Hatching Twitter

Highlights

Jack had been the first CEO of Twitter and another cofounder. He had been pushed out of the company by Ev in a similar power struggle in 2008.

writing marketing material for a company called O’Reilly Media, was in Sebastopol, a small, quiet hippie town fifty-five miles north of San Francisco.

The day he left for California, Clarks’s population went from 374 people to 373.

One week in the summer of 1999, while she was away on vacation, Ev released the diary Web site to the world. He called it Blogger, a word that had not existed until then. He believed it would allow people without any computer-programming knowledge to create a Web log, or blog.

He soon learned that if you give a microphone to enough people, someone will yell something into it that will offend someone else.

earth. It was the picture of Evan Williams, the Pied

Then, on February 15, 2003, he got the call. Evan Williams had found gold. Tens of millions of dollars in ones and zeros. “The buyout is a huge boost to an enormously diverse genre of online publishing that has begun to change the equations of online news and information,” wrote the San Jose Mercury News reporter who broke the news of the deal. “Part of that vision, shared by other blogging pioneers, has been to help democratize the creation and flow of news in a world where giant companies control so much of what most people see.”

Instead he had assisted with May Day from the comfort of a cubicle at Palm, Inc., the maker of the PalmPilot, where he was freelancing, using the company’s servers and computers (without his supervisors’ knowledge, of course) to cause havoc for the bankers, who used, well, PalmPilots.

Building a start-up is a lot like building a house, as Noah soon learned, so he recruited more laborers to help.

At night, after a long day coding, Rabble and Gabba would leave the coffee shop of the day and become invisible as they slowly opened the squeaky door to the van and quietly slipped inside, climbing over a jungle gym of ripped black leather seats and stained carpets. They would sleep on a makeshift bed built of plywood and rusty nails until the sun rose a few hours later, ushering in another day of tireless hacking.

Those same programmers didn’t understand blogging, and Ev soon learned that the acquisition of Blogger was facilitated simply to place ads next to people’s blogs, not to try to further the cause of push-button publishing for the people.

But after Google, Ev wasn’t anywhere to be found at Odeo, either. He soon semiretired at thirty-two years old. His bank account had gone from a three-figure balance—often barely enough to cover his rent—to double-digit millions of dollars.

He hadn’t done any drugs; he had been arrested for being Noah.

His hands tied, Noah sadly had no choice but to agree, trading the CEO role at Odeo to Ev for a two-hundred-thousand-dollar investment and keys to Ev’s old apartment that he once saw in a picture in Forbes magazine.

Jack also had an anarchist background. One of his tattoos, on his right leg, was a black and orange star, which was a symbol for an anarchist group. He had been vociferous for years online about his contempt for war and corporations. He’d written about these issues on his own personal Web site, which he called gu.st, and also posted some rants about the perils of capitalism, his disdain for banking institutions, and Americans’ thirst for oil. He also frequented message boards promoting feminism.

At the time, he was destitute and didn’t have anything to sell, so he set up auctions where he offered to read the famous children’s book Goodnight Moon over the phone to the highest bidder. He somehow managed to sell his reading service to four different people—one of whom paid one hundred dollars to listen to Jack, a perfect stranger, read.

Ev wasn’t like any traditional boss Biz had worked under before. When Ev hired someone new, rather than wait to trust them with confidential information or important tasks, he chose to trust them immediately. Biz felt a sense of confidence and pride that Ev treated him this way, and the bond between the two quickly tightened. Before long, fueled by their collective comic relief, Biz, Ev, and Goldman became best friends.

The cultural difference was incalculable. The sterile, robotic culture of Google, with its know-it-all engineers and bossy bosses, was now replaced with tattooed hackers with a do-what-you-want mentality.

He had always had a difficult time making decisions and pressing the final launch button. Noah, brimming with excitement and eagerness, had not.

including Ariel Poler, who presumed that podcasting could become a competitor to radio, just as blogging had done to publishing. In August 2005, with no business model, Odeo had received five million dollars in funding from Charles River Ventures and a number of other smaller investors—a bet on podcasting and Ev, not necessarily on the company or the people working for it.

