Hatching Twitter Part 12

At one point in the show Kutcher appeared on the screen, sitting in the same office he had been in a few hours earlier when he beat CNN to a million followers. "Congratulations!" Oprah said to him. "This is a commentary on the state of media," Kutcher said to Oprah and the audience. "I believe that we're at a place now with social media where one person's voice can be as powerful as a media network. That is the power of the social Web." He went on to explain that Twitter allowed him to control the type of images and videos that were shared about him online, specifically beating the paparazzi: He could now usurp the Us Weeklys of the world by posting pictures he had preapproved before the tabloids could.

As the show went on, Oprah's viewers started signing up for the site in droves. From Chicago to Clearwater, Modesto to Miami, Seattle to Statesboro, more people joined Twitter on that day than on any single day in the site's history-nearly half a million people in the first twenty-four hours-and although the servers were battered, they managed to survive.

After the show concluded, Ev and Sara went to the Oprah store to purchase bibs for Miles, a baby boy they were expecting Sara to give birth to in the next couple of months.

Later Ev wrote an e-mail to the staff with the t.i.tle "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."

Ev was glowing with pride. But not everyone was happy.

Although Kutcher had p.r.o.nounced that anyone could be as powerful as a media company, there was one person whose tweets had faded into insignificance, one person who had happened upon the Oprah show and seen his former friend and coworker, Ev, on live television.

Noah.

Noah had watched in disbelief as he realized he'd been completely erased from the Twitter story. He tweeted: "Watching him on TV, I wondered how I became so invisible, so absent mise-en-scene. No fingerprints at all."

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.

Ev hadn't been intentionally writing Noah out of the story. He had always been intent on trying to give credit where it was due in the creation of Twitter, thanking employees at award ceremonies like the Crunchies and talking about Jack and Biz's role in interviews. Ev honestly believed Twitter was a different company from the days when Noah had helped form it.

But Jack had never been forthright about the amount of collaboration that had gone on between him and Noah as they were hatching Twitter together.

As Jack watched Oprah, he was apoplectic that Jack wasn't the one appearing on the show. He would later voice a now familiar concern to Biz, "I'm being written out of history!"

"No, you're not," Biz told Jack. "Ev talked about you on the show. He called us geniuses!"

But it didn't matter what Ev said. Or Biz. Jack felt he was being erased. And unlike Noah, who had faded into obscurity after being kicked out of the company, Jack had bigger plans.

Spiraling into Iraq.

The C-130 transport plane roared on the Tarmac, its propellers ferociously slicing through the arid Middle Eastern air. Even from where he stood, several hundred feet away, Jack could see the plane was a behemoth. Next to the other aircraft on the runway it looked like a giant blue whale resting among a pool of goldfish.

Army trucks and jeeps sporadically surrounded the plane and were, in turn, surrounded by American soldiers huddled in their fatigues, guns and large green duffel bags by their sides. The scene looked strangely like toys left on the bedroom floor of an imaginative boy.

Jack watched through dark sungla.s.ses as the bright sun penetrated the ma.s.sive windows of the lounge area in the Queen Alia International Airport in Amman, Jordan. Waiting to board the plane gave him a nervousness he hadn't felt in a while, and it diverted his attention from Ev's appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show just three days earlier. Now he was obsessing about something else: Iraq, where he would be in a few hours.

As he tried to calm his nerves, there was a tap on his shoulder. Turning, he saw Jared Cohen, the State Department liaison who was responsible for the trip Jack was about to embark on.

"Did you see the article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal today?" Cohen asked him.

"No, what article?"

"It's about Twitter," Cohen said, already walking away to talk to someone else. "Look it up. It's called 'The Twitter Revolution.'" Jack pulled his iPhone out of his pocket and searched for the story, landing on the Wall Street Journal Web site a few seconds later.

Cohen looked like an actor in a low-budget spy movie, which was fitting considering he worked for the U.S. State Department. He had dark, messy hair and smooth skin. Even though he was large and lean, his suits always seemed to hang off his shoulders a little more than they should. His tie, always undone just a hair and pulled slightly in one direction, imparted a sense of constant busyness. And busy he was.

Cohen had joined "State," as it was called by insiders, under Condoleezza Rice in late 2006. He was just twenty-five years old at the time but came with a resume more impressive than those of most people twice his age. He had highfalutin degrees from Stanford and Oxford universities; he was fluent in Swahili and Arabic; and he had written two books: one on genocide in Rwanda, the other on silent revolutions and Muslim youth in Iran and Syria.

