Extremely Hardcore summary

On April 4, 2022, Elon Musk disclosed the fact that his buying spree of Twitter shares equaled a 9.1 percent ownership of the company. But at this point, it still wasn’t clear what all of this was leading up to. At first, Musk seemed content to play along, accepting an invitation from Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal to join the company’s board of directors. 

But this didn’t last long. Musk quickly grew frustrated, feeling that Agrawal lacked the aggressive leadership Twitter needed. He was annoyed by the platform's persistent bot problem and the lack of active engagement from Twitter's top executives. How could someone like Agrawal, who barely tweeted at all, understand what the platform needed? At the same time, Musk’s public interest in Twitter caused the stock to surge by 27 percent, making everyone happy.

When Musk finally took over Twitter, he didn't come alone. He arrived with a team of advisors and engineers from his other ventures like Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink. The tweeps dubbed this transition team the "Goons" as they quickly became a constant presence in the office.

There were a few who remained optimistic. Emmanuel Cornet, known as Manu, was a former Google engineer who was open-minded about Musk's influence. It was true that Twitter could be overly bureaucratic about implementing new ideas, and Musk’s willingness to quickly move forward with innovative ideas might be just the thing the company needed.

For the most part, the “extremely hardcore” email did not go over well. Only around 25 percent of Twitter’s software engineering team planned to stay while nearly 1,000 employees used it as their reason to leave. Twitter's staff went from 7,500 in October to just 2,700 in November. Musk knew that some wouldn’t sign up, but he didn't anticipate losing so many developers.

Musk also implemented a round of in-person “code reviews.” An employee lawsuit, Arnold v. X Corp., later claimed the reviews were a deceitful pretext to come up with “for cause” firings, thereby allowing him to forgo costly severance packages. 

By the end of 2022, it was clear that Musk's decision to prioritize speed over safety wasn’t working out very well. It was causing numerous platform outages. And despite his efforts to shift to a subscription-based model, it failed to gain traction, generating minimal revenue compared to the company's needs.

And yet, Musk was determined to make Twitter Blue a thing. In March 2023, he announced the relaunch and said that blue check marks would soon be removed from users who didn't subscribe. Only Blue subscribers would get preferential algorithm treatment, making their tweets more likely to be recommended. Was this just a different version of the hierarchy that Musk had been denouncing before? Another backlash ensued, with celebrities like LeBron James and Halle Berry openly stating they wouldn't pay for the subscription.