How Jack Dorsey’s Plan for Elon Musk to Save Twitter Went South

Elon Musk was growing irritable on Friday evening, Nov. 4, 2022. It had been just over a week since he’d closed his $44 billion deal for Twitter, and advertisers were bailing on the company in droves. Many brand-conscious marketers were worried that Twitter’s historical reputation for nastiness would return as a result of Musk’s pledge to defeat the “woke mind virus,” his derisive term for the censorious attitude he felt had sucked the joy out of his favorite social network.

Musk said the way to save Twitter was to restore what he saw as freedom of speech. He ...