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

by Nick Bilton

“I’m Nick Adler,” a man with a shaved head said confidently as he approached the doe-eyed, petite receptionist, who, sitting behind the low counter, looked back at the posse with utter confusion. “We’re here to meet with Biz Stone. Omid sent us.”

  The receptionist looked back and saw, towering above everyone, in the center of the group, like a queen bee surrounded by its lieutenants, the rapper Snoop Dogg. His head swayed slightly from side to side as he looked around the lobby, his sunglasses concealing his bloodshot eyes. A large, droopy hat covered his cornrowed hair.

  “Yes, um, let me call him,” the receptionist said, smiling awkwardly as she tried to reach Biz. But there was no one to call. There were no vice presidents or senior executives or any adult supervision at all in the building.

  One of Dick’s first tasks when he had taken over as CEO had been to remove Goldman as head of product at Twitter. Dick wanted to clean up the board, get out the old and bring in the new, make Twitter his company. Removing Goldman was the first step. Yet at the last moment there had been a compromise: Rather than being fired, Goldman was “allowed” to quit.

  In early December Goldman set out for the LeWeb show in Paris, and while onstage with M. G. Siegler, a TechCrunch blogger, he broke the news publicly.

  “You’ve been with Twitter for a while. So what’s next for you personally?” Siegler asked.

  “I’ve just announced to the entire company last Friday that I’ll be leaving Twitter at the end of the month,” Goldman said. “I’m not going to say I need to spend more time with my family—as it only consists of my girlfriend and two cats—but I just need a bit of a break.” (He was still dating Crystal.)

  Ev, too, was nowhere to be found. After handing the CEO role to Dick and processing the initial shock of being pushed out of the company, he was actually excited by his new job, realizing that it freed him from the stresses of the business side of the company. Now he could focus on the product. So in November he got to work designing new features for Twitter. But things quickly soured.

  When he presented these new product ideas to Dick, they were brushed off and mostly ignored. Before long Ev was being ignored too. There were executive-level discussions that he wasn’t invited to, senior off-site meetings he was not privy to. Like Jack in his “silent” chairman role, Ev was now a “silent” product director.

  Over the Christmas holidays, Ev set off to Hawaii with his family—a vacation he had taken with Dick many times before, but not this year. While away, sitting by the pool, thinking about the psychological trauma of the past several months, he realized he didn’t really have a role at Twitter after all. He had been fired without being escorted out of the building.

  On January 2, 2011, he sent an e-mail to everyone in the company, announcing that it was time to take a break. “I’ve decided to extend my vacation even longer—through March,” he wrote. “Why? I’ve been needing a break for a while, and the timing seems ideal. I’ll still be available and monitoring email, attending board meetings, talking to Dick and other folks regularly, doing some press if needed, and keeping a close eye on things. But I’ll also be spending a lot more time with Miles and Sara.” He signed the e-mail, “Mahalo, Ev.”

  With Goldman gone and Ev on leave, Biz wasn’t coming into the office either. He felt like an intruder in Dick’s company and had been spending his days trying to figure out if he would leave Twitter too.

  “Hi. Um. Biz isn’t around right now,” a short, white, geeky Twitter engineer said to Snoop Dogg’s entourage as he appeared in the foyer with a laptop in his hands. “He’s on his way back to the office, but … I can show you around until he gets here,” the engineer said.

  The employee nervously led the group through a door to the right that emerged into the center of Twitter’s offices. As the men flowed into the silent cubicles, a ruckus immediately ensued.

  “Whad up, honey, you look fly-a-liscious,” Snoop said to a young, attractive female employee as he wandered by. “Damn, girl, you be dope on a rope. What’s your name, honey bunny?” he said to another, hovering over her cubicle in his oversized blue Adidas jacket with “L.A.” emblazoned across the front. “Oooh, oooh, ooh,” he added, pursing his lips and shaking his head from side to side as if he were about to eat from a buffet.

  The sound of the entourage was so distracting to employees, it was as if someone had just set off a bottle rocket in a public library.

