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

by Nick Bilton

  The call ended, and Bijan hung up the phone, relieved that he had held off the switch from one CEO to another. Ev and Jack opened their respective conference-room doors simultaneously, paused briefly as they looked at each other as in a dramatic romantic-comedy scene, then walked briskly across the concrete floor in the same direction to sit awkwardly and silently across from each other.

  In addition to creating the Radiohead room, Ev and Jack had agreed to sit in the same place in the new office. Their desks butted up against each other, back to back, like conjoined twins. As they shuffled into their seats after the call, their frustrated scowls were obscured by two large monitors that stood on the desks like sandbags piled high on a battlefield to hinder enemy fire.

  Although the call with Bijan had stopped his execution, Jack now knew there were larger forces at work than just Ev. He sat, playing the things Bijan had said over in his head and trying desperately to figure out what was going on. Words like “yet” and “not now” spun in circles but didn’t offer clues to the future.

  It was a week later that Fred and Bijan flew out to Twitter HQ. The plan all along had been to fire or demote Jack and put Ev in as CEO. But when it came time to pull the trigger, Biz protected him, temporarily. So Bijan and Fred were left with no other option but to keep Jack in his current role. They sat him down and gave him an ultimatum. “You’ve got three months,” they told him. “Three months to fix things and take control of the company.”

  Of course, they knew Jack couldn’t fix anything in three months, or three years. He was incapable of running the company. It was like watching somebody try to build sand castles underwater.

  The two investors flew back to New York and Boston and started organizing a way to remove Jack, sending e-mails back and forth discussing a possible new job for him at the company. It was then that Bijan made his heinous error.

  First thing in the morning, his coffee cup still full next to his computer, and weary from a night without much sleep, Bijan accidentally pressed the “reply to all” button on his computer instead of replying just to Fred.

  “I believe Jack would take a ‘passive’ chairman role,” Bijan wrote. “It would then really be up to Ev to decide if he could live with Jack’s new title.” He hit “send” before he realized what he had done.

  Seconds later, he looked up at the exchange and uttered a word he was about to write eighteen times in an e-mail that he then sent to Fred: “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”

  He then quickly rattled off the e-mail to Jack: “Please call me when you get this message. Out of context this could be really confusing.”

  But it was too late. Jack knew what was about to happen.

  Building Sand Castles Underwater

  The summer of 2008 was coming to a close, the seasons changing as August rolled into September and Jack’s three-month reprieve began.

  Although Jack had spoken to Bijan after the accidental e-mail, he believed he could somehow save himself from being thrust out of the company. So he immediately went into panic mode and held a meeting with Twitter’s leadership team to announce his battle plan.

  “Before we start, I want to take a moment to address the events of last week,” Jack said. “For me, it was a wake-up call.” He took responsibility for the problems at Twitter, admitting that there was a lack of strong leadership. He also laid some of the blame on Ev and Goldman, noting that he needed to execute his own vision for the company, not theirs. And he admitted that Twitter needed to “think bigger,” as Ev had been saying since day one.

  But Jack’s idea of thinking big wasn’t to fix Twitter’s endless thirty-hour-long outages. It wasn’t to resolve the bank-robbery-size SMS bills. It was, as Jack outlined in an e-mail to Fred and Bijan, to “be at the forefront of this historic 2008 Presidential elections [sic].”

  “As we’ve been pointing out consistently in the past, events, massively shared and immediate experiences, capture the essence and engagement of what Twitter has to offer the world,” Jack wrote to the board. “And the biggest shared event we can plan for already has traction with our users, is right under our noses, will deliver us to mainstream usage, and is rapidly approaching.” Then, beating the rallying drum, he announced: “Twitter will be at the forefront of this historic 2008 Presidential elections [sic]. Whether we do anything or not, it’s going to be huge for us. Imagine how big it could be if we fully embraced it as a company?”

  As they read, none of the team members were in support of this idea. Fred: This won’t solve our problems! Bijan: Oh, Jack. Ev: WTF! Goldman: What the hell is he thinking?

