The Rise and Fall of Twitter

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Evan Henshaw Plath, who also goes by rabble, is a self-described anarchist hacker and troublemaker. Back in 2006, he was part of a team building a podcast startup in San Francisco called Odeo. The idea that took off was a platform where you could text short messages for all your friends to see.

Elon Musk took over Twitter with the promise of promoting free speech and making the loss-making platform profitable again. But his critics say he’s destroying Twitter’s culture and driving it to bankruptcy. How much danger is the company really in? In the first episode in a new series of Tech Tonic, Elaine Moore, deputy editor of the FT’s Lex column, asks whether Musk will save Twitter or destroy it.

In this episode we hear from Evan Henshaw-Plath, one of the original creators of Twitter; Rumman Chowdhury, Twitter’s former head of machine learning, ethics, transparency, and accountability who was laid off by Elon Musk; and FT tech reporter Hannah Murphy.

Presented by Elaine Moore. Produced by Edwin Lane and Josh Gabert-Doyon, Executive producer is Manuela Saragosa. Sound design by Breen Turner and Samantha Giovinco. Original music by Metaphor Music. The FT’s head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Special thanks to Hannah Murphy

Clips: TED Conferences, CBS, Joe Rogan Experience Podcast, MSNBC, CNN

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Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com

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