by Nick Bilton
Along with the boxes and computers, the movers also carefully transported the artwork that Ev and Sara had carefully picked out, a beautiful neon sign that read TELL YOUR STORIES HERE, and the @ symbol that hung in the cafeteria.
The following Friday, Dick stood up in front of the employees in the company’s new cafeteria. Compared with the old office, this new space was gargantuan. To the right of the entrance there was a huge outdoor roof deck where employees could lie on faux grass and work encircled by the San Francisco skyline. Snack stations were set up on each floor. There was a game room with table tennis, couches, and old and new video games. Wood-slab tables. A yoga room. Parking. And the dining area, where Dick was about to speak to employees, was a cavernous space, with a ceiling that rose up into the sky like a wave about to crest.
Although Jack’s image on the outside was mushrooming, internally his aura had quickly started to fade. In late July 2011, he had fired four product managers who were part of Team Ev and had been (somewhat) privy to Jack’s role in the ousting of Ev. Gone. Then he pushed Sean Garrett out, partially as revenge for Sean trying to muffle Jack’s media frenzy a year earlier. Twitter employees also started to complain to Twitter managers that Jack was difficult to work with and repeatedly changed his mind about product ideas.
Jack’s twenty-four-hour-a-day press tour had started to affect his relationship with Dick, who was often assumed to be an employee of Twitter in interviews, not its CEO.
When Jack went on TV to do interviews, he was sometimes introduced as the CEO of Twitter and Square, and he made no point to correct the mistake. The misinformation that Jack was CEO spread to leaders of other companies, to the media, and even to taxi drivers in the city.
One afternoon Dick was taking a cab back to the Twitter office from a meeting.
“Where to?” the driver asked.
“The corner of Market and Tenth,” Dick replied. “The Twitter offices.”
The cabbie explained that he would have to drop his passenger around the corner, because there was nowhere to pull over on Market Street. “It happens every time I have to drop someone off here,” the cabbie proclaimed. “There really should be a place to pull over near the Twitter office.”
“I might be able to do something about that,” Dick said, understanding the man’s plight. “I’m the CEO of Twitter.”
The cabbie turned around with an excited look on his face and said, “Whoa! You’re Jack Dorsey?”
Dick just sighed.
Though the public didn’t know it, the employees of Twitter did: Dick was in charge.
He had worked extremely hard over the past year to boost company morale from the tumultuous years of different CEOs. Twitter employees clearly loved Dick, and in turn he genuinely cared about the company and the people who worked there. He had also gone to great lengths to ensure that the company kept the ethical values instituted by Ev, Biz, and Goldman and continued to stand up to government requests for information about users. And he also knew he had a responsibility to make Twitter into a profitable and successful company. Dick and Ali Rowghani also started shutting down third-party feeds to ensure that competitors, including Bill Gross, couldn’t siphon people away from Twitter to a competing network.
Early one morning, after the employees had unpacked their boxes, placing books, keyboards, computer wires, and little trinkets on their desks in their new home, Dick called his first Tea Time meeting in the Market Street office. He stood in front of the employees in the cafeteria to welcome everyone to their new home—a home that felt like a large corporate company. A company that under Dick’s leadership had grown to a ten-billion-dollar valuation in 2012. A company that had begun making one million dollars a day in advertising revenue from sponsored tweets and other ads and by the end of the year would become consistently profitable, pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars a year from advertising. A company that, under Dick, would also soon fix its outage problem, staying up and stable nearly 100 percent of the time. A company that planned to go public in less than two years. A company that investors hoped would eventually be worth one hundred billion dollars.
As the employees sat, hushed, Dick paced in front of them with the microphone in his hand and told a story about their recent move.
He said that when he had directed the movers to transport the artwork from the old office, he had instructed them to leave one piece of art behind. It had hung in the Folsom Street office since late December 2009. The piece of art was in a black frame with a white border. In a bit of irony, it had been hung upside down. And in bold white letters on a dark background, it made a statement in thirty-six characters: “Let’s make better mistakes tomorrow.”