  Blogger had been down this road before. Four years earlier Goldman had set out to the Democratic National Convention in Boston to try to persuade the media and attendees to blog. There he had seen firsthand that if people were going to use these new technologies, they did it of their own accord, not because a company willed them to.

  Goldman remembered the 2004 election vividly. He had hopped on the phone with Noah, who was in California, and explained the scene in Boston, recording a podcast that described the apocalyptic setting with thousands of Boston police and protestors.

  As the 2008 presidential election approached, people were no longer talking about podcasts or blogs. A new word had obliterated the vernacular of politics and media: “Twitter.”

  Outside, protesters were using the service to organize massive demonstrations against the police. Inside, a young senator from Illinois named Barack Obama was using Twitter to try to disrupt politics and grassroots campaigning and, he hoped, win the election. And the media, including the Huffington Post, had set up Twitter accounts to update live snippets from the 2008 conventions.

  The reality was, Twitter didn’t need to do anything to ensure that it kept growing. It was already on its way to becoming a “personal newswire,” as Biz explained it.

  Twitter continued to compress time, often reporting news more quickly than news outlets that had been in the business for more than a century. As more people joined the service, it moved even faster. During the 2008 conventions, the 1.4 million people who were actively using Twitter sent more than 365,000 tweets from both the Republican and Democratic conventions. Such numbers showed that the elections were important, Ev agreed, but they weren’t more important than growing the tiny team of twenty-two employees and getting the site working properly.

  Like rolling blackouts in a country already starved of electricity, the site had continued to go off-line daily. The Fail Whale took over the site almost hourly. Some outages lasted a few minutes, others more than a day. The fire hose, the name given to the stream of all the tweets coming through the service for third-party applications, would often turn off.

  As Jack got to work designing a dedicated elections page, Ev said nothing, waiting for Jack to fail. And it didn’t take long.

  At the next board meeting, after going through the slides announcing the number of new sign-ups, Fred and Bijan asked Greg Pass, who was now running engineering and operations, to present a plan for how to fix Twitter’s outages. It was an altogether impossible task, like asking a mechanic to figure out how to replace the engine of a moving car filled with 1.4 million passengers.

  The sun shone brightly through the conference-room window when Greg walked in. He sat down slowly, methodically, like a doctor about to deliver bad news to a patient.

  Greg began by explaining that he had built software to detect what was wrong with the site, to find out why it continued to go off-line. As he opened his laptop and began talking, Jack sat silently. Ev too. They had both been warned by Greg what he was about to say to Fred and Bijan.

  “We have a bit of a problem,” Greg began. While he had been running tests on the site, he had discovered that there was no backup of Twitter. “If the database goes down right now, we would lose everything,” Greg said awkwardly. Every tweet, every user, everything. Gone.

  “You’re fucking kidding me,” Fred said
with almost comical disbelief. “Well, what the fuck are you doing in here?”

  As Greg rushed out of the room to figure out how to back up Twitter, everyone looked in Jack’s direction. And although he didn’t know it at that moment, they all did: Successful election site or not, Jack Dorsey’s days as Twitter’s CEO were numbered.

  Calling My Parents

  The week Jack Dorsey was fired from Twitter began much like any other. Monday started with the usual Jack routine. He got up and made his white bed. Showered. Dressed in his dark blue Earnest Sewn jeans and black cardigan. Grabbed his keys and bag and ran down the stairs.

  At some point that morning, Jack checked his e-mail and was greeted by dozens of messages that had filled his in-box throughout the night. There was one message that stood out like police lights on a dark city street. It was from Bijan and Fred, and it had been sent at 7:41 A.M. on the East Coast. The subject line simply said: “Breakfast wed morning.”

  Why were Bijan and Fred asking to get breakfast on Wednesday morning? They weren’t supposed to be in San Francisco that week. Did Ev know about this? Jack thought.