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.

One of Ross's and Cohen's boldest ideas was to take an entourage of highly influential tech denizens, including people from Google, YouTube, Meetup, Howcast, AT&T, and, of course, Twitter, to war-torn Iraq. The hope was that they could offer input on how to rebuild the decaying country with technology and cell phones rather than bricks and cement.

Cohen had explained the objective during the group's stopover in Amman. They'd be meeting with both the president and the prime minister of Iraq. He had reminded them to wear suits for the flight to Iraq so the group could go directly to some meetings when they landed.

Now here they were, five hundred miles from entering a war zone.

Ev had been invited on the trip, but he was too busy to attend, as were Biz and Goldman. At first they had planned to decline the invitation, but they reasoned that Jack could go if he wanted to; what harm could he cause in Iraq? And now here he was, standing in the airport in Jordan, nearing the end of reading the Wall Street Journal article. Cohen soon announced that it was time to board the plane.

They crossed the hot Tarmac and received protective army gear at a staging area. They then shuffled into the C-130, immediately noticing there were no windows. Everyone was strapped securely into red mesh seats, army helmets fixed on their heads, bulletproof flak jackets wrapped around their torsos. Jack, sitting close to Cohen and Scott Heiferman, the founder of Meetup, looked to the rear of the plane, where army personnel sat holding machine guns, clearly heading to Iraq for different reasons.

For the tech delegation it was a difficult scene to comprehend. The dark, round hull of the military plane exposed its metal innards-except for an American flag that hung from the ceiling, proudly proclaiming which team its pa.s.sengers were on. The heat inside the plane made the scene even more unnerving. There would be no peanuts on this flight.

A ripple of fear and excitement undulated across the group as the plane began the long, steady climb to twenty-eight thousand feet. 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.

The piece had been a profile of Twitter and, as the subt.i.tle suggested, "the brains behind the Web's hottest networking tool." But it wasn't the t.i.tle or subt.i.tle of the article that vexed him. Or the ill.u.s.tration of Biz and Ev, sans Jack. Or the mere mention of Jack's involvement in Twitter. It was, instead, the last line that sent a now-familiar anger through his veins.

Ev had told the Wall Street Journal reporter that there was a possibility that Twitter would soon go public, but "probably without [Ev], as he has little interest in running a public company." No, Ev was interested in working on another idea, he told the reporter. "He's been pondering a way to revolutionize email."

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?

As the plane started to slow he noticed people around him take their helmets off and start sitting on them like tiny footstools. One by one, others did this. "What's going on?" Jack yelled over the rumble of the engines to the State Department employee sitting next to him.

"We're landing!" the man screamed back. "We sometimes take small-arms fire as we land, and you don't want to take a bullet up your a.s.s." Jack frantically removed his metal helmet and slid it below him to protect his b.a.l.l.s. As he did, the plane started to turn rapidly.

Landing a C-130 at war-torn Baghdad International Airport is not like a simple pa.s.senger-plane arrival at JFK. There are no FASTEN SEATBELT signs or stewards demanding that you turn off your iPad. In Iraq planes have much bigger concerns; specifically, not being shot down by rocket launchers. The trick pilots use is to land in a corkscrew, spiraling down toward the runway like water circling a drain. (Or, as a pilot who landed there explained it so eloquently, "You drop faster than Paris Hilton's panties.") As they taxied on the ground, the rear-ramp door of the plane cracked open and a slit of orange sky burst inside. Behind it the desert heat rushed in like a backdraft in a house fire, hitting them one by one with a blanket of scorched air. As Jack looked out, he could see dozens of helicopters speckling the horizon like tiny black ants crawling across the sky.

It looks like the scene out of Forrest Gump, Jack thought to himself.

They soon discovered that Cohen's request that they wear suits on the plane had been a terrible idea. Their flak jackets, which were made of rugged ballistic nylon, had spent the past two hours rubbing up against their blazers, which had torn the suits to shreds like sandpaper on tofu.

When the plane finally rolled to a stop, they were directed out of the rear and introduced to Tony, a bulky ex-marine with broad shoulders and alert eyes, who would be overseeing their security for the next week. He explained to the group what to do if they were kidnapped or held hostage.

After a few minutes they were shuffled to a group of helicopter gunships that would transport them to the Green Zone, the American-controlled area of Baghdad. Although not immune to missile strikes, they were told, it was the safest place in Iraq-at least for Americans.