  “Um, excuse me, Mr. Snoop Dogg,” the engineer skittishly said as he looked up at the six-foot-four-inch rapper. “We’re going to go, um, go into this conference room.”

  Snoop, along with his entourage, which included Warren G and several other rappers, were in San Francisco for a show they were performing that evening. Nick Adler, who managed Snoop’s digital presence, had organized the meeting and been told that Biz would be there to meet with the Snoop entourage. There was a slight problem, though: Biz had not been told. Nor had any of the other Twitter executives, who were all at an off-site meeting.

  Snoop’s visit had been set up by a new employee of Twitter’s emerging media team, a group that had been developed to build relationships with more high-level stars, including actors, athletes, and musicians. These people were called VITs, or Very Important Tweeters, inside the company.

  It also signaled a change in music culture. Although top-of-the-charts musicians had visited Twitter in the past—including Kanye West and P. Diddy—these stars were no longer visiting a certain other media: radio, ironically the thing Ev and Noah had originally set out to reinvent in 2005.

  Instead, musicians wanted to see Twitter. Enter Snoop Dogg.

  But this particular “tour” wasn’t going as planned.

  After Ev’s ousting, Dick had organized a number of off-site meetings to reorganize the company. As a result, most execs were missing from the office as the slight, white engineer tried to entertain Snoop Dogg and his posse. It wasn’t going well; he was like a substitute teacher trying to manage a group of unruly kids.

  “So this is our new analytics tool,” he said to the group. “It can show you which tweets are performing better than others.”

  “Oh, really, dude? That’s really neat, dude,” Snoop said, imitating a white-person voice. “That’s your new analytics tool. Dude, that’s really cool.” Laughter erupted from the rest of the class as they all sat playing with their phones, barely paying attention.

  But the engineer continued to speak. “So you can see, whenever you tweet about weed, you get a huge spike from your followers,” he said. At this Snoop sat up, staring inquisitively at a graph on the screen.

  After some time in the conference room the entourage quickly sat for a short video interview to help publicize a new feature on Twitter, and they were then led out through the Twitter cafeteria and back to the lobby. As they wandered past a DJ table and microphone set up in the cafeteria, Snoop stopped in his tracks. “Yo, yo, yo,” he said, his arms outstretched on either side. “I can get on that?” he asked, pointing to the turntable. But before the engineer had a chance to answer, Snoop had a microphone in his hand and music was blasting out of the speakers. The sound flowed through the hallways, and employees quickly started to venture into the cafeteria. Before long people’s phones were out, taking pictures, shooting videos, and, of course, tweeting.

  Then, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of thin air, Snoop Dogg had something else in his hand: a large blunt the size of a Sharpie pen. Then a lighter. And a few seconds later he was smoking weed, ferociously. Seeing this, his entourage assumed it was okay to light up in the Twitter offices, so naturally they pulled out joints that had been in their pockets or tucked behind their ears.

  In a matter of minutes, the cafeteria had become the stage for an impromptu Snoop Dogg concert, with a dozen large blunts being passed around among famous rappers and Twitter employees, most of whom were dancing, some grinding on each other. A few girls stood on cafeteria tables, their arms waving in the air as if they were atop a large speaker in a nightclub, not
at work. They were all partying while their parents were away.

  Eventually a Twitter lawyer appeared. Asking Snoop Dogg and his entourage of rappers to stop smoking weed in the office wasn’t an easy affair, but all parties must come to an end, and eventually they left, bequeathing a haze of smoke, dozens of stoned employees, and hundreds of tweets in their wake.

  A note was sent around to employees by the lawyer reminding people that they were not allowed to use drugs at work. People were asked to delete tweets. Photos were removed from the Web. The only incriminating videos left online belonged to Snoop Dogg.

  Dick was furious when he found out about the weed, the dancing, the partying employees. He vowed that this was the last time anything like that would happen. It was time for Twitter to grow up, he said.

  Jack’s Back!