“Who would you lose? Who could you afford to lose the most?” Noah asked Biz and Ev on the boat as they floated through the chilly water, smiling, as he already knew the answer.

Some were totally bizarre, like his suggestion to create a start-up that would allow programmers to team up and work together, but not in a traditional way. The idea was that while one person wrote code, the other programmer would massage his or her shoulders; then they would switch.

But in 2005, although it had taken off in other countries and with teenage girls in the United States, text messaging was a relatively esoteric form of communication for most of America.

Jack listed a few items he liked, including music, sailing, and programming. Then he mentioned his “status” concept.

At the time, Jack had been using a blogging service called LiveJournal, which was a competitor to Blogger.

When teens started using the “away” feature, they took a different approach, often typing in their mood or the music that was currently playing on their computer. Soon nerds like Jack, Crystal, and Noah were copying teenagers and also making their away messages

This status thing could help connect people to those who weren’t there. It wasn’t just about sharing what kind of music you were listening to or where you were at that moment; it was about connecting people and making them feel less alone. It could be a technology that would erase a feeling that an entire generation felt while staring into their computer screens. An emotion that Noah and Jack and Biz and Ev had grown up feeling, finding solace in a monitor. An emotion that Noah felt night after night as his marriage and company fell apart: loneliness.

His vibrating phone led him to think of the brain impulses that cause a muscle to twitch.

His vibrating phone led him to think of the brain impulses that cause a muscle to twitch. “Twitch!” No, that would never work, he thought.

“The light chirping sound made by certain birds.” Noah’s heart started to pound as he continued to read. “A similar sound, especially light, tremulous speech or laughter.” This is it, he thought. “Agitation or excitement; flutter.” A verb. Twitter. Twitter. Twittered. Twittering. Twitters.

A few days went by and Ev composed an e-mail to Noah and a couple of other Odeo execs. Jack was so low within the company, he wasn’t included in the message.

For his first update he wrote, “setting up my twitlog,” a few minutes later adding, “hmmm . . . will it work?” He then spent the next few days updating pithy Twitlogs from his phone. “Eating a vegan peanut butter cookie. Mmm.” “Wishing Sara was here.” “Walking to work.” “Eating a vegan burger in Salt Lake airport.”

And now admission was free. You simply paid in privacy by giving up your personal information for access.

A couple of Valley entrepreneurs with a witty sense of humor about the roller-coaster mentality of the tech scene decided to capitalize on the demise of these start-ups and started a monthly club called “Valleyschwag,” where people would pay a twenty dollars a month to receive a bag of random swag. Each month’s goodies, wrapped in brown burlap, included T-shirts, stickers, pens, and mouse pads from the companies that were about to disappear in an elaborate magic trick of their own making.

Two weeks later, faced with no other choice and no one in his corner, Noah resigned. He stopped by the desolate office on a Saturday afternoon, packed his life into cardboard boxes, and let the beige door slam behind him, no longer an employee of two companies he helped start.

Jack rushed back and forth to a liquor store around the corner to buy cheap bottles of vodka and plastic cups.

The plan was to give out free drinks, along with the Twitter flyers, to get people to sign up for the service.

Goldman was immediately caught up in the Lord of the Flies–like power vacuum. Technically he reported to Jack while on Twitter, but he was also reporting to Ev on Obvious and was possibly Jack’s superior, as Obvious technically owned Twitter.

Technically he reported to Jack while on Twitter, but he was also reporting to Ev on Obvious and was possibly Jack’s superior, as Obvious technically owned Twitter.

Since the site had been built as a prototype in two weeks using a relatively new programming language called Ruby on Rails, it was rife with shortcuts and code problems.

Jack had continued to see Twitter as a way to talk about what was happening to him. Ev was starting to see it as a view into what was happening in the world.

The Apple iPhone would not go on sale for another three months, so the act of peering down at a cell

Since Twitter worked via text message, people with all types of cell phones could use the service and it started to spread quickly among the conference attendees.

“I would like to thank everyone in 140 characters or less,” Jack said to the crowd as he leaned forward into the microphone “. . . and I just did.” He waved, then said, “Thank you,” as the group walked off the stage to thunderous applause.

