Emergency Pod: Elon Musk Owns Twitter

We look into the company’s weird new future with Times tech reporter Kate Conger. Plus, how Apple is single-handedly deciding the future of the digital economy, and a social media death watch.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 0:34Casey Newton?

  Well, we made it four episodes before our first emergency pod, Kevin.

• 0:38Kevin Roose?

  I've always wanted to do an emergency podcast, but actually doing it is a little more frantic than I would have anticipated.

• 0:52Kevin Roose?

  I'm Kevin Roos. I'm a tech columnist at The New York Times.

• 0:54Casey Newton?

  And I'm Casey Newton from Platformer, and you're listening to an emergency edition of Hard For.

• 1:00Kevin Roose?

  It's about 8:00 PM Pacific on Thursday night.

• 1:04Casey Newton?

  No part of me thought that this was how I was going to be spending my Thursday evening.

• 1:08Kevin Roose?

  I am frankly a bit shocked that this actually happened. Elon Musk, as of a couple hours ago, is the new owner of Twitter.

• 1:18Casey Newton?

  You know, even just hearing you say it out loud, it sounds surreal. It is going to take a while for it to sink in, as Elon might say.

• 1:27Kevin Roose?

  It does. It sounds a little bit like the, the front page headline in like a movie, you know, about the future, like, "Space Magnate Buys Microblogging Platform." It's just like, but this is real. This happened just a couple hours ago. I read it with my own eyes.

• 1:44Casey Newton?

  And the best part is that we have basically no idea what is going to happen next.

• 1:49Kevin Roose?

  Yes. Okay, so Casey, let's just catch up on what has happened. So on Wednesday, we learned that Elon Musk was actually at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco.

• 1:59Casey Newton?

  And not only was he there, but he brought a site gag with him.

• 2:02Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, this was one of the weirdest parts of this whole thing. He shows up at Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco carrying like a sink. And the whole point of this was to be able to make a joke on Twitter that said, "Let that sink in."

• 2:17Casey Newton?

  Yeah, it was, it was prop comedy. It was giving carrot tops.

• 2:22Kevin Roose?

  So he shows up at Twitter headquarters. He meets with a bunch of employees. He apparently, you know, makes the rounds and sort of shakes some hands and gets a coffee at Twitter's like in-house coffee place. And we don't hear anything more on Wednesday. And then on Thursday, it was reported that he brought in engineers from Tesla to look at Twitter's code.

• 2:48Casey Newton?

  Yeah, which by the way, I'd just like to imagine how that goes, right? So, you know, like engineer Frank or whoever comes over and looks at the Twitter code and they're like, yeah, you really couldn't run that on a car. Yeah, like what are these people saying to him about the Twitter code?

• 3:00Kevin Roose?

  Right. What can you learn about Twitter's code in a couple hours as a car engineer? But I would love to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation. And then just a couple hours ago, we learned that Elon Musk had officially closed his deal. He is the owner of Twitter, $44 billion, one of the biggest tech deals in history. And immediately he fired at least four top Twitter executives. So Parag Agrawal, Twitter's CEO, is gone. Ned Segal, the chief financial officer, also gone. Vijaya Gadi, the top legal and policy executive, she is also gone, as well as Sean Edgitt, the general counsel.

• 3:45Kevin Roose?

  All of them are gone and Twitter is owned and operated by Elon Musk.

• 3:51Casey Newton?

  Yeah. And by the way, talking to Twitter employees this afternoon, there's been almost no communication from the company to them. They're just sort of waiting around. And I think the reason is that even though this was a legal process that played out according to the laws of the land, in a lot of ways, if you're a Twitter employee, it kind of feels like a coup, right? Like a new regime came in, swept out all the leadership. There was supposed to be an all hands that got canceled. And I think it's because they're still trying to figure out, what is the chain of command? Who is authorized to speak? When they're authorized to speak, what do they say? So it was a real scene of chaos inside Twitter today as people were mostly looking to reporters on Twitter. Try to figure out what was happening at their company.

• 4:33Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, it seemed like it was just total chaos over there. No one knew what was going on or who had jobs and who didn't. I will say there's probably no clean way to do a transition like this, to do a take private deal for a company with thousands of employees, where frankly, a lot of the existing employees don't like the new owner and have said so both publicly and privately. So this was always going to be messy, but I was shocked by just how fast it all happened.

• 5:02Casey Newton?

  I mean, you know, look, I sort of disagree there. If you wanted to make it less messy, you know what you could have done? Waited more than 10 minutes to fire the CEO.

• 5:11Kevin Roose?

  Right?

• 5:12Casey Newton?

  Like, they, they could have held a meeting on Friday and said, they had Elon and Parag sitting next to each other and say, you know, this is a big milestone in the history of the company and Parag is now going to ride off into the sunset and hi, I'm Elon and I'm going to appoint a new CEO. Any of those things could have happened, but they did not happen.

• 5:27Kevin Roose?

  Right. And I think the top leadership at Twitter, most of them expected to lose their jobs. They were.

• 5:34Casey Newton?

  They were counting on it because they were going to get millions of dollars if they did.

• 5:37Kevin Roose?

  Right. So Parag Agarwal will get a nice payday.

• 5:40Casey Newton?

  Forty-two million dollars.

• 5:43Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, he will get a nice payday, ride off into the sunset. I'm sure the other executives will have some payouts as well.

• 5:51Casey Newton?

  Wait, let me ask you a question, and I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I have to ask right now. Is Parag Agarwal's tenure as Twitter CEO one of the most legendary CEO runs of all time? The man comes in in November, he's gone by October, he makes forty-two million dollars by mostly just not tweeting and sending out a weekly email saying, no new information, we'll be in touch when we have more.

• 6:11Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, it's one of the great deliveries of CEO performance in history. It's, it's also just, I mean, to be clear, like Twitter employees are going to make off pretty well financially from this deal. The ones who own stock, I mean, I'm sure they're having a lot of mixed emotions right now, but they are getting a much higher price for that stock. Fifty-four dollars and 20 cents a share than they would have gotten on the open market.

• 6:36Casey Newton?

  Yes, that's true. Although for what it's worth, I've heard from very few of them jumping for joy over the payout from the sale of the stock, right? They're sort of much more concerned about what the future is going to look like. But I do think that that is a fair point. The Twitter folks, and this is why Parag's getting that 42 million. They got the absolute best price for this company that you can imagine.

• 6:54Kevin Roose?

  Right, which doesn't mean that they're going to be happy about this. And I know you and I have both spent months talking to Twitter employees who are just distraught at the prospect of Elon Musk taking over, in part because it means that a lot of them will likely lose their jobs.

• 7:07Casey Newton?