  He opened the e-mail. “Can you meet with me and Fred before the board mtg,” the message from Bijan read. “Why don’t we meet for breakfast Wed morning at 7:45am at the Clift Hotel. Let me know if that works.” Jack glanced up at the time, where the numerals showed that it was 7:15 A.M. Pacific Time. Fred and Bijan wanted to meet exactly forty-eight hours later.

  Routine interrupted.

  Anxiety welled up in his chest. He knew almost immediately that this wasn’t a good sign.

  As his mind raced with scenarios, he wrote a response. “That works. I’ll see you there.” He hit “send” and the e-mail made its way to Fred and Bijan.

  He spent his commute on the Muni train preoccupied with the meeting. The metal wheels clicked and screeched against the tracks as he tried to replay past conversations with the board in his mind. He glared out of the window, asking himself why Fred and Bijan wanted to meet. He was like one of Agatha Christie’s fictional detectives trying to decode a meeting two days from now, his only clue a forty-three-word e-mail.

  When Jack arrived at work, he stepped off the elevator into the Twitter office and was greeted by the familiar smell of percolated coffee that filled the hallway. He headed straight for Ev’s desk, hoping by some miracle, by some obscure chance, he would be sitting there ready to answer questions.

  But Ev’s desk was empty. Just his roller chair, alone. His Mac computer, sleeping.

  As the afternoon drew on, Jack’s anxiety still hadn’t abated, so he decided to write Ev an e-mail asking for some answers. He hit “send,” then waited. Waited for a reply. A phone call. A text message. For Ev to appear in front of his desk and explain what was going on.

  Ev never responded.

  Fred’s hand scrunched around his face as he rubbed his eyes, trying to abate the tiredness that was consuming him. It was Tuesday morning and he was exhausted after the six-hour flight from New York. He was also starting to grow impatient, as the conversation seemed stalled.

  Bijan started speaking again as Ev paced in his living room, his feet brushing against the white shag rug and the dark hardwood floor. In the background his bookcase, filled with marketing, management, and business titles, watched over them. Surely one of these books covered this topic: firing a CEO.

  The three had been talking for some time, having a variation on previous conversations that had taken place over the past few months.

  “What if he goes to Facebook?” Bijan had asked on more than one occasion. “We have to do something to make sure that doesn’t happen. It’ll look terrible for Twitter if the founder goes to Facebook.”

  “He’s not gonna go to fucking Facebook.” Fred laughed, rolling his eyes in Bijan’s direction, his hand in its usual resting spot, his chin. “Look, I get that he’s all starry-eyed by Zuck, but he’s not gonna go work there.”

  “He could!” Bijan said and argued that the board should make Jack director of product or chairman or give him another senior role at Twitter after he was let go as CEO, to ensure that he didn’t go off to a competitor.

  But that wasn’t an option either. Jack had been quite vehement when he had been given his three-month reprieve that if things didn’t work out, he would not work for Ev.

  As the morning wore on Ev cupped his phone in his hand and paced, looking at it every few minutes to see if one of his confidants, like Chris Sacca, an investor in Twitter and one of Ev’s trusted friends, had called with some advice on the matter.

  “I’m not giving him a fucking board seat,” Ev snapped. “He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.”

  Then there was a group discussion to just fire him and call it a day.

  But as Ev noted, Biz and Crystal and the people who enjoyed working with Jack would be distraught. If Biz even knew about this discussion, he reminded them both, he’d be fuming and might threaten to quit. At all costs, Biz must stay at the company, Ev said. Losing two of the three cofounders would be a disaster.

  The discussion went on for over an hour. Round and round the proverbial merry-go-round they went. And then, finally, a decision. A plan. An execution.

  Wednesday arrived quickly. Jack awoke weary and anxious. He felt sapped as he stepped off the train in the Tenderloin. Plodding up the steps to exit the station, he kept his head down as he walked in the direction of the Clift Hotel. Although it was still early, homeless people were everywhere, spilling out of halfway houses. Hookers—a familiar scene of leftovers from the night before in the Tenderloin—stood about without a care in the world. As Jack approached the hotel, the doorman pulled back the large glass door and repeated his morning announcement to guests, “Good morning, sir.”