But this was the type of thing Goldman worried about from Jack. Using usernames, rather than real names, was a typical engineering decision. People in the real world didn’t call themselves bob2342; they were simply Bob.

More than a year after it had begun as an experiment, Twitter had grown to nearly 250,000 active users.

Brickhouse was a cavernous, loftlike space. Huge white columns randomly interrupted the floor like giant linebackers standing on a football field. At one end of the room, floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on the city; at the other, a wall had been meticulously covered with thousands of fluorescent Post-it notes, creating an image of a giant pixelated hand. Engineers lay about on beanbags programming on their laptops. It was a nerd’s paradise.

watched Ev walk Bradley around the Twitter garden. Then the

“So it’s a social network?” Bradley asked. Silence filled the room. Almost a year into the service, there was no consistent answer to the question.

Major news outlets—including the New York Times, Dow Jones, and the Defamer blog—had set up on the streets of Twitter, all sharing breaking, local, and gossipy news.

Some in the media had taken to calling it “hipster narcissism,” “self-absorption,” “self-obsession,” “egotistical,” and more than a few people who had tried Twitter called it a “complete and utter fucking waste of time.”

The comical tone was interrupted as Ev told them what Bradley had said on the phone: that he believed Yahoo! could easily build the technology behind Twitter, that it was “simply just a messaging service” and “a few engineers could do the same thing in a week.” He had concluded that if Twitter didn’t sell, Yahoo! planned to build and release a competitor. It was a typical relationship offering in the Valley: Either you fuck us, or we’ll fuck you.

“The question everyone asks is ‘What is the business model?’ To be completely and totally honest, we don’t yet know,” Fred wrote on Union Square’s Web site. “The capital we are investing will go to making Twitter a better, more reliable and robust service. That’s what the focus needs to be right now.” Revenue would have to come later.

Because of the way the site had been built—hacked together over two weeks—the influx of people on Twitter was making it fall apart. It wasn’t just one aspect of the service that was breaking; it was every aspect of

Although the site’s problems should have slowed the flood of people signing up, they were only making it worse, adding bad press that would pique more curiosity about this Twitter thing—“If everyone else is signing up and breaking it, then surely I should see what this thing is about”—a pile-on of hundreds of thousands of people on one tiny little company.

They proclaimed, on Twitter of course, that they would snub the service for twenty-four hours to show their disdain for the free site going off-line all the time. On the same day, after reading about the boycott, another group of Twitter supporters decided to send free pizzas to 164 South Park to show their love of the service.

The first use of the @ symbol was by a young Apple designer, Robert Andersen, who on November 2, 2006, replied to his brother by placing an @ before his name as they talked.

On Flickr, the photo-sharing site, people sometimes used the hashtag symbol to group similar images. In one instance, people had been using Flickr to share pictures of forest fires in San Diego, California, and had started to organize the newsy pictures with a tag that read “#sandiegofire.”

Although he would never admit it, pretending that he knew exactly what he was doing and that his actions were all part of a bigger, more resolute plan, he was so far out of his league that he was often speechless.

He loved sewing and enthusiastically set out to learn how to make an A-line skirt for his first class assignment.

Jack was furious but didn’t respond. He didn’t know how to respond. He didn’t know if he could respond. Could a CEO argue with a chairman?

Jack had always seen Twitter as a status updater, a way to say where he was and what he was doing. A place to display yourself, your ego. Ev, who was shy and had been shaped by his days building Blogger, saw it as a way to share where other people were and what other people were doing.

The company was now made up of fifteen employees. There were 1,273,220 registered users on the service. Those people were sending almost fifteen million status updates a month. The outline noted that updates were global, coming from all over the planet.

It didn’t matter that Twitter still had no business model or even the faintest sign of one. Or that the site was broken. Everyone still wanted a piece of the fledgling company because it was gaining so much attention. Investors wanted their names associated with the Next Big Thing, and they believed they could help fix its problems.

