18 Years Old, Twitter—Now X—Behaves Like a Sullen Teen

This March, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter will turn 18 — a grown-up in human years, even as the site seems to be stuck in a crude adolescence. In the opening pages of “Battle for the Bird,” the Bloomberg journalist Kurt Wagner recounts how Jack Dorsey, one of Twitter’s founders and its two-time chief executive, liked to issue high-flown pronouncements about fostering a “global consciousness.” Barely more than 200 pages later, Wagner describes how the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who acquired the platform in October 2022 and has since changed its name to X, insisted on personally addressing the complaints of a prolific poster known as @catturd2.