  So in mid-June, when a junior State Department employee called an “Iran watcher,” whose job it was to compile memorandums about the goings-on in the country, noticed that Twitter was going to be down for “scheduled maintenance,” that fact was included in a report.

  When Jared Cohen, just back from Iraq, noticed the addendum that Twitter would be off-line, he e-mailed Jack. On the trip to the Middle East, Jack confided in Cohen that there was trouble at Twitter between the cofounders, but Cohen believed Jack could help persuade Biz and Ev to hold off the maintenance.

  Cohen explained that there was a large protest planned in Iran at the same time the site was scheduled to go down for maintenance. He asked if they could postpone the upkeep. “This could literally make the difference in terms of what happens in that country,” Cohen wrote in the e-mail.

  As Jack passed the message along to Biz, another e-mail, which included Cohen, came through from the State Department, adding pressure to the moment: “There is quite literally a Twitter Revolution going on in Iran right now!”

  It wasn’t the first e-mail Biz had received on the matter. The company had been inundated with messages from dozens of people who had noticed the scheduled maintenance outage and knew about or were involved with the Iranian revolts. Biz, Ev, and Goldman called a meeting to figure out what to do. Although the site’s scheduled maintenance was critical, and failing to do it in the coming days could potentially decimate Twitter’s servers, the consensus was to delay the site closure. Biz grabbed Goldman to help him write the blog post announcing the decision.

  “We’re clearly not smart enough to understand Iranian politics,” Biz said to Goldman as they sat in a quiet conference room together trying to figure out what to write. “We don’t know who the good guys are or who the bad guys are.” Biz paused and then joked: “Wait, are there any good guys?” Goldman laughed.

  For a moment they both sat there silently in the conference room, trying to digest what was happening, what they were doing: writing a blog post to notify the world that a maintenance upgrade for Twitter, a technology they had both helped pioneer, a technology that just three years earlier people had used to say when they were going to the toilet or to figure out where to get free beer at a party, was now being used in the streets of Tehran to try to overthrow a government.

  It was a testament to the resilience of humanity. Give a man a tree and he will make it into a boat; give him a leaf and he will curve it into a cup and drink water from it; give him a rock and he will make a weapon to protect himself and his family. Give a man a small box and a limit of 140 characters to type into it, and he will adapt it to fight an oppressive dictatorship in the Middle East.

  Biz interrupted the silence, noting that he wanted to ensure that Twitter remained completely impartial in the Iranian revolution. “I want to be sure that Twitter is not in the story,” he said as they began writing again. “We are not standing with, or against, the protesters. We just love this use of Twitter.”

  At 4:15 P.M., Biz published to the company Web site the blog post announcing that the downtime had been rescheduled. “A critical network upgrade must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter,” the post said. “However, our network partners … recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran. Tonight’s planned maintenance has been rescheduled to tomorrow between 2-3p PST (1:30a in Iran).”

  He added, trying to distill Twitter’s involvement: “Our partners are taking a huge risk not just for Twitter but also the other services they support worldwide—we commend them for being flexible in what is essentially an inflexible situation.”

  Biz’s plan backfired. The story went global, with Twitter and its involvement appearing on the front page of newspapers around the globe.

  Mark Landler, the New York Times diplomatic correspondent who broke the story, noted that although “the Obama administration says it has tried to avoid words or deeds that could be portrayed as American meddling in Iran’s presidential election,” it looked like it just had meddled.

  “On Monday afternoon, a 27-year-old State Department official, Jared Cohen, e-mailed the social-networking site Twitter with an unusual request: delay scheduled maintenance of its global network,” wrote Landler, who had heard about the delay through sources at State, “which would have cut off service while Iranians were using Twitter to swap information and inform the outside world about the mushrooming protests around Tehran.”

  And the media storm continued.

  “I wouldn’t know a Twitter from a tweeter,” Secretary Clinton had said at a news conference as the protests had begun. “The United States believes passionately and strongly in the basic principle of free expression,” Clinton said as she stood at a podium surrounded by dozens of TV cameras and news reporters. “And it is the case that one of the means of expression, the use of Twitter, is a very important one, not only to the Iranian people but now increasingly to people around the world, and most particularly young people.”

  After the New York Times article, people behind the scenes were not happy: the White House, the State Department, and, of course, Twitter.

  At the State Department, Cohen’s name was being tossed around with the word “fired.” When he showed up for a prescheduled meeting with his counterparts at the White House, he looked as if he were suffering from a rogue flu. “What the fuck did you do?” a friend who worked at the White House asked him. “And you look like shit.”

  Cohen returned to the State Department and was told to wait at his desk until his fate was decided. Clinton argued to the president’s senior staffers, who wanted Cohen and anyone involved in the Twitter incident publicly fired, that they were just doing their jobs and this was all part of the changing cultural fabric, with Twitter woven right into the middle of it. The next day, during a morning meeting, Clinton wal
ked up to where Cohen was sitting, dropped the New York Times on his table, and sternly pointed to the article. “This is great,” she said, her finger thudding against the newspaper. “This exactly what we should be doing.”

  But one person who didn’t have a full-time job was not being treated so kindly. Jack. The New York Times article had mentioned Jack’s name as the person who had agreed to pause the site’s downtime, even though he wasn’t an employee at Twitter. Although it wasn’t Jack’s fault that he was perceived as taking credit this time, it didn’t matter to Ev, Biz, and Goldman, who were dismayed when they read his name in the article.

  Biz and Ev had spent days turning down press interviews about the situation in Iran, telling media outlets that they didn’t think it was “appropriate” for Twitter to get involved in such a volatile political situation, especially one where protesters were being attacked by their government.

  Now it seemed Twitter had been seen as picking a side in an international war of words. It had been seen on one side of a moral and diplomatic fence—exactly the last place it wanted to be.

  The Accidental Billionaire

  I bet he tries to buy us,” Goldman said to Alexander Macgillivray, who had recently joined the company as its general counsel. Ev looked at them both as he took another bite of his sandwich at Charlie’s Restaurant in Palo Alto.

  “No way,” said Macgillivray, who was nicknamed Amac, which sounded like someone saying “Hey! Mac!” when they called him. “Not after what he just did; there’s no way they’ll try to buy us.”

  “I agree with Amac,” Ev said. “Come on, that would be totally awkward.”

  “No. He will,” Goldman said. “What do you want to bet, Amac? Come on. Let’s bet.”

  Goldman, Ev, and Amac had a relationship that stretched back to 2003, when Google had purchased Blogger. At the time, Amac had been a deputy general counsel at Google, and he had become the new blogging team’s go-to lawyer at the company. At Twitter he had been thrown in headfirst.