  So Kevin, you mentioned that you and I have both been talking to Twitter employees today, and I sort of learned two interesting things that I think are worth sharing. One is that the Washington Post reporter earlier this week that Elon was planning on laying off up to 75% of the company, which is a staggering number, right? And someone sent me a video today from when Elon was walking around the coffee shop, and this employee sort of nervously says to him, like, "We're very excited to work with you, but I think the question on everyone's mind is, are you about to fire 75% of us?" And Elon sort of like looks up at the ceiling for a second, and he says, "Well, I don't know where that that number came from, because no, like that like that number didn't come from me." And so everyone sort of laughed nervously.

• 7:50Casey Newton?

  But I thought that was interesting, both to see the interaction and to hear him say, at least to those employees, he's not going to gut the company, at least to the levels that some people have talked about.

• 8:01Kevin Roose?

  I will say, though, it would be a very Elon move to then go like, "I'm actually firing 80% of you." See, I was telling the truth, wasn't 75.

• 8:09Casey Newton?

  That is dark, and yet, can I really disagree? I'm not sure that I can.

• 8:14Kevin Roose?

  So, okay, so he's denying that the bloodletting at Twitter is going to be as bad as it had been previously reported. What else did you hear today?

• 8:22Casey Newton?

  So, inside the company Slack at one point today, after Elon has been walking around, a VP posts a note where he sort of updates everyone at the company on what Elon has been doing since he's been inside the headquarters. And it's very, very upbeat. You know, there's a quote where the VP writes, "Overall, the tone was very positive and upbeat, and he's been curious about our business," which is the absolute funniest thing you can say about a man who's just spent $44 billion to acquire you. He's really looking forward to kicking the tires on this thing, figuring out what it is, what it does. But then in this sort of note, they go, they say sort of two interesting things.

• 9:02Casey Newton?

  One is Elon wants subscriptions to be 50% of revenue at some point. And he thinks that if Twitter had more credit cards on file, it could help the company with bots. But Kevin, talk about what a big percentage of revenue, 50% would be for Twitter.

• 9:19Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I mean, what is, what are subscriptions now? I think Twitter's revenue right now is about 90% from targeted ads.

• 9:26Casey Newton?

  That's 89%, yeah.

• 9:27Kevin Roose?

  So this would be just an absolute overhaul of their business, which is not to say it couldn't happen. I mean, but arriving on day one or day minus one of his tenure with these sort of, I don't know, incomplete, half-baked ideas for how to turn the company around is not something that would inspire a lot of faith in me if I were a Twitter employee. One thing I've been wondering, Casey, have you seen any Twitter employee be publicly excited about this? Is anyone sucking up to the new boss? Is anyone saying, you know, I'm so excited to listen and learn from Elon, one of the great operators in technology history?

• 10:03Casey Newton?

  You know, I have not seen that. You would sort of assume that that would be going on and yet we have not seen many of those tweets. I couldn't point you at one. You know, at the same time, I think if you were an employee who really liked Elon Musk, you probably wouldn't want to tweet about it publicly and invite the criticisms of everyone on Twitter who does not like Elon Musk, which is a substantial number of people.

• 10:26Kevin Roose?

  Got it, got it. I will say, I don't think Elon Musk will follow this advice, but if I were him, I would not search my name in Twitter Slack on the first day that I get access. Bad idea.

• 10:37Casey Newton?

  Twitter needs to nuke that Slack and start from scratch like yesterday if they haven't already.

• 10:42Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, there's a lot of people like furiously deleting old messages right now.

• 10:46Casey Newton?

  So I want to read you one more paragraph, which I would describe as a paragraph that is rich with meaning, and I can't tell you, I can explain all of it, but I think it's tantalizing for people who are listening to this, wondering what does Elon owning Twitter mean for like the the future of content moderation and just sort of generally what his policies will be? So it says, here is the top line for Vijay. And counsel. So that suggested to me that this was maybe a meeting with with with Vijay and the legal and policy teams. And the VP, this is again, this is happening in Slack, writes, discussed ideas around the future of Twitter and having it on your own terms, content moderation, working with foreign governments, standards of speech around the world. Section 230, he was very knowledgeable about this and its importance to Twitter,

• 11:29Casey Newton?

  also discussed his work with Starlink and how he's providing internet to countries like Iran and Russia without government interference and what this could open for Twitter. There's a lot in there and it clearly seems like it's mostly off the top of his head. But man, there's a lot of really tantalizing ideas in there about what Elon Twitter could look like.

• 11:51Kevin Roose?

  So Casey, we have so much more to discuss about this deal, but I just got a very exciting Slack message from my colleague Kate Conger, who is breaking a lot of the news on Elon and the Twitter deal for the New York Times tonight. She's been covering this deal for months and months and months, and she knows more about it than anyone I know. So she

• 12:10Casey Newton?

  And she's also stayed up past 8:30 PM?

• 12:13Kevin Roose?

  She is burning the midnight oil and she is going to come on and talk with us about what she is hearing about this deal. Kate Conger, hello.

• 12:23Speaker 03

  Hi.

• 12:24Kevin Roose?

  So it seems like Elon's, I guess he's calling himself the chief twit now. Is that his official job title? Do we know? Or is that just what he's calling himself?

• 12:33Speaker 03

  We don't know if that's the official title, but you know, he does like to have a silly title, so he may keep it.

• 12:40Kevin Roose?

  So his first move as chief twit appears to have been firing at least four top executives, including Parag Agarwal, the CEO. Have you heard anything more about potential executives being fired or additional moves that he's going to make just in the next few hours?

• 12:57Speaker 03

  I have not. We do know that the next big vesting date for a lot of Twitter employees is November 1. So that's the date where they're expecting to receive their next stock grant, or you know, once the company goes private, that will be a cash grant. And so at this point, there's sort of a race against the clock for Elon to try to make some decisions about the layoffs that have been discussed and try to sort of beat the clock so that those cash grants don't need to be paid out if those employees are laid off prior to that deadline.

• 13:33Casey Newton?

  So November 1st is Tuesday. So is there really a chance that like on Monday, hundreds of people lose their jobs?

• 13:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think so.

• 13:40Kevin Roose?