  It was light outside and dark inside. Jack was pacing back and forth in front of the bright projector screen as cracks of daytime hidden behind the blinds crept in. His brown dress shoes slid against the carpet like a ballet dancer’s slippers. A white employee badge with the name Jack Dorsey and the word “Twitter” dangled from his waist, swaying from a thread clipped to his jeans.

  “We’re calling this Twitter 1.0,” he said to the several hundred Twitter employees who sat watching him. “We’re going to abbreviate it ‘T1.’” Then he explained to them all that before that moment, until Jack had arrived back at the company, Twitter had been incomplete. “Pay attention to the direction, not the details,” he said confidently. This was the new Twitter. He didn’t praise the previous iteration of the product—Ev’s version—but rather took a couple of slight swipes at it. It was a beta and incomplete, he said.

  He had started his preamble by playing the song “Blackbird,” by the Beatles, where a bird with broken wings learns to fly. Fitting. Some of the employees were excited, but many looked around, upset, as Jack disparaged the work they had spent the past two years on.

  It was the moment Jack had been waiting and planning for—the moment that should have happened months earlier when Ev was forced down. Now Ev was being forced out.

  After discussions with Dick and the board, Jack had arrived back at his castle in late March, a banished king returning from exile.

  When Dick introduced him at a Tea Time, he was greeted with a standing ovation from most of the now 450 employees at the company, many of whom believed he was the rightful heir returning home. But there were a few who didn’t stand up: a small handful of people who knew what had happened behind the scenes with Jack’s return.

  As Jack stood there basking in the glow of applause, Ev sent an e-mail to all of the employees at Twitter.

  “I’ve been doing some serious soul searching,” Ev wrote about his past two months away. “Obviously, Twitter is the biggest thing I’ve ever played a significant part in or likely ever will. And, though I couldn’t be more proud of what we’ve accomplished together, it is clearly not finished. If it reaches its potential, Twitter will be around for many, many more years, and we’ll look back at 2011 as one of the quaint early years.

  “I’ve decided, though, that my role in Twitter from here on out will not be day-to-day,” he wrote. “I’ll be doing what I can to help, as a co-founder, board member, shareholder and friend of the company (and so many people in it).”

  He concluded, “I’m by no means disappearing,” and signed the letter, “Continue changing the world. Your friend, Ev.”

  Three days later, on Monday morning, the company officially announced that Jack was back. This was followed by his tweet confirming his return. “Today I’m thrilled to get back to work at @Twitter leading product as Executive Chairman. And yes: leading @Square forevermore as CEO,” Jack wrote.

  Then came the press. Piles of it. Fenton stepped in to make sure Jack was painted as the hero. “It was a tragedy for the period of two years when he wasn’t involved with the company that we were missing the founder,” Fenton told the New York Times in an article about Jack’s return.

  In public talks and news interviews Jack continued to channel Jobs, using terms like “magical” and “delightful” and “surprising” and “best” to describe products, along with almost exact vernacular used by Jobs at conferences and on television, including “we’re just humans running this company” and hawking the concept that Jobs shared, when he told people he was “most proud” of the things the company hadn’t done.

  Then, as he started to move into a greater orbit, he was featured in a huge profile in Vanity Fair on April 1, 2011, titled, “Twitter Was Act One.” Next to the several-thousand-word article was a picture of Jack in a black suit and tie, his chest pushed forward, a little blue bird resting on his shoulder.

  The article touted Jack as the “inventor” of Twitter and noted that this was one of the first times he had spoken publicly about his ousting as CEO. “It was like being punched in the stomach,” Jack told David Kirkpatrick, the reporter who wrote the piece for Vanity Fair. The quote was picked up thousands of times on social and news networks.

  Yet to a few the quote sounded eerily familiar. Like many of the things Jack had been saying for the past year, it was an unattributed quote by Steve Jobs. When Jobs was ousted from Apple in 1987, he told Playboy magazine: “I feel like somebody just punched me in the stomach.”