Bijan’s fingers moved on the keyboard in a repetitive motion. Back and forth he typed, one single word, like a parrot with Tourette’s syndrome. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.” Then he hit “send,” catapulting the words in an e-mail to Fred Wilson’s in-box. Nothing else,

Then he hit “send,” catapulting the words in an e-mail to Fred Wilson’s in-box. Nothing else, just the word “fuck,” eighteen times.

To: Jack. “Please call me when you get this message,” he wrote, noting that he wanted to clear up his previous e-mail. “Out of context this could be really confusing.”

Jack had suggested putting in a Radiohead room. “It can play Radiohead twenty-four hours a day!”

It was the “enough’s enough” moment for Ev. But also for Fred and Bijan. And in several secret calls and meetings, they decided it was time to figure out what was going on inside Twitter.

Jack, who had been managing expenses on his laptop, had been doing the math incorrectly.

Jack, who had been managing expenses on his laptop, had been doing the math incorrectly. When Ev learned about this, he asked a friend and seasoned entrepreneur, Bryan Mason, to meet with Jack and show him how to manage the company’s books, but Bryan spent the entire meeting at a whiteboard with a marker explaining the basics of accounting.

Although most employees would have helped pull Ev’s side of the tug-of-war rope given the choice, and although Jack was completely out of his league as CEO, some Twitter employees, including Biz,

While Jack listened, he paused for a moment as he heard Radiohead lyrics floating in the background in the tiny conference room, his iPhone pressed up to his ear trying to block out the faint music. He looked in the direction of the speaker, briefly registering the irony of the song “Karma Police” playing while he was embroiled in this confusing power battle with Ev.

Ev and Jack opened their respective conference-room doors simultaneously, paused briefly as they looked at each other as in a dramatic romantic-comedy scene, then walked briskly across the concrete floor in the same direction to sit awkwardly and silently across from each other.

Of course, they knew Jack couldn’t fix anything in three months, or three years. He was incapable of running the company. It was like watching somebody try to build sand castles underwater.

“I believe Jack would take a ‘passive’ chairman role,” Bijan wrote. “It would then really be up to Ev to decide if he could live with Jack’s new title.” He hit “send” before he realized what he had done. Seconds later, he looked up at the exchange and uttered a word he was about to write eighteen times in an e-mail that he then sent to Fred: “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”

Barack Obama was using Twitter to try to disrupt politics and grassroots campaigning and, he hoped, win the election. And the media, including the Huffington Post, had set up Twitter accounts to update live snippets from the 2008 conventions.

The reality was, Twitter didn’t need to do anything to ensure that it kept growing.

The reality was, Twitter didn’t need to do anything to ensure that it kept growing. It was already on its way

Twitter continued to compress time, often reporting news more quickly than news outlets that had been in the business for more than a century. As more people joined the service, it moved even faster. During the 2008 conventions, the 1.4 million people who were actively using Twitter sent more than 365,000 tweets from both the Republican and Democratic conventions. Such numbers showed that the elections were important, Ev agreed, but they weren’t more important than growing the tiny team of twenty-two employees and getting the site working properly.

“We have a bit of a problem,” Greg began. While he had been running tests on the site, he had discovered that there was no backup of Twitter. “If the database goes down right now, we would lose everything,” Greg said awkwardly. Every tweet, every user,

“He’s not gonna go to fucking Facebook.” Fred laughed, rolling his eyes in Bijan’s direction, his hand in its usual resting spot, his chin. “Look, I get that he’s all starry-eyed by Zuck, but he’s not gonna go work there.”

Fred repeated himself almost verbatim: We’re making Ev CEO. You’re getting a passive chairman role. You will have a silent board seat. Here’s the paperwork. Call a lawyer.

“So I’m supposed to just lie to my girlfriend?” Goldman said with anger and sarcasm in his voice. “Yes. You need to learn to separate business and relationships,” Ev responded.

Still, Kidd had taken him in and let him stay in the guesthouse in the backyard. He also gave him a job as a nanny for his newborn baby. A blue-haired, dreadlocked

Ev tried again to explain the vesting time frame, but Jack interrupted. “This is my company!” Jack slammed. “I’ve put so much more into it than you have.” After Jack railed for a while, Ev calmly responded: “This isn’t your company. It’s done.”