The chopper leaned forward as its propellers carried them through the thick Iraqi air. Jack sat in the back and peered out the open side of the helicopter as marines seated next to him pointed their guns at the ground below. "This is the most dangerous road in the world," one marine yelled to Jack. "There are IEDs everywhere." (IEDs were "improvised explosive devices" planted by insurgents to kill Americans.) "Interesting," Jack said nervously, pulling his head back inside and taking a deep breath. He looked at the others in his helicopter and smiled slightly. Scott was snapping pictures with a digital camera, Cohen was on his BlackBerry, and Steven Levy, a reporter, was writing in his notepad.

Beyond Cohen's ability to talk his way into almost any situation, he also had another very impressive skill: an knack for bringing the press along on his excursions. Levy, a columnist for Wired, had been invited to come along as this particular delegation's embedded reporter.

"The idea is to use the brains of this small collective to give ideas to Iraqi government officials, companies and users that will help it rebuild," Levy wrote on Wired's Web site when he arrived in Baghdad. "Who knows that stuff better than a contingent of internet goombahs heavy on the Google juice and includes the guy who thought up Twitter?"

The following days became a blur of meetings, press interviews, and photo ops.

They were shuttled around in black bulletproof Suburbans to meetings with Iraqi officials of all ranks and levels of importance. Helicopters flew above, tracking their every move with guns hanging from the sides, like guardian angels keeping watch as they drove through the Iraqi streets.

"Taking off my helmet and flak jacket," Jack tweeted at one point. The group had decided to use the hashtag "#iraqtech" for the trip. Though Ev, Biz, and Jack had at first been uninspired by hashtags, calling them "too nerdy," they had now become an integral part of the service and were being used to organize everything from discussions of TV shows to riots.

"So much concrete. It's everywhere." Jack tweeted as they drove out of the Green Zone. Jack spent a lot of the time thinking about Ev's and Biz's media appearances over the past months, which made Jack seethe that he wasn't giving these interviews.

But that was all about to change.

One of the group's first meetings was with the National Investment Commission, an economic arm of the Iraqi government. Then it was off to meet with senior government officials.

Each meeting began with awkward explanations of what the delegation's respective jobs were. "I started a company called Twitter." "Tweeter?" "No, Twi-t-ter." "Ahhh, yes, Tweeter." They all genuinely wanted to help the Iraqis, offering suggestions about how technology could be used to help rebuild the country and its shattered economy.

During one meeting, as the group sat drinking from ornate cups in the home of Barham Salim, deputy prime minister of Iraq, Jack tried to convince officials that they should join Twitter. "The people of Iraq and the media will follow you," Jack told Salim. "A technology like Twitter can bring access and transparency to government." As they sat sipping wine, surrounded by guards, the deputy prime minister a.s.sured Jack, "I will sign up tomorrow."

"President Obama uses it all the time," Jack said, eloquently explaining how Twitter had played a role in Obama's election. Like a traveling salesman, he managed to sign up a few American Blackwater security guards who were a.s.signed to protect the delegation.

When the entourage finally met with the Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, word had made it to the Western world about the delegation of tech wonders traipsing through Baghdad explaining how Twitter and YouTube worked. Media outlets, including CNN, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and Al Jazeera, along with dozens of others, began covering the entourage like paparazzi following Britney Spears at a shopping mall.

The slew of reporters now following the delegation continually asked Jared if they could talk to "the Twitter founder" who was on the trip. Jack, happy to maneuver the spotlight away from Biz and Ev, gladly obliged.

On the last evening of the trip they all sat outside at a long mess table at the American army base. Their laptops open, sipping from warm cans of Budweiser, they reflected on the week, where they had gone from nerds to consultants trying to help a scorched government enter the twenty-first century. But one of them, Jack, had also turned into an international superstar. A photo of Jack talking to reporters was splashed across newspapers, blogs, and magazines around the world.

Ev, Biz, and Goldman's plan to allow Jack to come along and keep him out of the way had completely backfired. FOUNDER OF TWITTER SENT TO SAVE IRAQ, read the headline of in a British newspaper, with a picture of Jack Dorsey below.

On the last morning they were whisked back to the airport and stood on the dented rubble-strewn Tarmac, waiting for the C-130 that would hurtle them out of Iraq and back to America. While they waited, Jack reached for his phone to check Twitter. As helicopters thumped in the air above and fighter jets tore holes through the calm sky, Jack saw that the deputy prime minister had actually kept his word.

