Sam Sanders

Kate says that while X is a fundamentally different place now, it's still an active and important part of the Internet.

It's been about 20 years since Twitter was created.

So I sat down with Kate and Ryan to talk about the promise of Twitter at the beginning, how it evolved over the years, and what that evolution tells us about social media and its role in society today.

Let's talk for a minute about what Twitter was.

Take folks back to that peak of Twitter, Twitter.

What was this company and this platform like?

I love that you use the word utility because I remember for years when there were natural disasters occurring across the country or the globe or even mass shootings.

The places where survivors, responders, and journalists went for the most up-to-date news about these things, it came from Twitter.

And a lot of the terminology around Twitter and what it used to be, it used the word public, a public good and a public square.

And it wasn't profitable for many, many years.

Yeah, yeah.

I want to go back and spend a little bit of time tracing Elon Musk's entrance into Twitter and then his purchase of it.

What was Elon Musk on Twitter in the early days like?

And earnest.

Yeah.

I want to talk about...

A narrative that Elon Musk glommed onto that seemed to propel him forward into the version of who he is right now on X, formerly Twitter.

And that was COVID-19.

COVID-19 made him a different kind of tweeter.

And it seems as if it might have led him to end up being the guy who bought the site.