The company was still small, with just under thirty employees and freelancers.

And for the first time he told a story he would repeat for years, that he would still be around, as the “executive chairman,” involved in a larger role at Twitter. He didn’t explain that his chairman title was a sham and meant nothing. That he was completely out of a job at the company he had cofounded. That he had been fired. When he was done, he walked away,

They all hugged, and Jack could feel tears welling up in his eyes, but he held them back. He couldn’t cry in front of his employees. That is not what ex-CEOs do. — When Ev and Biz wrapped up their speeches, they told everyone a blog post would be going up on the site to announce the changes and instructed them not to speak to the press or tweet about it.

Although some employees had been sad to see Jack go

Although some employees had been sad to see Jack go as a friend, they were relieved they no longer had to report to him as a boss. In the months leading up to Jack’s departure, employees had complained to senior staffers that Jack had acted like a “cowboy” when he was CEO, sometimes ordering people around and rarely trusting those who worked below him. When Ev stepped up to take charge of the company, he took a completely different approach to management, always trusting employees from the get-go, which gave them a sense of pride and, in turn, a loyalty to Ev and Twitter.

Biz and Ev had driven down to Facebook’s campus a few days earlier to meet with Mark. Like most meetings involving the chief of Facebook, it had been almost unbearably uncomfortable.

Given the limited seating options, Biz and Ev chose a tiny two-seater couch that butted up against the wall. Facebook’s boyish CEO had rushed to take the only other seat in the room, an almost high chair that sat above them on a higher plane. Facebook and its CEO looking down on Twitter and its CEO.

“Should I close the door or leave it open?” Ev asked. “Yes,” Mark replied. Ev looked at Biz, who shrugged. “Yes I should close it, or yes I should leave it open?” Ev asked. “Yes,” Mark said again.

Then, as Mark often did when he was trying to buy companies, he had noted that if the founders chose not to sell, Facebook would continue “to build products that moved further in their direction.”

“It seems to me, there are three reasons to sell a company,” Ev wrote in an e-mail to the board outlining why they should decline Facebook’s offer. 1. The price is good enough or a value that the company will be in the future. (“We’ve often said Twitter is a billion dollar company. I think it’s many, many times that,” Ev wrote.) 2. There’s an imminent and very real threat from a competitor. (Nothing is going to “pose a credible threat of taking Twitter to zero.”) 3. You have a choice to go and work for someone great. (“I don’t use [Facebook]. And I have many concerns about their people and how they do business.”)

They started to discuss a product that would allow people to make such a purchase using a cell phone and a credit card and got to work on an idea they would first call Squirrel, then rename Square.

He told Jack that one afternoon he had missed out on the sale of a large glass sculpture because his customer didn’t have enough cash. They started to discuss a product that would allow people to make such a purchase using a cell phone and a credit card and got to work on an idea they would first call Squirrel, then rename Square.

As was the case for most venture capitalists in the Valley, it wasn’t about the money for him; it was about winning. Fenton had to be the best at everything he did: marathons, venture capital, learning to fly helicopters.

“We had to hold some metaphorical guns to some metaphorical heads,” Gore said with a chuckle. Then Joel, his business partner, chimed in. “Al, the heads were real!” Followed by a roar of laughter.

Like most high-level politicians, Gore had more charisma and charm than a Hollywood star.

“We gotta stop doing these meetings with famous people,” Ev said. “They keep trying to buy us!”

Here they were, in the Trump Hotel in Chicago, watching CNN race Ashton Kutcher to be the first account to get to one million followers on Twitter, and in a few short hours Ev would be going on The Oprah Winfrey Show to help Oprah, one of the most famous and influential women in the world, send her first tweet.

Wednesday quickly turned into a series of internal meetings about how to make sure Twitter didn’t collapse under the weight of Oprah’s stardom.

To ensure she couldn’t mess

To ensure she couldn’t mess up her first tweet, the staff had set up a laptop with colored stickers that Oprah was instructed to press after typing her first 140-character missive.