  Possibly thousands. I mean, that would be a lot, but that's sort of the magnitude of what's been expected. So all three of us have been really chasing this deal and reporting on it and talking to people surrounding the deal for months now. And it can be easy to get kind of caught in the sort of frenzy of activity in moments like this. But I think it is worth just taking a step back and thinking about how major and frankly historic this deal is. This is the largest leveraged buyout in history. This is one of the biggest technology deals ever. It's the first time that a major social network has changed

• 14:20Kevin Roose?

  ownership since MySpace was sold. And I think it's also, in some ways, the culmination of this kind of decade, really, of transformation in social media. So I've been thinking about sort of a decade ago, when Twitter and social media were seen as this like liberating force, almost this thing that powerless people, dissidents, marginalized groups were going to use to start revolutions, to occupy Wall Street, to take down, you know, SOPA and PIPA, or whatever people were fighting about on the internet 10 years ago. And over the past 10 years, it really feels like Twitter and other social networks really became more

• 15:02Kevin Roose?

  of a tool for the powerful than the powerless. And what better symbolism could there be than at the end of that decade, the world's richest man buying and taking over Twitter? So Kate, Casey, what are your thoughts on that?

• 15:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think you're right. I think smart premise, Kevin. Good job.

• 15:21Kevin Roose?

  I may or may not have just spent the past like 12 hours writing a column about this.

• 15:24Speaker 03

  But I do think that this is sort of a transformational moment in social media history. You know, these companies are almost universally founder-led.

• 15:35Speaker 03

  And very tightly controlled by the founders, right? So it's someone who built the product from the ground up, feels very strongly about it. Personally, has this very intimate connection and understanding to the product that they're building. And there is something, I think, to having an outsider come in and try to run the company in a different way. And it's something that we don't often see in tech, but I feel like we're going to start seeing more and more of. You know, there are things about this that remind me of the shift at Uber, going from a founder-led, founder-controlled company to moving under a new management and a new CEO and being run in a very different way.

• 16:15Speaker 03

  And I think that this transition for Twitter is probably going to feel similar in some ways to that. You know, having the direction of the company change, having the priorities change, having a lot of the employees leave, having, you know, a lot of new executives come in and try to reshape the company into something different. And I guess it's a sign of just the industry growing and maturing and some of these companies getting to the stage in their lives where they can be bought out. But it also is something, like you said, where this company is going from a platform that is used by people who do not have a voice and are trying to access a voice.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  And going into this new era, I think that that might change and other platforms might start to be the destination for people to go to speak out.

• 17:05Casey Newton?

  You know, a few things that I would say in the interest of playing devil's advocate. You know, Twitter was a very poorly run company for a lot of years. I think if you were a victim of abuse and harassment on this platform between, say, you know, 2008 and 2017, you probably didn't feel like you had much of a voice on the platform, right? A lot of good folks were, you know, suffered targeted harassment campaigns. So I think that's worth saying. It's also worth saying that, you know, Musk has said he wants this platform to host more speech. He wants to eliminate what he sees as improper censorship. And while there are plenty of examples in his past of him doing the opposite at his companies,

• 17:44Casey Newton?

  if he actually lived up to that, you know, maybe this could still, Twitter could still feel like a platform that gave a lot of people a voice. I hope it does.

• 17:53Kevin Roose?

  Can we talk just briefly about this tweet that Elon put out earlier today? This message to Twitter advertisers? Truly one of the most bizarre twists in this whole thing. So Elon Musk has railed against advertisements for years. He has said that he wants Twitter to move away from ads to subscriptions. And then today, on just the precipice of this deal closing, he puts out this statement on Twitter, says, Dear Twitter advertisers, I wanted to reach out personally to share my motivation in acquiring Twitter. And then he talks about how the reason he acquired Twitter is because he thinks it's important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square.

• 18:36Kevin Roose?

  And then he starts talking about how much he wants advertisers to support this. He says Twitter obviously cannot become a free for all hellscape where anything can be said with no consequences. And then he talks about how advertising, when done right, can delight, entertain, and inform you. It can show you a service or product or medical treatment that you never knew existed, but is right for you. Fundamentally, Twitter aspires to be the most respecting advertising platform in the world. So my first question is, who actually wrote this? And why is this being posted on Elon's Twitter account today?

• 19:10Casey Newton?

  I mean, I think today was the day that Elon Musk realized that 89% of Twitter's revenue is targeted at advertising. Like, is there any other explanation?

• 19:18Speaker 03

  It's funny that you're saying like, who posted this on this, on his account? Because a lot of what he said in that message is really similar to the things that he said back in April when he first announced that he wanted to buy the company. He said, you know, this is important for the future of civilization. And that was kind of how he was sort of fitting the Twitter deal in with his persona as this like space explorer, right? Like, these are all projects that have the potential to radically alter our civilization and do things for humanity. That's sort of his vision for it. So these are things that he's said before. And I think, you know, Casey's absolutely right. Twitter needs to make money now more than it ever has. It's being loaded with a significant amount of debt,

• 20:02Speaker 03

  and he's going to have to start making those interest payments. And so it is very important to reassure advertisers about the platform not becoming, in his words, a hellscape. Because advertisers have been really worried about that and worried about if these content moderation protections roll back.

• 20:21Speaker 03

  Are their ads going to be running next to really controversial or unseemly content?

• 20:26Kevin Roose?

  Right, so let's talk about that content moderation policy change that we all, I think, expect is coming and could be coming very soon. Do you have any indication, Kate or Casey, about when these rules are going to change? When the people who were banned from Twitter previously are going to be let back on, including Donald Trump? When is this all going to happen? Are we talking tomorrow? Are we talking Monday? Are we talking in a month? What do you think?

• 20:54Speaker 03

  I think that this is one of the things that Elon has said that he wants to do and made a top priority. And so I think that those things are going to happen fairly quickly. I mean, you know, we saw he took control of the company and immediately moved to fire some of these executives who he's been criticizing for quite some time. And so I think that demonstrates the pace at which he wants to move on some of these priorities. And I think we will likely see him move very quickly to try to unban some people who have been kicked off the platform and roll back some of the content moderation policies that Twitter has had in place. And, you know, this is a very interesting time to be making those moves, right? Brazil has its presidential election this weekend.

• 21:35Speaker 03

  You know, the midterms in the US are in another week and a few days or so. So, you know, these are very important moments where the integrity of the information on the platform is very important and it will be put to the test. And, you know, if he decides to roll back some of these rules in the next day or two, then we're immediately going into elections that are going to be a little bit more of a free for all than they have in the past.

• 21:59Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. So I've been glued to Twitter all night, like I'm sure both of you have. There are a lot of people who are sort of performatively saying that, you know, I'm leaving Twitter, I'm going over to some other social platform, Mastodon or something like that, or, you know, catch me on Tumblr or whatever, sort of making a show that this is their last day on Twitter, they will not be part of the Elon Musk Twitter regime. A question for Kate and then for Casey. Do you think these people are actually going to leave? Do you think there will be a significant number of people who delete their Twitter accounts in the next 24 hours? Or is this just a small but vocal minority?