The new office, Dick explained, meant that it was time for Twitter to grow up as a company. To end the rolling site outages and a long list of other problems that had plagued Twitter’s infancy.
“We’re leaving the motto of making better mistakes tomorrow in the old building,” Dick said. “That’s not the type of company we are anymore.”
What’s Happening?
Each day, Chris Hadfield, the commander of the International Space Station Expedition 35, peers out the domed window of his spaceship, holds up his digital camera, and captures small, square snippets of Earth. He then swims through the air back to his sleeping pod, loads the images onto his computer, and tweets them. These are images that most of the seven billion people spinning below him will never have the opportunity to see in real life.
He captures images of the Middle East, where protests against dictators are still organized using Twitter. He captures Rome, where the pope now talks to millions of Catholics in 140-character sermons. He captures Washington, where the president of the United States regularly addresses Americans in tweets. He captures Israel and Gaza, where a war as old as religion itself now rages online, on Twitter. He captures images of hundreds of millions of people who tweet to one another billions of times a week, in every language and from every corner of the globe.
On January 24, 2013, he happened to be passing over San Francisco and snapped a picture of the city where Twitter was born. Then he tweeted the image. If you look closely at the photo, you can see the Golden Gate Bridge, its vast red columns reaching into the sky, surrounded by San Francisco Bay. The same bay where a few years earlier, a group of friends who worked at a small, failing podcasting company called Odeo sailed across the water to share a drink at Sam’s Anchor Cafe. That group of nearly a dozen people who would all contribute, in their own special way, to the creation of Twitter.
If you were able to look closely enough at Commander Hadfield’s photo, zooming into the intricate web of city streets, houses, and office buildings, the parks and beaches, you would be able to see Jack, Ev, Biz, and Noah wandering the city—separately, together.
In the summer of 2012, Noah anxiously walked into a doctor’s office with his girlfriend, Delphine. They approached the counter, told the nurse who they were, and filled out the appropriate paperwork. They then sat in the waiting room, hands clasped together, holding each other’s hearts.
Noah had moved back to San Francisco in mid-2011, realizing it was time to get back to life. Back to a different life from the one he had left two years earlier. He had placed everything in cardboard boxes in LA and driven north where he had once gone south. Although Twitter wouldn’t have existed without Noah, Noah now didn’t exist because of Twitter.
Time heals all wounds, but some leave very visible scars. So he settled back into the same city, differently, renting a loft apartment with Delphine in a different neighborhood from the one he had lived in years earlier. He made new friends who didn’t work in technology. People who wouldn’t become business partners.
Then, in July 2012, they received the news and made an appointment with the doctor.
Their name was called and they walked down a hallway, opened a door, and entered a relatively dark room. There were screens everywhere. Blinking lights. Beeping noises. Delphine was told to lie on the
bed and lift her shirt as Noah watched nervously. The doctor reached over and pressed a number of buttons on one of the machines, then started to gently rub gel on Delphine’s stomach. Noah grasped her hand tightly.
There was a long pause as the doctor looked at the screen on the machine, then back at Noah and Delphine.
“Congratulations,” the doctor said with a smile. “You’re going to have a little baby girl.” Noah looked at Delphine as tears welled up in his eyes, then started to trickle down his face. She looked back at him and smiled, an affectionate, happy smile. A loving smile. Then Noah buried his head in his hands and wept. He had cried hundreds of times over the years, cried a million tears. He had cried alone. In his bed. In his truck. But this was different. This time he was crying out of joy. He had always wanted a baby girl, dreamed of a little girl he could hold in his arms and cuddle and kiss and care for. And love. A little girl he could love. And here she was.
It was in that moment that he realized this was what he had been searching for in mid-2006, when he sat at his computer and typed a short blog post about the name of the latest project he was starting with his friends: Twitter.