But instead Oprah pressed the caps-lock button first, then began typing: “HI TWITTERS. THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21ST CENTURY.”

history—nearly half a million people in the first twenty-four hours—and although the servers were battered, they managed to survive.

Later Ev wrote an e-mail to the staff with the title “Holy cow.” He continued: “Just going to bed here in Chicago. Am going to get about 4 hrs sleep,” effusing about how proud he was of the thirty-five-person staff that had kept the site alive through the influx of users. “What a week for Twitter! Thanks for everyone’s hard work.”

In the past, history was always written by the victors. But in the age of Twitter, history is written by everyone. The victors become the ones with the loudest voices who get to tell their version of history.

When Hillary Clinton had become the Obama administration’s new secretary of state, she had given Cohen—and his boss, Alec Ross, another young State official—the authority to promote diplomacy with the new technologies available to everyday citizens. In other words, they had a License to Social Media.

As Jack sat dripping sweat, he wasn’t thinking about the fact that he would soon be meeting with the Iraqi president. Instead he was obsessing about the last line of the Wall Street Journal article he had read on the ground in Jordan.

Jack repeated the last line in his head over and over during the flight. “Revolutionize email!” Why had Ev had kicked him out of the company if he didn’t even want to run it?

“Sorry, my first tweet not pleasant,” Barham Salim said in his first 140-character proclamation. “Dust storm in Baghdad today & yet another suicide bomb. Awful reminder that it is not yet all fine here.”

“Before you go inside, there’s one more thing I need to give you,” their handler said. “You’ll need to wear this lapel pin so guests know you’re one of the Time 100 Most Influential People in the World.”

Ev was seated with Joy Behar, cohost of The View, and Moot, who had won the title of World’s Most Influential Person after his Web site, 4Chan, had rigged the Time vote.

Then Ev told Jack to amend his Twitter bio, which stated that Jack was the founder and inventor of Twitter.

“A seventeen-year-old with a smart phone can now do what it used to take an entire CNN crew to do,” she said. “It’s bringing transparency to opaque places.”

“It’s allowing us to see inside places like Syria and Iran, places where the media can’t go,” Ross said.

Cohen explained that there was a large protest planned in Iran at the same time the site was scheduled to go down for maintenance. He asked if they could postpone the upkeep. “This could literally make the difference in terms of what happens in that country,” Cohen wrote in the e-mail.

“We’re clearly not smart enough to understand Iranian politics,” Biz said to Goldman as they sat in a quiet conference room together trying to figure out what to write. “We don’t know who the good guys are or who the bad guys are.” Biz paused and then joked: “Wait, are there any good guys?” Goldman laughed.

In other words, Facebook had changed the locks on its door, at least for Twitter, blocking access to the site’s friends lists, even though thousands of other sites were allowed to access the same Rolodex.

They all believed that these technologies, first and foremost, should be a mouthpiece for everyday people.

and Crystal, who managed Twitter’s support team, had always said no, “not without a warrant.”

As Ev still owned the largest majority of the company, he would become a billionaire in a sale to Facebook or any other big suitor. But it wasn’t about the money for Ev, it was about protecting the sanctity of Twitter and giving a voice to the people who used it.

In 2007 people had been sending 5,000 tweets a day. By 2008 the company had been processing 300,000 tweets each day. As 2009 rolled on, that number grew by 1,400 percent to 35 million tweets sent each day.

He knew the company hadn’t failed because it didn’t have enough work. Quite the opposite. It had cracked because each week Ev would come in and announce to his friends and employees that he had a new idea, a new project, a new focus.

In that moment, looking at the list, he made two promises to himself: First, he would repay his father. Second, if he ever had an opportunity to run another company, he would never lose focus like that again; he would always make a firm decision and stick to it.

The latter wasn’t as easy to solve. Coming up with ideas was what made Ev Ev.

But to his surprise, both Ev and Campbell said no. “Twitter? Not interested,” Campbell told Fenton, “I don’t need a CEO coach,” asserted Ev.

When it was Ev’s turn to talk, he asked his first question: “What’s the worst thing I can do as CEO to fuck the company up?” Without skipping a beat, Campbell responded: “Hire your fucking friends!” He went into a ten-minute tirade about friends and business and how they don’t mix. Ev scribbled in his notepad.