• 22:41Speaker 03

  I think that there are some people who will leave the platform. And I've seen some people talking about it, obviously on Twitter, saying, you know, I'm gonna, like you said, migrate my social media presence to this other place. Follow me there. I don't know. I mean, these moments of people leaving a platform are so hard to predict. And I think that they come in these moments of really intense outrage, where the platform has done something or something has happened on the platform that people find so objectionable that they just kind of rage quit the platform. And I think that the deal going through maybe isn't that moment, but there may be decisions or things that happen at Twitter down the line

• 23:24Speaker 03

  that are going to be those inflection points that cause people to say, you know what? I've had enough. I'm done. I'm out of here. But I don't think that just the deal closing is that outrage moment.

• 23:35Casey Newton?

  I think that's exactly right. People have a lot of feelings about Elon Musk, good and bad. But, you know, outside a very small percentage of people who I think are just outraged at the idea that he's bought the company, I think most folks will be willing to give him some sort of grace period. They want to see what kind of steward is he going to be of this company? Certainly during the acquisition process, it didn't feel like he was being a very good steward of it. He was criticizing this thing and its executives over and over again. Didn't really seem like he had a lot of fully fleshed out ideas for what to do with it. Then he spent months trying to get out of buying it, right? So it's really hard to look at all of that and assume that it truly is a new day and he's turned over a new leaf. But at the same time, we do have to wait and see because what other choice do we have?

• 24:19Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I think everyone who is still on Twitter at this point is like a diehard addict. Like, they're not going anywhere, including me. Like, I was thinking tonight, like, do I really want to?

• 24:31Speaker 03

  I thought you were trying to start TikToking.

• 24:33Kevin Roose?

  Well, maybe this is the start of my TikTok era. Who knows? Anything can happen.

• 24:38Casey Newton?

  I've always said you're an incredible dancer.

• 24:41Kevin Roose?

  Kate, thank you for joining us. I know it's late and I really appreciate it. It's great to talk to you.

• 24:45Casey Newton?

  Thank you so much.

• 24:47Speaker 03

  Great to talk to you guys, too.

• 24:54Casey Newton?

  Well, believe it or not, Kevin, more things happened in the world of tech this week, and we're going to get into them. Apple is raising the rent on the digital economy in ways that concern me, and you have some thoughts about the current state of social media. Let's talk about both of those after the break.

• 25:12Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 25:26Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner. Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 26:00Speaker 04

  Today's AI builders need infrastructure that scales with their ambitions. Iren is a vertically integrated AI cloud platform, delivering data centers, compute, and software for AI training and inference, underpinned by its expansive portfolio of land and grid-connected power in renewable-rich regions globally. Iren's AI Cloud gives direct access to Nvidia GPUs, scalable from hundreds to thousands. For builders, that means direct access to AI compute, rapid scaling, and predictable pricing. Iren, AI Cloud for the next big thing.

• 26:33Speaker 05

  AI spend is growing fast, but most businesses still can't see exactly where that money is going. Ramp gives businesses visibility and control across AI providers with real-time guardrails by team and model, helping ensure spend goes to the highest ROI areas. Stop guessing where your AI spend is going. Get started with Ramp. And if you're new to Ramp, you can get $250 off at ramp.com/hardfork. Go to ramp.com/hardfork. Ramp.com/hardfork.

• 27:06Casey Newton?

  All right, Kevin, I would like to talk about some stories this week that I imagine you may have seen. Have you been following sort of all these little like dribs and drabs about changes that Apple made to the App Store like review process?

• 27:19Kevin Roose?

  I have sort of, but I have to confess that every time a story involves App Store guidelines or privacy policies, my eyes glaze over and I stop paying attention.

• 27:28Casey Newton?

  That's completely reasonable, and yet that's why Hard Fork is here for you, to walk you through things that maybe sound a little boring, but are actually going to change the entire future of the digital economy.

• 27:37Kevin Roose?

  All right, convince me.

• 27:38Casey Newton?

  So I want to walk you through a handful of stories that if you sort of knit them together, tell you about just how much influence Apple has over not just the products and services that we use every day, but about entire businesses that will now just never be able to be built.

• 27:55Kevin Roose?

  All right, I'm ready.

• 27:56Casey Newton?

  Okay, so all of this really stems from something that sounds kind of boring, which is that Apple updated its guidelines for the App Store review process.

• 28:06Kevin Roose?

  Thrilling.

• 28:07Casey Newton?

  What does that mean? Well, you're a developer, you have a hot new app, maybe you have a Twitter replacement that you've just put together and you want to put it into the App Store. But in order for it to show up, Apple's human reviewers have to approve it, and that's really good, right? It keeps a lot of really terrible things out of the App Store. But over time, and well, from the start, but also increasingly over time, reviewers are using that process to dictate what kinds of businesses can and cannot be formed on, you know, on this platform. So basically, this week, the company updates about 700 words revising the App Store guidelines, and here are a few things that come out of

• 28:47Casey Newton?

  those changes. Number one, they say, "Digital purchases for content that is experienced or consumed in an app, including buying advertisements to display in the same app, such as sales of, quote, 'boosts' for posts in a social media app, must use in-app purchase." I understand how boring this sounds, but you've been on Facebook, you've seen boosted posts, right?

• 29:09Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 29:09Casey Newton?

  So somebody, maybe you have a farmer's market and you post to your farmer's market page, "The tomatoes are really good this season." And then you decide to boost that. Well, up until today, Facebook has been able to collect all of that money. Now, Apple says, hmm, actually, if you want to sell boosts in your app, you're going to need to make that available as an in-app purchase. And do you know how much of a percentage Apple gets from that?

• 29:32Kevin Roose?

  30%.

• 29:32Casey Newton?

  That's right. So they're going to get 30% of all that going forward. Twitter has boosts, Tinder has boosts, and they've already been using in-app purchases for those boosts, but Meta hasn't. So with this update, Apple's effectively asking Meta to cough up that additional 30%. And this, of course, comes on the heels of Facebook last year saying that it was going to block Facebook and other social media companies from tracking you around the web. So it essentially made their ad businesses much worse.

• 29:56Kevin Roose?

  Right. And this 30% cut has been at the heart of a lot of the attacks on Apple. To be clear, like, 30% is the rate that the top apps pay. I think you have to generate more than $1 million a year in revenue to get that 30%. I think for smaller apps, it's more like 15%. But the big apps, they have to pay 30%. Now, this 30% is extending to this new category of purchases.

• 30:18Casey Newton?

  Right. And so the question is, you know, why do this now? Facebook has been doing this forever. Apple is printing money. But, you know, inflation is out there. It wants to preserve its 45% gross profit margins. So what does it have its reviewers do? Hey, why don't we go back through those app guidelines and see where else we can squeeze out an additional 30%?

• 30:39Kevin Roose?

