2023 will go down as the year that Elon Musk killed Twitter. First he did it in a big way, by buying the company, firing most of the employees, and destabilizing the platform; then he did it in a small, but important, symbolic way, by renaming the company X and trying to make a full break with what came before. So now that the story of the company named Twitter is officially over, it felt important to stop and ask: What was Twitter, anyway, and why were so many powerful people obsessed with it for so long? In this special episode, I sat down with Marty Baron, former executive editor of The Washington Post, and Zoe Schiffer, managing editor of Platform and author of Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter. We discussed how two of Twitter’s most dedicated power users – Donald Trump and Elon Musk — were addicted to the platform, defined it, changed it, broke it, and then put it to rest.

Links: The year Twitter died: a special series from The Verge Extremely softcore Inside Elon Musk's “extremely hardcore” Twitter How Twitter broke the news Trump vs. Twitter: The president takes on social media moderation Martin Baron recounts leading The Washington Post during the Trump era