In contrast to his inability to make smaller decisions, when Ev made up his mind about something big, it was going to happen.

The video, which included a walk-along interview with Jack, never mentioned Ev’s, Biz’s, or Noah’s involvement. “Dorsey has become a superstar,” the CBS host said. “He was honored last month at his home town of St. Louis, where he spoke at Webster University, he got the key to the city from the mayor, and threw out the first pitch at the St. Louis Cardinals game.” When Ev heard about the report, he just shook his head. Each morning the Twitter employees would come into the office to find more press about Jack—articles, talks, and interviews from all over the planet.

But it wasn’t just Jack’s press junkets that were gaining the ire of his cofounders and Twitter’s investors. As he continued his development of his new company, Square, he was using his Twitter e-mail address to set up meetings with venture capitalists and the media, often saying he would be happy to discuss Twitter, when

For the first time in the company’s history, a number that had been at zero since day one had started to grow: revenue. In December 2009, Dick had been instrumental in striking a deal with Google and Bing to make the nearly forty million tweets being sent across the site each day viewable on their respective search engines.

band—Jobs once told 60 Minutes that his “model for business is the Beatles.”

“Did you have the opportunity to work with Steve Jobs?” Jack would ask. “Can you tell me a little about his management style?”

Before long, like someone undergoing minor plastic surgeries until he resembles his idol, Jack no longer looked and acted like Jack Dorsey: He began acting like the second coming of Steve Jobs. The Beatles, the Gandhi references, the “editor” title, the design ethos, the daily uniform, and the quotes all contributed to what happened next.

On a late afternoon in mid-2010, Mike Abbott, who was vice president of engineering at Twitter, asked Jack if he could stop by the Square offices to chat. Abbott had no idea that

The site was also finally on the mend. The engineering team had come up with an extensive long-term plan to rebuild the entire back end of Twitter, fixing the legacy problems that had plagued the company since its inception.

“We will need a map of all of the exits and elevators,” one of them said

“We will need a map of all of the exits and elevators,” one of them said in his thick Russian accent to a Twitter employee.

But June 23, 2010, was different. Dmitry Medvedev, the president of Russia, would be arriving at Twitter’s headquarters to take a tour of the office and, as he put it, to “see with his own eyes” the hottest start-up

It was a stark example of how the world’s stage was changing. On previous visits to the United States, leaders of other nations would meet with newspaper and magazine editors. Now, rather than fly into New York City and make the rounds at Esquire, Time, or Newsweek, officials were dropping in to Silicon Valley to see the companies that were changing the way the world communicated.

Twitter would be the first part of a three-day trip to the United States by President Medvedev to bolster relations between America and Russia.

Rather, Johnson noted, “as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth.”

At the peak, more than twenty thousand were signing up for Twitter accounts in a single hour. (It had taken eight months to reach the twenty-thousand-user milestone in 2006.) Even the best-engineered Web site on the Internet would have had trouble handling such attention. But for Twitter, which was still being held together by chewing gum and masking tape, the crowds had been like a whale trying to fit into a goldfish bowl.

As luck would have it, the moment President Medvedev’s entourage of black cars pulled up to the beige building on the corner of Folsom and Fourth streets, one or all of the above had happened to Twitter.

He looked as if he had just run to the deli to pick up a carton of milk, not come to meet the president of Russia and an entourage of global

Out on the street, President Medvedev looked up at the building as he was directed inside by his security detail. He walked past the Subway sandwich shop to his right, through the open glass doors, and across the marble-floored lobby and into the elevator. He didn’t need to wait for an elevator, because for the next several hours the only person who would be able to enter or leave the building or travel between floors would be him.

There had been meetings over the previous few weeks with the White House, the State Department, the San Francisco mayor’s office, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office, and the Russian embassy to play through the meticulously planned visit. The plan: After the Russian president sent his first tweet, the White House would retweet it. Barack Obama would reply, congratulating him on his tweet, as would the mayor and governor, all welcoming the Russian president to Twitter and to the United States.