  Not for Jack, it wasn’t.

  Jack was reminded of the sounds and the smell of the hotel from the last time he had stayed there. A year earlier, when Twitter was just a hatchling, he had spent two nights at the Clift. A staycation in his own city. Wining and dining in the hotel. He had worked too, spending an evening writing the code that would connect people’s names together using the now famous @ symbol.

  As the door to the Clift swung open, he walked inside, looking around for Fred and Bijan.

  At the moment Jack exited the Muni train, across the city, Goldman’s phone vibrated in his pocket as he took a sip from his morning coffee. He looked at the screen and a bit of confusion set in. A text message from Ev said to meet at Ev and Sara’s apartment on Fourth Street in an hour. Greg got the same message. Biz too. As did Abdur Chowdhury, who had joined Twitter during the Summize acquisition. Each thought the same thing: A meeting. This early in the morning. At Ev’s. Can’t be good.

  They all arrived, separately, buzzing as the door clicked open, into the elevator, into Ev’s house. Before long the group of Twitter executives were sitting at Ev’s kitchen table, sipping coffee and waiting to find out why they were there so early in the morning.

  “So Ev, you wanna tell us what’s going on here?” Biz asked after everyone was settled. Goldman looked up, nudging his glasses with his finger to push them back up his nose. They all noticed that Ev was fidgety. Not a good sign. As some of them knew, fidgety meant someone was getting fired.

  Ev looked down at the table as everyone looked back. His arms crossed, he took a deep breath and then began to talk.

  Jack walked by the huge, blazing fireplace in the lobby of the Clift Hotel. He spotted Fred and Bijan sitting in the rear of the hotel’s Velvet Room restaurant. They were in a round booth, their backs pressed against the dark brown leather. Seven ornate lightbulbs hung from the ceiling, encircling them both.

  “Hey, Jack,” Fred said, motioning to an open black chair at the end of the booth, “take a seat.” Fred was already tearing apart the eggs on his plate. Coffee cups had been refilled more than once. It was clear there had been a meeting before this meeting. Bijan seemed more solemn, pursing his lips as he nodded in Jack’s direction and almost whi
spering, “Hey, buddy.”

  Jack sat, his hands clenched under the table. In an almost-sad whisper he asked, “How’s it going?”

  Fred was about to start speaking—there would be no small talk here—when the waitress interrupted. “Coffee?” she asked with a smile. Jack’s stomach, already churning like a washing machine, couldn’t even handle chamomile tea, never mind coffee. “No, thanks. I’ll have a yogurt, please.”

  Then, as she turned to walk away, Fred dropped the guillotine.

  “So we’re making Ev CEO,” he said, his fork clenched in his hand. “You’re going to get a passive chairman role and a silent board seat. We have some paperwork for you and a recommendation for a lawyer.”

  Jack felt like he had just been hit in the face with a baseball bat. “Say that again,” he stuttered to Fred, thinking he had heard incorrectly.

  Fred repeated himself almost verbatim: We’re making Ev CEO. You’re getting a passive chairman role. You will have a silent board seat. Here’s the paperwork. Call a lawyer.

  Jack was told that the chairman title was more honorary than actually functional. His board seat wouldn’t actually be a board seat at all. Instead it was “silent,” which meant it would belong to Ev, who would maintain Jack’s voting rights. Jack would now be the company mascot, unable to make any decisions about Twitter. Passive. Silent. Ev, in comparison, was the majority stakeholder in Twitter, with four times as much stock as Jack, and would now have two board seats.

  At almost the exact same moment, Ev spoke from the same mental script to the Twitter executives gathered around his kitchen table. “Jack’s out,” he said.

  “The board met. This is the final decision. They want me to be CEO, and Jack will become chairman,” he continued. “The board is telling him right now. Today will be his last day.”

  They all looked back in shock as Ev continued talking, explaining why the board had made the decision.