  Okay, so that's one thing, that the in-app purchases of boosts on social media apps.

• 30:43Casey Newton?

  Number two, Spotify. Spotify competes with Apple. Apple has a music streaming service. So does Spotify. Apple's music service has a big advantage, which is that it doesn't have to pay itself 30% of all sales for people who subscribe through the app, right? So this is a real challenge to Spotify, whose main business for a long time was selling music. So Spotify decides to diversify. It decides, we're going to try to take over literally the entire podcasting industry so that we can better compete with Apple. And then they introduce sort of a new plank in that strategy, which is that they're going to sell audiobooks. But there's a problem here, too, because, as you know, if you've ever tried to buy a Kindle book on your phone, you can't do it, right?

• 31:25Casey Newton?

  It just sort of says mysteriously, hmm, you can't complete this purchase here for some reason. Wink, wink, maybe go to the web, right? So Spotify runs into a similar situation and three different times, Apple rejects Spotify's app from getting any updates at all because it doesn't like the language through which Spotify is trying to tell its own customers how they can go buy an audiobook on Spotify.

• 31:49Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I read about this. The New York Times, a small local newspaper, ran a story about this written by my colleague Trip Mickle. And it described this sort of Byzantine process that Spotify had to go through. I've never tried to like buy drugs on the dark web, but I imagine that it is actually, in some cases, easier to buy drugs on the dark web than to buy an audiobook from Spotify.

• 32:12Casey Newton?

  And if you've bought drugs on the dark web, send us a voice memo here at Hartford. We want to hear whether it was easier than buying an audiobook on Spotify. That was thing number two, but it's actually thing number three that I think has the biggest long-term consequences. So one of these additions to the guidelines is, quote, "Apps may use in-app purchase to sell and sell services related to non-fungible tokens or NFTs such as minting, listing, and transferring. Apps may allow users to view their own NFTs, provided that NFT ownership does not unlock features or functionality within the app. Apps may allow users to browse NFT collections owned by others, provided that the apps may not include buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms

• 32:56Casey Newton?

  other than in-app purchase."

• 32:58Kevin Roose?

  I'm officially asleep. Please tell me what that means.

• 33:01Casey Newton?

  Great. So here's what it means. One, it means that if you want to sell an NFT inside an app on iOS, then you're going to have to pay Apple your 30%. I think that's pretty standard, right? But when you talk to crypto people about the promise that they see in NFTs, it's that NFTs avoid these sort of gatekeepers. You can buy them anywhere. You don't have to go through an app store, right? I might buy an NFT on OpenSea, right? I might buy it on Coinbase. And when I do that, Apple doesn't get its cut. But what if I'm a developer and I want to attach an NFT to some sort of service? Maybe if you own this NFT, you get a subscription. Maybe you come a member to something and maybe you want to unlock features of that membership within your app that's on iOS.

• 33:47Casey Newton?

  All of a sudden, Apple says, no, you can't do that. And so effectively, it made all of those sorts of uses for NFTs worthless within iOS.

• 33:59Kevin Roose?

  Hmm.

• 34:00Casey Newton?

  And if you're the sort of person who has positioned NFTs as the foundation of a new version of the internet, one that's less controlled by gatekeepers, one where ownership isn't dictated by any one platform or CEO, this is devastating, right? Because this means that a whole pillar of the vision for Web 3 gets wiped out overnight, and you have no recourse other than to just hope Tim Cook changes his mind at some point.

• 34:28Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, it's really interesting, and I feel like this has been a story that I've been kind of observing from afar for a while now, but I'm glad that you're explaining it to me, because it does feel like Apple has gotten just more brazen about this. I mean, there was that trial last year, Epic Games, the makers of Fortnite, had sued Apple over basically this issue, whether Apple was being too aggressive and acting like a monopoly and setting up this basically toll booth that anything that happens on the iPhone has to go through.

• 34:59Casey Newton?

  That's right. Even if that service is like mostly available on the web, right? Even if it's just sort of hinted at in the App Store, Apple sort of wants a cut. And I just think it's time that we have a conversation about this company, right? I think, you know, no one would dispute that Apple deserves a cut of revenue for, you know, many or even most of the services that are provided on the apps, right? Without iOS as a platform, none of these apps could exist, and Apple deserves its percentage. But what we see over time is that Apple wants to increase its purview into more and more kinds of economic activity until it really is just becoming the landlord of the entire digital economy, and the rent is only ever going up. And so the reason I want to talk about this is this is a show about the future, and the

• 35:42Casey Newton?

  easiest way to talk about the future is to talk about the stuff that's getting built. Here's a new product. Here's a new service. Here's this fast-growing new startup. But there's this other part of the future, which is the stuff that isn't getting built because it can't get built. And so those three stories I just walked you through is a story about the digital economy that can't exist, right? We can't have a World where social media companies can, you know, come up with a quick and easy ways to boost their revenue without handing, you know, a huge chunk of it to Apple. We can't have an easy way to buy audiobooks unless it's an Apple audiobook. And if you want to make NFTs the foundation of some kind of new digital service, it's actually not going to work on iOS. So your best bet is to get people to sideload it through Android or the entire thing just has to exist on the web. So, you know, you know how people behave.

• 36:24Casey Newton?

  This is, this has a huge effect on the future of like Web three to the extent it had one, right?

• 36:29Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and developers have been complaining about this so-called Apple tax, this 30% cut for years, right? There was, you know, Spotify, among others, has been complaining about this for years. And it really seems like Apple has been sort of tweaking things around the edges to make it seem like they're kind of loosening the restrictions. I remember after this lawsuit from Epic, they, they did change a little bit of the sort of guidelines for whether, you know, basically how apps could direct people outside of the App Store to buy things. So there have been some minor changes, but why do you think Apple is dialing this up?

• 37:07Casey Newton?

  I think that when a business figures out a way to make money, it's going to make that money, right? I think because Apple has a monopoly on iOS, it just gets to set the terms, right? It knows that no one is going to switch to Android because it was hard to buy an audiobook. No one is going to switch to Android because Facebook had to pay a tax on Boost, right? And so it can just sort of gradually extend those tendrils without too much worry. It also knows we have a Congress that despite years of complaining, hasn't passed a single new law related to the regulation of our tech companies, right? So it's sort of free to get in there and do whatever it wants. So who does that leave? It really just sort of leaves the, the Federal Trade Commission, maybe the Department of Justice to, if they were interested,

• 37:51Casey Newton?

  do some sort of antitrust action against Apple. And we should say, there have been antitrust actions against Apple in, in Europe. And I imagine that we'll see sort of more of those around the world as regulators sort of get wind of this. But in the meantime, it feels quite brazen. And I just think it's worth thinking about what are the costs of living in a world where some of these services just can never get built?