He had explained what this new project could do: “The fact that I could find out what my friends were doing at any moment of the day made me feel closer to them and, quite honestly, a little less alone.”
That feeling he had been searching for when he helped start Twitter was a hope that a technology could connect him to people. Yet it was the hand he was holding at that moment, Delphine’s, that was the real connection he had always been searching for. The technology in that room, the screens, the beeps, had also done what Twitter had never been able to do for Noah. They had allowed him to feel a connection to someone who wasn’t there. The technology had connected him to his baby who wasn’t born yet.
Noah collected himself, wiping the tears away from his eyes as he looked at Delphine and kissed her. They walked out of the doctor’s office, the warm sun drying his moist face, and peered up at the sky as birds floated by, lightly chirping, flapping, and tweeting in the warm San Francisco sun. He looked down at Delphine’s hand, grasping it as they walked, together. Compared to his former cofounders, Noah made very little money from Twitter and Odeo. One day in the future he hopes to take the small sum he has saved to try his hand at another start-up.
On April 6, 2013, Noah tweeted for the first time in more than two years: “Cheeks stained with glorious tears of joy and absolute humility I celebrate the birth of my daughter Oceane Donnie Marie-Louise Poncin Glass.”
Some mornings, Biz and Livy wake up in their two-thousand-square-foot home across the bay in Marin County, their heads resting atop puffy pillows as the sun streams in through their windows. “Hey, Livy!” Biz says as they look each other in the eye. “We’re rich! We’re rich!” At which they both giggle like children who have a secret pile of candy under their bed. They remind each other that as Twitter was just hatching, they lived a very different life. On some mornings they recite the story of a certain day, five years earlier, at the Elephant Pharmacy in Berkeley.
It was a late weekend afternoon, and Biz and Livy wandered into the kitchen of their small, box-shaped home and opened the fridge. It was completely empty. Just a cave of white plastic. They wandered to the cabinets: empty. Their wallets: empty too. Livy looked at Biz and with a sad smile asked what they were going to do. They were tens of thousands of dollars in credit-card debt at the time. Bills landed with a thud on top of more bills. They had already borrowed money from Ev twice, which had since dissolved. Their tweets lamented their current state: “we’re paying bills.”
They were broke and had no options. Well, almost no options.
“I bet you there’s a lot of change in this can,” Biz said as a he grabbed the coffee can the two had been using to collect spare change. It was your typical homemade piggy bank, round and metal with a plastic top. Each day the Stones came home and dropped dimes, nickels, and pennies inside—sometimes a few quarters would mix in too. Clink. Clink. Clink. The echoes grew quieter over time as the piggy bank filled up. Now, broke and hungry, they decided it was time to cash in. They walked down Cedar Street, the coffee can in hand as if it were made of glass, and arrived in front of the Elephant Pharmacy in the Gourmet Ghetto. They walked inside, through the glass doors, and stood in front of the green Coinstar machine.
Biz began tipping the coins into it, carefully grasping the side of the can as Livy stood behind him and watched. They had assumed that they could get thirty dollars—maybe even fifty!—from the coin collection, but the number displaying the total kept flipping higher and higher. Before long, they were approaching sixty dollars. Then past seventy. Eighty. And still it kept going.
“Oh my god! Oh my god!” Livy said, clapping her hands with pure excitement as she jumped up and down in place.
“Are we in Las Vegas?” Biz asked as he looked back and forth between her and the rising number.
“Oh my god! Are we going to pass one hundred dollars?” she asked as the numbers continued to flip. Silence fell over both of them as the machine continued to $90. Then $91. $92. Livy began jumping in place again, her hands in the air, and yelped as they passed $100, coming to rest at $103. They both wore smiles so wide they looked unreal. Happiness at the bottom of a coffee can.