  Two weeks later, for the first time in several years, someone else appeared in the press: Noah. Nicholas Carlson, a blogger for Business Insider, had tracked Noah down and interviewed him for a piece on the real story of Twitter’s founding. Carlson wrote that “all of the early employees and Odeo investors we talked to also agree that no one at Odeo was more passionate about Twitter in the early days than Odeo’s cofounder, Noah Glass.”

  Ray, Blaine, Rabble, and others spoke on the record and said Noah was the “spiritual leader” of Twitter. Noah, though reluctant to talk about the old days, did too.

  “Some people have gotten credit, some people haven’t. The reality is it was a group effort. I didn’t create Twitter on my own. It came out of conversations,” Noah told Carlson in the interview. “I do know that without me, Twitter wouldn’t exist. In a huge way.” But Noah’s real gripe was with Ev, whom he still believed had pushed him out of the company.

  The same day the article came up, Ev tweeted: “It’s true that @Noah never got enough credit for his early role at Twitter. Also, he came up with the name, which was brilliant.”

  But none of this stopped Jack. As the media’s Next Steve Jobs, he was too big and too powerful for anyone to dent his version of history that had appeared in thousands of press outlets. And as the months rolled by, Jack’s image and fame only grew. He started spending more time with celebrities. He partied at ritzy affairs in Los Angeles and New York City. He flew on private jets. He appeared in gossip outlets, partying on boats with celebrities and models. He metamorphosed with the help of coaches and stylists and drastically grew the public-relations team that would get him featured on more television shows and in more magazines.

  Biz was the last cofounder to leave. On June 28, 2011, he announced that he was leaving a day-to-day role at Twitter. But really he was leaving because he didn’t have a day-to-day role. His collaborators were already gone.

  The day after Biz said he was leaving the company, an e-mail went out to all the Twitter employees announcing that the following day the White House would make public its plans for the first-ever “Twitter Town Hall” with President Obama. The event would be held in the East Room of the White House and streamed live to millions of Americans on the Web, and on Twitter, the e-mail said. It also noted, “Jack Dorsey will be the moderator.”

  Biz was sitting up in his bed when he read the e-mail, his back resting on his pillow. Seeing Jack’s name, he started to fume. Over the years, he had never really grown too upset about Jack’s media blitz, unless it crossed the boundary he and Ev had worked so hard to instill at Twitter. That had happened when Jack’s name had been included in the Iran revolution story in the New York Times and whe
n Jack had spoken about Twitter and China. And now it was about to happen again.

  Biz quickly wrote an e-mail, his thumbs tapping the screen of his iPhone as the hair on the back of his neck stood on end.

  “When Amac first explained this to me he said that nobody from Twitter would be the moderator specifically to highlight the fact that we are a neutral technology,” Biz wrote in an e-mail that he sent to the entire company. “I very strongly disagree with anyone from Twitter being involved as the moderator especially a founder.” He went on: “This goes against three years of work to stay out of the narrative and remain neutral. Amac, what happened? This is the complete opposite of what you pitched me and it was the one thing I said to avoid to which you wholeheartedly agreed. The only thing I said to avoid. Please, please, please don’t do it this way. We should not get involved in this manner.”

  And then, like a light switch turning off the last dimming bulb in a once brightly lit room, Biz’s e-mail was disabled from e-mailing the entire company. His voice was muted.

  Jack Dorsey was going to interview the president of the United States, cast across the media spotlight for all to see. Ev, Biz, and Goldman wouldn’t be able to stop him now.

  Make Better Mistakes Tomorrow

  The nearly six hundred Twitter employees spent most of the week of June 4, 2012, placing their belongings in cardboard boxes. Books, keyboards, computer wires, little trinkets were all sent to sleep in the confines of cardboard. Then, as the week drew to a close, they walked out of the office that Ev had built, 795 Folsom Street, for the last time.

  Over the weekend a swarm of men arrived, lifting the boxes and computers and transporting them to trucks that lined the street below. A light wind rustled the trees on Folsom Street as the engines coughed to life. Then they drove along the quiet streets, turning left onto Third, then down Mission, right, left, and finally arriving at a beige building the width of a city block on San Francisco’s Market Street: Twitter’s new home.