• 38:14Kevin Roose?

  Right, and I think it's worth trying to see this from the other perspective too, because obviously Apple knows that these criticisms are out there. And I think what it has said in the past is, look, we built the App Store, we built the iPhone. This is our platform and it costs money to run. So we have these reviewers who check every app that's listed in the App Store and make sure that it's complying with our guidelines, that it's not malware, that it's not spamming people, that it's not some horrible game that's tricking people into making in-app purchases. And so all of this costs money to run. And so that's why we take a 30% cut or a 15% cut of what's going on on our App Store.

• 38:59Kevin Roose?

  So have you talked to anyone at Apple? Like, what do they say to justify these positions, these changes to their App Store guidelines that are making all these developers angry?

• 39:08Casey Newton?

  They say exactly what you just said. And again, I'm really sympathetic to that. I think that they do deserve a cut, right? And, you know, I think there's a lot of services they provide that could probably just be done for a flat fee, right? It's like, do you really need a third of my revenue? But I do think that there ought to be limits on it, particularly when it comes to competitive services, right? It's like, you know, I think Spotify is a really good music service, but over time, it's become less of a music service because that's just not a very good business. And it's not a very good business because Apple has a better one, because it doesn't have to pay itself 30% of revenue, right? So I think that there is an actual harm to consumers there, where we don't have the very best services because Apple is able to give itself an advantage in so many ways. And I'd just like to see that playing field leveled out a little bit more,

• 39:52Casey Newton?

  if only to make it easier for me to buy an audiobook every now and again.

• 39:56Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, you have to be able to buy copies of my audiobooks easily. I mean, that can't take nine steps. I, I do wonder, though, if this comes from sort of Apple feeling like the door may be about to close on them. Because as you mentioned, there are all these antitrust actions happening in Europe. This Epic Games lawsuit is still out on appeal. So there's still a chance that a judge or even the Supreme Court could force Apple to open its App Store and reduce its cut. So I wonder if Apple's just saying, well, this whole party that we've been throwing for the last decade, like, it might be coming to an end. We might have to take out our toll booth. So let's just really like crank the dials while we still have them.

• 40:38Casey Newton?

  And if that's the case, it would certainly help explain why this week, Apple also increased the price of Apple TV Plus by, what? 40% to $6.99 a month? So yeah, enjoy Ted Lasso at a much higher cost.

• 40:53Kevin Roose?

  Wow.

• 40:58Kevin Roose?

  So Casey, your grand theory about Apple ruling the entire digital economy, and also our conversation with Kate about Twitter and Elon Musk, really brings up this theory that I've been rolling around in my brain for the last few weeks, and I want to talk to you about it right after the break.

• 41:15Casey Newton?

  No, thanks.

• 41:39Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 42:13Speaker 04

  Today's AI builders need infrastructure that scales with their ambitions. iRan is a vertically integrated AI cloud platform, delivering data centers, compute, and software for AI training and inference, underpinned by its expansive portfolio of LAN and grid-connected power in renewable-rich regions globally. iRan's AI Cloud gives direct access to Nvidia GPUs, scalable from hundreds to thousands. For builders, that means direct access to AI compute, rapid scaling, and predictable pricing. iRan, AI Cloud for the next big thing.

• 42:46Speaker 05

  AI spend is growing fast, but most businesses still can't see exactly where that money is going. Ramp gives businesses visibility and control across AI providers with real-time guardrails by team and model, helping ensure spend goes to the highest ROI areas. Stop guessing where your AI spend is going. Get started with Ramp. And if you're new to Ramp, you can get $250 off at ramp.com/hardfork. Go to ramp.com/hardfork. Ramp.com/hardfork.

• 43:19Kevin Roose?

  So Casey, we've talked about Twitter, but I want to spend some time talking about what's happening in the rest of the social media industry this week because it has been a really brutal week. So this is earnings season. Tech companies are reporting their quarterly financial results. And across the board this quarter, it's just been really bad. So Snap reported that it's losing money. It lost $359 million in the third quarter. Its stock is down about 80% this year. Meta reported that its profits have gone down 52% from a year ago, while spending was up by 19%. Its stock is down about 60% on the year. And even YouTube, which has historically been one of the more

• 44:02Kevin Roose?

  stable social media companies, reported that its revenue shrank in the third quarter as well. So all of the big social media companies, and I would put TikTok aside for a minute, but other than TikTok, all of the big social media companies seem to be really struggling right now. And I think there are a few primary reasons for why this is.

• 44:22Casey Newton?

  All right, let's hear them.

• 44:23Kevin Roose?

  So the first is that it's just the economy. The economy is down, inflation's high. We're maybe entering a recession. And generally recessions are bad for advertising-based businesses. So big companies that spend a lot on ads and social media and traditional media, generally, one of the first things that gets cut when you enter a downturn is the advertising budget.

• 44:44Casey Newton?

  Yeah, this one's a gimme. I'll give this to you.

• 44:46Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, so that's part of what's happening is just that the economy out there is bad, and that's rippling through the tech industry and the social media industry. The second explanation is that these companies, these social media companies, have just gotten really bloated and mismanaged, and that they are essentially undisciplined, and that that's what's causing the problems. So on Monday, Altimeter Capital, this hedge fund that owns a bunch of stock in Meta, sent this open letter to Mark Zuckerberg and Meta's board, basically saying that the company was bloated and lazy and that it needed to hit the gym. So I'll quote from the letter. It says, Like many other companies in a zero rate world, Meta has drifted into the land of excess. Too many people, too many ideas, too little urgency.

• 45:29Kevin Roose?

  Meta needs to get fit and focused. To accomplish this goal, we recommend a three-step plan that will double FCF, free cash flow, to $40 billion per year and focus the company's teams and investments. And they make three recommendations. One is reduce headcount by at least 20%, so lay off at least 20% of workers, reduce capex, capital expenditures, by at least $5 billion, and limit investment in the metaverse to no more than $5 billion a year. So Ultimater is saying what a lot of tech investors have been saying recently, which is that these companies, they just got too big too fast. They overhired, they don't lay people off, and so they're just all kind of inefficient and that they basically need to get fit. So that's one other explanation.

• 46:11Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I mean, and I'm certainly prepared to believe that when you have tens of thousands or more than 100,000 employees, some of them aren't getting all that much work done. But I do giggle a little bit at the idea that one of Meta's problems is that it has too many ideas. Like, I feel like that's sort of a hot take. Like, this company has two ideas, like clone TikTok and build VR. And if they're not doing a good job, that seems like a different question than, like, do they have too many employees?

• 46:37Kevin Roose?