Once they collected their winnings, they traipsed off to Trader Joe’s, where they loaded up on food—chips and dips, bread, a six-pack of cheap beer—and they went home, happy. The crinkle of their grocery bags accompanied them as they wandered back up Cedar Street.
Years later, their lives had become very different. Biz can sometimes make upward of half a million dollars to give a fifteen-minute public talk. Their bank account, which once began with a negative symbol, now ends with seven zeros.
When people ask Biz about his wealth, he tells them that money rarely changes people; it often just magnifies who they really are. Biz and Livy still drive their old Volkswagen and Subaru to work. Biz still dresses as if he walked out of a thrift store. And the majority of the money they make goes to the Biz and Livia Stone Foundation (a nonprofit they founded that gives money and support to organizations that make it easy for anyone to help students in need) and a number of animal-related sanctuaries. As a result, a few mice now have a warm home on a farm.
In early 2012 Jack sold his loft in Mint Plaza, saying good-bye to the nearby homeless glut of the Tenderloin, and moved to the glitziest part of the city. His new home, for which he paid almost twelve million dollars, isn’t visible from the street. It sits behind a large wooden gate and down a steep driveway, hidden from view by old, swaying trees. The rear of the house, which is an endless wall of glass, sits atop a giant, jagged, rocky cliff face at the edge of the world.
Each night, when Jack comes home from work, he types his password into the keypad that opens his front doors, then walks inside his empty glass castle in the sky. The rooms in the house are all sparse. In the living room there are only a couple of pieces of furniture, including the same Le Corbusier couch and chair Steve Jobs once had in his home.
Through the living room there is a set of glass doors that open onto a balcony that sits out over the rocks like a magic carpet floating atop the moist air. Some nights Jack wanders out there alone and looks out at the bay. Below, the waves crash against the rocks, making a roiling sound like ferocious lions locked in a dungeon.
By 2013, with a net worth of a billion dollars, it might seem like Jack had “won.” But to some of the people who knew him when he arrived at Odeo eight years earlier, it seemed quite the opposite. Back then he had joined the company as a quiet young programmer in search of friendships and a mentor. He had found the mentor, sort of, in his emulation of Steve Jobs. But he lost friends when he used those same people as a ladder to climb to the top.
Jack is often featured on the covers of magazines. He’s been profiled by 60 Minutes as a visionary and touted as a playboy billionaire who parties with the stars in gossip rags. He is often s
poken of as the next Steve Jobs and the sole inventor of Twitter.
From his balcony, as he watches the dark ocean down below, he can hear the sounds of boats heading back from sea, their horns blaring as they return to port.
In early 2013, on the nights that Jack stands out there alone, as the smell of the bay drifts up the sides of the rocks, he looks out at the ocean and plots his next moves. His plans for Square, where he has become an adept leader, growing the company into a multibillion-dollar business. His plans for Twitter, where he one day might return as CEO. His plans to one day become the mayor of New York City.
But during those moments when he feels truly lonely—when the ocean, the sirens, the rocks stop calling to him, he walks back inside, closing the glass doors behind him, and reaches into his pocket, pulling out his smart phone. He slides his finger across the glass screen, then places it on the blue icon with the little blue bird. And he talks to Twitter.
On Monday evenings, just before five o’clock, Ev rushes out of Obvious Corporation, which he reopened for business after officially leaving Twitter. His office is in a nondescript building on Market Street, just a few blocks away from Twitter’s headquarters. He dashes home to eat dinner with his family. Then they wander upstairs for their nightly ritual of reading together—their favorite part of the day.
Ev was despondent for months after leaving Twitter. He started to piece together what had happened to him, learning more about the private meetings between Jack and others. He played back in his head over and over conversations where people who worked for him had acted surprised at the news of his firing. Some of those people had actually been involved in the coup.
On Tuesday evenings Ev works late, often the last person to leave the office as he sits sketching out ideas for new projects, the glow of a computer screen lighting his way.