"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."

The Time 101.

Flashes of white light exploded in the air like miniature fireworks in front of Jack, Biz, and Ev. Pop. Pop. Pop.

"Over here!" "Look this way!" photographers yelled as their cameras rattled like muted gunfire. Friendly fire: Click. Click. Click. "This way!" they yelled. "Look over here!"

The Twitter founders paused every few feet-pop, click, pop-then walked forward as they continued on the red carpet as if they were on a conveyor belt. Coiled white earpieces crawled up the necks of Secret Service agents who stood watch over the scene.

"Hi, Jack Dorsey," a young woman said as she approached with a clipboard in her hand. "h.e.l.lo, Evan Williams," another woman gleefully cried without ever having met him before. "You must be Sara," she added to Ev's wife. "Mr. and Mrs. Stone," another said, matter-of-factly. "I'll be escorting you inside," they all heard separately. The shouts of the paparazzi could be heard trailing into the background as they walked forward. "Liv! Liv Tyler!" "Kate!" "Whoopi, over here!"

They were shuffled along red carpets with red backdrops, through metal detectors, past the second security gate. Along another carpet for some television interviews. "Hey, it's the Twitter guys!" they heard as microphones and TV cameras hovered inches from their faces. Questions were asked. Jokes made. Then they were shuffled along a few more feet to the next microphone. The next camera. The next set of questions and jokes. At the end of the media gauntlet they found themselves at a final booth where they were given a card noting their designated table for dinner. "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." Shiny gold and red badges of honor were tacked to their suits.

Inside, white gloves floated in the air transporting trays of champagne that swept smoothly around the room like magic carpets, immune to the turbulence of the power that swirled around them. World leaders, musicians, actors, billionaire CEOs, media moguls, n.o.bel laureates, First Ladies, Second Ladies, all mingling, quietly and properly clinking gla.s.ses and looking around at the who's who of the who's who.

Amid them stood Jack, Biz, and Ev. How far they had come: A couple years earlier they had been somebodies among n.o.bodies, visible only to the tech nerds in San Francisco. A couple of years before that they'd been just n.o.bodies: Jack with blue dreadlocks, wheeling a stroller around Berkeley, a hacker nanny sleeping on couches. Biz, who was afraid to fly on airplanes, juggling credit cards to pay the rent with fifty thousand dollars in debt. Ev living in a six-hundred-dollar-a-month garage atop someone's home, riding a borrowed bicycle to work across dirt roads to a tiny cubicle, where he sat silently each day. All lonely and alone, searching for something. And here it was-or so they thought.

Some people are destined for greatness; others fall up a hill to get there.

Jack surveyed the room, realizing that he should let the world know where he was. "Having champagne at the Time 100 Gala," he tweeted.

"Oh, you're Whoopi Goldberg," Biz said upon meeting the award-winning actress. "I loved you in Star Trek," he said excitedly. She wasn't amused. Behind him Stella McCartney, the world-famous fashion designer, stood huddled with her entourage, including Liv Tyler and Kate Hudson, each with their own fancy c.o.c.ktail in hand. Laughter ricocheted around the s.p.a.ce under the soft hum of conversation.

Although the room was filled with celebrities, many of them were talking about three people: the Twitter guys.

John Legend told the a camera crew, "I do Twitter. I just joined the bandwagon a few weeks ago. I'm up to 230,000 followers, which is not bad so far."

"Oh, wow, there's M.I.A.," Jack said to Biz with the excitement of a child seeing a favorite cartoon character in real life. He briskly walked in her direction, the champagne in his gla.s.s sloshing like a giant storm in a tiny ocean.

M.I.A., a famous rapper from West London, had signed up for Twitter only a few months earlier but had instantly fallen into the deep end of the 140-character swimming pool. Standing there in a black dress and jean jacket, she told Jack that she loved Twitter because it allowed her to engage with fans and say whatever she wanted. As they stood there talking, Ev walked up and introduced himself. "And you're with Twitter too?" M.I.A. asked Ev.

"Yes."

"Great, what do you do?"

"I'm the CEO," he said.

M.I.A.'s attention instantly shifted to Ev. Jack was annoyed that Ev had stolen the conversation and that he was able to introduce himself as Twitter's CEO. "Can you get together so I can take your photo, please?" someone asked. As Jack stood scowling, a photograph was taken of the group. M.I.A.'s husband leaned in. She scrunched closer, tilting her head. Ev turned and smiled, his black bow tie pointing up at an angle. But not Jack. He pursed his lips slightly, his brow tightening. Pop. Click. A moment caught forever.