  Right, so that's one theory that's out there. These companies are just lazy and undisciplined. The third theory is basically the "it's all Apple's fault" theory. And this is what you'll hear from executives at some companies, including Meta. They'll say, you know, "Apple, through its privacy changes to iOS that it implemented last year, made it harder for apps to track users across the internet. That in turn made targeted advertising less effective." And so now, you know, small businesses, large businesses that might have used targeted advertising a lot to reach their customers are finding that it's no longer that effective, and so they're spending less on the platform. And basically, Tim Cook and Apple, by making it harder for apps to track users across the internet, have essentially killed or threatened the entire social media industry.

• 47:22Casey Newton?

  Yeah, so I do totally buy this like app tracking transparency, which was the name of this feature. Clearly did just wipe out tens of billions of dollars for all these companies. And we should say, you know, you know what else that enabled? It enabled Apple to build a massive advertising business, right? Like a story that popped up this week is that developers are really mad because they're selling their podcasts or productivity apps. And suddenly they began to see ads for casino gambling games that were appearing on their App Store pages. Now, Apple has since walked that back, but it seems clear that Apple is building a huge advertising business on the backs of these changes that it has made.

• 47:58Kevin Roose?

  So of these three explanations, one being it's just the economy, two being it's a lack of discipline at the big social media companies, and three being it's all Apple's fault. Which of those do you think is most responsible for how badly social media companies are struggling right now?

• 48:12Casey Newton?

  Oh, gosh. I, you know, I don't know, because honestly, Kevin, I would throw a couple other things in there. Like, one is competition, right? Like TikTok is in there somewhere, and I'd be curious to know, you know, what you make of TikTok. And then two, and I think it's sort of related, is like, these platforms are getting a little old and stale, right? Like, every social platform is essentially just kind of chewing gum that loses the flavor after a little bit too long. And like, some of these platforms are starting to lose their flavor. So I don't know. I like, when I think of the, the biggest problem, it's somewhere at the nexus of all of those. Where do you sort of lay the blame?

• 48:51Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I think all of them have a lot to do with what's going on to some extent. I do think that when the economy recovers, some of these platforms will have a much easier.

• 48:59Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 48:59Kevin Roose?

  Like Snap, for example, their users are still growing. That is not an app that is in decline.

• 49:05Casey Newton?

  Yep.

• 49:06Kevin Roose?

  And yet they are losing money because the advertising market just isn't there. So that seems to me like an app that if the economy does turn around, if advertisers do come back, they've got the users. Their problem is not that they are losing popularity.

• 49:21Casey Newton?

  Right.

• 49:21Kevin Roose?

  Whereas I think Facebook and Instagram are in much more trouble because even if and when advertisers do come back, like their usage is declining, so they are losing the thing that makes the. Whole equation work, which is that users want to come back and spend hours a day on these apps.

• 49:37Casey Newton?

  I agree with that.

• 49:38Kevin Roose?

  But I think all these explanations still miss something for me, which is that I think there's something that's actually much broader going on right now. And this is an idea that I would say is like a strong view weekly held. Like I maybe only have 70% confidence in it. But I want to sort of give it a test drive today with you and get your reaction to it. I think social media is dying.

• 50:01Casey Newton?

  Well, so what do you mean by social media exactly?

• 50:03Kevin Roose?

  So I think social media to me means three things. It means you're a town square. You are where people, young, old, Republican, Democrat, you know, come to discuss what's going on in the world. Number two, I think social media that just in the name has two parts, social and media. So I think it has to have both a communication layer where you and I are sharing things with our friends and a broadcast layer where we can share something that then millions of people could see. I think a true social media platform needs to have both communication, sort of interpersonal communication and mass broadcast.

• 50:41Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 50:41Kevin Roose?

  And then I think social media apps generally are fueled by targeted advertising. That is the business model that allows them to be free, that allows them to work and that uses all of that data that's created to make the advertising experience better and make more money to pay for the whole thing. And I think all three of those components right now are kind of falling apart. So on the town square piece, we're already seeing social media apps start to fragment, right? We have all these right wing social media apps. We have, you know, young people are on TikTok, old people are on Facebook. We no longer have the kind of critical mass in the US of a place where everyone is going. On the second piece, I think we're also seeing a splintering of social media apps into communication and broadcast.

• 51:26Kevin Roose?

  So contrast like a Snapchat, which is mostly messaging with a TikTok, which is mostly broadcasting. And I think we're starting to see those kinds of apps separating from one another. And then I think the third is the targeted advertising piece, which I think Apple really is killing, or at least wounding, making it harder to do that at the same profit margins and the same level of profitability as it was just a couple of years ago. And so I think for me, the question is like, if the economy rebounds, if these companies do cut costs and trim the fat and become, you know, lean and mean. There might still be a future where we don't have these kind of big, successful, ultra-profitable social media platforms.

• 52:10Kevin Roose?

  It might just be that this sort of era in tech is over. What do you think about that?

• 52:13Casey Newton?

  So, I disagree with you. I think that social media is evolving, but that I can go through your points and provide some counterexamples.

• 52:26Kevin Roose?

  Please do.

• 52:27Casey Newton?

  One, you said that essentially there's no public square anymore because we're starting to see social media fragment into places where Republicans and Democrats are going to different places. The counterexample to that is TikTok.

• 52:40Kevin Roose?

  TikTok is one of the fastest-growing apps in the country right now.

• 52:42Casey Newton?

  Republicans and Democrats are there. Republicans are going viral, spreading their talking points, just as are Democrats. So I still think you have a place where everyone is going to broadcast, to discuss. Look at the comment section of any viral TikTok, right? It's very, very sort of vibrant. It has the attention. So I think by some large measure, TikTok has just replaced Facebook as the place where we go to get our information, our entertainment.

• 53:07Kevin Roose?

  Okay, that's fair.

• 53:08Casey Newton?

  Two, you say, you know, communication and broadcasts are separating into different things, and we have our messaging businesses and we have our entertainment businesses. And while I think that's sort of true, it's also true that TikTok in particular is trying to build in all of those messaging features, right? You know, TikTok, every now, every time I open the app now, it's saying, "We just found this person in your contacts, they're on TikTok, want to follow them?" It has a friends tab, so if my friends ever post a TikTok, I'll see them there. It just introduced a BeReal clone because it wants all my friends posting like a daily selfie to give me another reason to engage. So all of these things are kind of constantly, you know, morphing and transforming into versions of each other.

• 53:50Casey Newton?

  And I think you see TikTok, even though it started out as this big broadcast platform, it increasingly wants to build in all of those messaging features and keep it there as long as it possibly can.

• 53:59Kevin Roose?

  Okay.

• 53:59Casey Newton?