“Holy fuck,” he whispered to Ev as the president walked forward to talk to Mayor Newsom. “That was close.”

Yet after Abbot, Ali, and other senior staffers complained to the board about Ev’s recent management choices, the near miss with the Russian president, Ev’s slothlike decision-making process, and his insistence on hiring friends, the tide had turned.

Then, after Ev left the room, proud that his mentor thought he was doing such a great job, Campbell would shout at the group: “You gotta get rid of this fucking guy! He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing!”

Although Twitter was now making more money with its advertising products, Ev wasn’t as concerned with the revenue side of the operation, which was more fuel for the board’s desire to oust him as CEO. Dick, on the other hand, had been leading the charge to make Twitter profitable, which contributed to the board’s decision to ask him to be the interim CEO when they thrust Ev out of the company.

and millions of new accounts were being created each week.

Ev had continued to try and help the people close to him, giving money away in undisclosed ways. At a friend’s art opening, he anonymously purchased the artist’s work. He had also started to give vast sums away to charities, secretly donating hundreds of thousands of dollars. And taking care of his friends and family by paying off debts for those closest to him.

“You mean you didn’t know about this?” Goldman asked. “Noooo!” Dick said, shocked. “This is literally the first I’ve ever heard of it.” This wasn’t true, but it wasn’t completely untrue, either.

Campbell, who had known about Ev’s approaching ousting for months (even during the coaching sessions), had suggested to the board that he tell Ev to step down, but he wasn’t supposed to mention the Dick part of the equation.

Dick sat, mouth agape, unsure what to do as Campbell walked out after his speech where he told Dick that they would find another company in the Valley where he could become the CEO. As soon as the board heard, Dick’s phone started ringing, with Fred and Bijan telling him, “Don’t go anywhere! You’re not fired!”

“I second,” said Jack. It was in that moment that Ev started to realize what was happening. Jack had been behind it all. Moving chess pieces, ten moves ahead. This was Jack’s revenge.

But although Ev had come close on several occasions to removing Jack, once his friend, now enemy number one, he had always decided against the conflict. That act of mercy was to be Ev’s demise.

But Biz was genuinely confused. “I don’t understand how they can just throw away this guy’s entire career,” he said to Goldman as they talked about Fred’s e-mail. “Don’t these people have feelings?” Although Biz was a cofounder of Twitter, he had never really had much power at the company. He had never understood what drove the “money guys.” The e-mail from the board seemed utterly unfair.

she stopped midscreen and rolled her eyes as she called people over to look at the message he had jokingly sent a year earlier: “First full day as Twitter COO tomorrow. Task #1: undermine CEO, consolidate power.”

“Dick!” he said loudly. “Please explain to me—let me see if I have this right—you will not agree with the idea that Ev is head of product and you are CEO because you’re uncomfortable?” Biz said. “That’s exactly right,” Dick replied tersely.

Ev had known all along that it had never been about the money. A billionaire still throws up into a garbage can. It was about making a dent in the universe. About power, the power that had been sucked from politicians and Hollywood, from celebrities, revolutionaries, corporations, and the media, then siphoned through this bizarre fucking thing called Twitter. This accidental thing that had tipped the world upside down.

Ev walked out, a microphone in his hand, and delivered his own eulogy, telling employees that he had decided to step into a product role and had asked Dick to take over as CEO. A solemn few words said in an upbeat tone. Then he stepped aside, handing the microphone to the new CEO of Twitter. The third CEO in two years.

Like Jack in his “silent” chairman role, Ev was now a “silent” product director.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

“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.

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.

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.”

In 2012, a year after Ev officially left Twitter, thinking of what had taken place behind his back, he sat down with Sara and they asked each other the following questions: How can we raise our children to never act this way? How can we raise them to be honest and caring? How can we make a road map for the kinds of parents we want

Second, they would develop a weekly schedule to adhere to, ensuring that family comes before anything else.

Ev and Sara noticed early on that, like Ev, Miles is shy and sometimes socially awkward. As much as they want to change that in him, they know they can’t. But they also know that technology won’t change that either, so the kids are strictly forbidden to use iPads, iPhones, or televisions.