They were soon shuffled inside the main ballroom at Lincoln Center for dinner. Biz and Livy found their a.s.signed seats at table 10. They chatted with Lauren Bush, the former first cousin, and Jon Favreau, the personal speechwriter for the president of the United States.

As Jack found his way to his seat on the upper level, he scanned the room, looking for Ev. He caught a glimpse of Mich.e.l.le Obama, then spotted Lorne Michaels, producer of Sat.u.r.day Night Live, who looked like a forlorn teenager as he played with his phone and ignored everyone around him. Close by, Glenn Beck, the conservative Fox host, was snapping pictures with his smart phone while he chatted with Arianna Huffington, the liberal blogger. Behind them Jimmy Fallon gave a small laugh at a joke.

Then Jack saw him. Ev, seated at table 2, literally the best seat in the house, in front of the stage where Mich.e.l.le Obama stood. Ev was seated with Joy Behar, cohost of The View, and Moot, who had won the t.i.tle of World's Most Influential Person after his Web site, 4Chan, had rigged the Time vote.

Jack took a large gulp from his gla.s.s of champagne. Even at the Time 100 Most Influential People in the World gala, there is a pecking order. And in 2009, at the top end of that chart there was Evan Williams, the CEO of Twitter.

The upper level seemed to house less important guests, like Christine Teigen, John Legend, and Lou Reed. (Oprah was back there too, though only because she had to leave early.) As Jack ruminated, his thoughts were interrupted by a tap on his shoulder. "And who are you?" an older women asked, as her hand, which was covered in ornate rings, stretched out to greet him.

"I'm Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter."

"Oh, are you coming on the show tomorrow?" the woman said, then introducing herself "I'm Barbara Walters." She was wearing a black dress with a mesh top that exposed her shoulders. Large sparkly earrings hung from her ears like chandeliers in a French palace.

"No," Jack said. "What show?"

Walters explained that the following morning, after the Time 100 gala, the Twitter cofounders were scheduled to go on the The View, the show she cohosted with Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg.

Jack immediately started to deliver his version of the events that had taken place over the past year, as if he were being interviewed by Walters in a special on her own show.

He told her that a few weeks earlier, he had heard that the latest issue of Time magazine, which was consumed by twenty-five million readers, would announce the one hundred most influential people in the world. Ninety-eighty of those influentials would be political leaders, physicists, n.o.bel laureates, economists, musicians, and the kings and queens of the A-list celebrity jungle. The other two spots on the list had been reserved for Evan Williams and Biz Stone of Twitter. Jack Dorsey was not included.

When Jack had found out, he'd sent Biz an infuriated note demanding to be included on the list. Biz explained that it was out of his hands. The editors of Time magazine hadn't seen Jack as an employee of the company and therefore hadn't thought it made sense to include him on the list. Biz had known how delicate the situation was and had tried to get Jack added, but to no avail. E-mails among Jack, Biz, Ev, and Time's editors had shot in every direction. But Time had reiterated its position, reasoning that Jack was not involved in the daily operations of Twitter. Eventually, after some tense negotiations, Biz had managed to get Jack invited to the dinner, but technically he was not considered one of the Time 100. So the dinner had become the Time 101. Although no one knew this except the editors, the Twitter guys, and now Barbara Walters.

Walters listened to all of this like a mother whose child has just come home after fighting with his best friend. "We're going to take care of this," Barbara told Jack, explaining that Ev was scheduled to be interviewed by her the following day and that she would talk to him about the turmoil. But Jack wasn't finished yet. The world's most famous interviewer, who usually listens to presidents, kings, and princesses, heard Jack continue to complain about Ev and Biz.

When Jack had first grabbed a copy of the magazine, he had quickly flipped to the page that said "The Twitter Guys" and started reading. Time had asked celebrities to write each of the three-hundred-word blurbs announcing the influentials, and Ashton Kutcher had been chosen to showcase Twitter.

"Years from now," Kutcher wrote, "when historians reflect on the time we are currently living in, the names Biz Stone and Evan Williams will be referenced side by side with the likes of Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Guglielmo Marconi, Philo Farnsworth, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs." Jack was mentioned in the article later, in pa.s.sing, as one of the cocreators of Twitter, and was "(not pictured)" in the accompanying photo. Instead, it was an image of Ev and Biz staring at each other with a few fake birds suspended on a tree branch above them.