  And then third, I think you're right. Apple really is hurting these businesses with app tracking transparency. But what that is causing is for these companies to diversify their businesses. So for Meta, it means they're trying to become more of a hardware business. For a TikTok, it means that they're going to lean really hard into e-commerce and creating live shopping shows or try to get you buying stuff there. It's gonna let you buy sort of a digital gifts and tips for creators who might be live streaming, right? Maybe it's gonna let you subscribe to those creators to get some extra content from them. So the businesses are all evolving in reaction to what Apple did, but they're not going to wither and die by that alone.

• 54:43Casey Newton?

  So you sort of add all of that up, and I do think that you're right, that in one sense, this era where we would all go onto Facebook every day and we would post our status and comment on each other's statuses, that does feel a little bit different. But I do think a new era has arrived, and that era is we see funny stuff that was made mostly by kind of pro creators or really talented amateurs, and then we discuss that over private messages. And I think that's why it really feels different, right? It's like all that conversation we used to be having, that used to be in public, it used to be very in your face, right? You would post every time you change your relationship status, but now it's sort of like, look at this funny thing, lol, look at this funny thing. And like, that is the president of social media.

• 55:28Kevin Roose?

  Right. And where I think my view on that differs from yours is that I don't think that shift to private messaging is a temporary trend. I think that is like basically a species level evolution. Like, we had these 10 years where we were all just going ham on social media, posting our innermost thoughts, our things that we would normally just share with a tight group of people. All of a sudden, we were posting it to everyone that we went to high school with, everyone that we work with. It was this kind of like era where we didn't know how many people were listening. And so we were just dancing like nobody was watching, right? And then we kind of realized, oh, everyone is watching. I could get in real trouble. This could wreck my social life. This could wreck my relationships with. My family, this could cost me my job.

• 56:11Kevin Roose?

  And so gradually, people have just been shifting to private messaging, which is a much harder business to monetize, right? Because that is where you people want not just privacy, but encryption, some of them want, which means that you can't take their data and use it to target ads. It's also just not a place where people have traditionally had a lot of targeted advertising. I think if iMessage started putting ads into our group chats, we'd be like, what the hell?

• 56:36Casey Newton?

  Okay, first of all, don't give them any ideas.

• 56:38Kevin Roose?

  Sorry, whichever Apple VP is now furiously drafting up a memo to insert targeted ads into iMessage. But I do think that that's sort of a thing that we've all learned in the last decade. And maybe to bring it around full circle to the Twitter discussion, like, I really think there was an era where we didn't know how powerful these apps were.

• 56:57Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 56:57Kevin Roose?

  And I think now the secret is out, right? Elon Musk wants to own Twitter, not because he thinks it's a great business, but because he knows like that's where real power in today's world is. We all sort of understand the stakes and the consequences of what we post on social media. And so I don't think we're going back to a world where we kind of forget that the audience is out there and just share our innermost thoughts with the world.

• 57:20Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I think we're changing our relationship with that audience. And we're being much more selective about when we want to be the performer and when we want to be the audience. I think there was a time when we were sort of very happy being both on any given day. And now we're really picking and choosing our moments, which actually feels much more sustainable for the future of the species.

• 57:40Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, the problem is that if you don't have these giant platforms where everyone is doing both their private communication and their public communication, you end up with a much smaller business.

• 57:49Casey Newton?

  I have to say, the world you're describing, it sounds like a better world than the one we were living in, right?

• 57:55Kevin Roose?

  Totally.

• 57:56Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm happy to live in a world where every person doesn't feel like they need to be posting 24/7 for clout just so they can get a job or have friends, right? And maybe a mode where most of us use these apps primarily for entertainment and to sort of message our friends, you know, a few times a day. It feels a lot more chill.

• 58:16Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I mean, I do have some nostalgia for the days when we all just like live tweeted our inner monologues.

• 58:22Casey Newton?

  Can you believe anyone used to change their relationship status to it's complicated?

• 58:25Kevin Roose?

  Oh, my god.

• 58:27Casey Newton?

  Who are we doing that for?

• 58:30Kevin Roose?

  It caused a lot of drama in my school. It was like, oh, did you see? Did you see Scott and Bethany just change their relationship status? I think there was a level of naivete on our parts as the users as these platforms got bigger about how, about who we were talking to. And I think that era is really over. And so I think it's, yes, these businesses may recover some or most of their revenue and their profits if the economy recovers. But I do think there's a bigger change that's happened on the part of the users that is not going to reverse itself.

• 59:04Casey Newton?

  That's right. And you know how this era is going to end? When the AI-generated content gets so good that it's personalized only to you and there's not even anyone you would share it with because it's so specific to your personal taste, so that we just sort of enter a mode of pure consumption and we become the people in the floating chairs like in Wally.

• 59:30Kevin Roose?

  We'll be right back.

• 59:39Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 1:00:13Speaker 04

  Today's AI builders need infrastructure that scales with their ambitions. iRen is a vertically integrated AI cloud platform, delivering data centers, compute, and software for AI training and inference, underpinned by its expansive portfolio of land and grid-connected power in renewable-rich regions globally. iRen's AI cloud gives direct access to Nvidia GPUs, scalable from hundreds to thousands.

• 1:00:37Speaker 04

  For builders, that means direct access to AI compute, rapid scaling, and predictable pricing. Iron, AI Cloud for the next big thing.

• 1:00:46Speaker 05

  AI spend is growing fast, but most businesses still can't see exactly where that money is going. Ramp gives businesses visibility and control across AI providers with real-time guardrails by team and model, helping ensure spend goes to the highest ROI areas. Stop guessing where your AI spend is going. Get started with Ramp. And if you're new to Ramp, you can get $250 off at ramp.com/hardfork. Go to ramp.com/hardfork. Ramp.com/hardfork.

• 1:01:21Kevin Roose?

  All right. Do you want to do the credits?

• 1:01:24Casey Newton?

  Yes. Hard Fork is produced by Davis Land. We're edited by Paula Schuman. This episode was fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Corey Shreppel. Original music by Dan Powell, Alicia Baitutup, and Marian Lozano. Special thanks to Hannah Ingber, Nell Galogly, Kate LaPreste, Shannon Busta, Mahima Shabloni, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us at [email protected]. That's all for this week. We'll see you down the dusty trail.

• 1:02:30Speaker 06

  It's time to innovate at the speed of AI without compromising control. That's Outsystems. Take a look at what happened with one global retailer during a period of massive expansion. They used Outsystems to build AI agents to automate invoicing and translation processes, shifting 95% of their daily store operations to a new digital app, saving thousands of hours of manual work. Outsystems gives you the flexibility to deploy how you want and the governance to do it safely. Own your agentic future. Learn more at outsystems.com/NYT. That's outsystems.com/NYT.