Yahoo Finance Business interview: Twitter boss Bruce Daisley is a fast-talking news addict who’s found the right medium
Like television in the Fifties, Twitter is rewriting the rulebook for how politicians, celebrities and businessmen communicate. When, in August, Elon Musk chose it as the place to announce that he wanted to delist Tesla, the Establishment were apoplectic. How could a loose-lipped billionaire simply inform the market he was thinking about taking his company private through such a flippant and unregulated medium?
In the end Musk was forced to backtrack and pay a fine for the misleading tweet, which sparked a suspension in the shares. But for Bruce Daisley, Twitter’s EMEA vice-president, it shows just how far Twitter has come in 12 years: from a frivolous place where Stephen Fry kept his followers amused to arguably the number one breaking news site in the world.
Daisley says the Musk debacle, headline news globally, shows Twitter’s clout. “Powerful right?”
The social media boss is unapologetic that the tweet caused so much hysteria and the fact that the richest and most influential men and women and in the world now communicate with billions of people through an unfiltered medium, even after a spliff or a drink.
Daisley says: “These people lived completely separated from the outside world in the previous forms of communication. When someone is on CNN you can’t reply to them but Elon Musk replies to what people say to him on Twitter. It became news and he was asked to explain it. A lot of the pushback was from an aggregated set of financial journalists and people who watch the car industry. You can’t uninvent things.”
The shift is simply a sign of the times, he says. “Maybe we are showing our age a bit. If you sat down with a 22 to 25-year-old they don’t make a distinction between real life and the internet. They recognise that they are one and the same. You’ve got to evolve.”
Musk isn’t the only man that Daisley, a super-skinny Brummy with a sharp sense of humour, has to keep his eye on.
US President Donald Trump fires off a string of tweets moving markets and stoking political tensions before he’s even had breakfast. “If Trump says something and it’s not true you’ve basically got the biggest hive mind in the world fact-checking what they’ve said and the veracity of it.”
Many disagree with this and instead view it as a platform where characters like Trump can send information to their followers without being properly challenged.
But Daisley is refreshing in that, unlike many social media executives, he is happy to admit that he works for a news company, adding that its breaking news agenda is why he joined Twitter in the first place.
“Why do you press the Twitter bird on your phone? Principally it’s because you want to know what’s going on. The news. I’m a news addict. That’s the reason why this job is so appealing to me. It’s the joy of revelation.”
The debate over Twitter’s status cuts to the heart of the financial world’s debate over Twitter. Despite admitting it is a news site, Daisley refuses to go further and describe it as a publisher — publishers are responsible for all the words that appear under their name, Twitter is not.
He says: “It would be such a semantic cul-de-sac for you and me to go into. If it’s their words and they’re going directly then they’re the publisher. I think we could get ourselves into a spaghetti tangle.”
It is one of the world’s largest companies, valued at $22.4 billion (£17 billion), but to many it’s still an unproved business model. This is reflected in the share price, which has struggled over the past six months despite recording its first profit amid declining user numbers.
Twitter says its actions to delete fake and offensive accounts is the reason behind the falling numbers.
Daisley is eccentric for a senior executive and loves a ragey debate. When his brain clicks into gear he starts talking super-fast, becoming a whirlwind of ideas. Occasionally his PR man has to butt in just to slow him down when we meet at Twitter’s Piccadilly offices.
The 47-year old rails against the present macho culture of showing off about working ludicrously long hours, which is surprising given that he is responsible for all Twitter’s operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
He works from the London office, which employs 200 people, and advocates working only 40 hours a week. “We’ve got to this stage where people mistakenly think that the key to success is to get up at 5am, have a breakfast of champions and work out. But how much sleep are these people getting? The need to work longer and harder leads to burnout and exhaustion, I’m interested in the science of that.”
He’s dressed in classic geek chic, black jeans, Nike trainers and a dark All Saints shirt. Standard clobber for the tech scene, smart but also shunning convention.
From Kings Norton in Birmingham, Daisley went on to study economic history at York university.
Interesting though Daisley is, his most grating feature is his constant self-mocking and tendency to make out his success was an accident. Even at the start of his career he was prepared to go to extreme lengths to get ahead.
Leaving university he was desperate to work in the music industry and so he made a cartoon CV illustrating why he should have a job. It worked and he was hired as an assistant at Capital Radio.
“I’m a five out of 10 cartoonist. They said years later, ‘you were definitely the worst candidate out of the 50, but your CV had gone around the office and people were rooting for you.’”
From there he worked his way up via the sales route and moved onto Emap, which is now Ascential. He eventually joined Google in 2008 before being contacted by Twitter in 2012 to set up the company’s London office.
He insists that the London set-up is not just a satellite office for Twitter’s main operations in Silicon Valley, where the company founder and chief executive Jack Dorsey sits. Daisley says Dorsey’s a good listener despite being an introvert and that they regularly exchange emails and chat.
He adds that the UK office has been a leader in changing the business, particularly with offensive tweets, partly because of the country’s aggressive attitude to pastimes such as football.
“The way Twitter is used in different countries strongly varies. Regarding the safety stuff, we (the UK) have always been the ones saying we need to be more vigilant. Look at sport. In the US there are no away fans. In the UK you’ve always had opposing fans in the stadium and we have more of a history of barracking. So when some elements of that were coming online we were the first to say we need to be aware of this.”
Despite being a Twitter zealot, Daisley is happy to tackle the darker sides of the site, namely the trolling and abuse that takes place. He admits that the company has been lax on this front in the past but insists it has started to clamp down on the behaviour. “We suspend 10 times more accounts than we did a year ago. We’ve cleaned up so much — albeit you’ll never fully win on those things. Everyone is focused on making Twitter a good place to have conversations.”
The company also uses a practice which critics have termed “shadow banning”. It means Twitter accounts that have had reports against them don’t come up at the top of the website’s search function.
This has caused outrage in the US, with Republicans claiming they are not visible in automatic search results because Twitter algorithms have an inbuilt left-wing bias.
Daisley dodges the topic: “I’m not best placed to talk about that.”
Outside Twitter, his big interest is education and he takes part in Speakers for Schools. The charity arranges for successful men and women to talk to state school children. He believes it is important to have a work network and thinks it’s easier for private-school pupils because they are born into “the system” via their parents.
He adds: “All the approaches I get are from the parents of private-school kids. I had a guy hit me up on LinkedIn last week telling me how brilliant his son is. I replied, ‘why has your son not contacted me, because if he had it’s a different discussion.’
“State-school kids have it harder. The power of being in a network can’t be underestimated.”
Opinionated. To the point. This boss is well suited to his noisy upstart firm.
