My worst takes from the last five years.

Friday is upon us. Mazel tov for surviving another week. I’m Isaac Saul, and before we jump into a very fun (and humbling) Friday edition, I wanted to let you know that the Tangle team has arrived in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, and… well… it’s as advertised. Gorgeous, rolling hills and woods, a quaint downtown, and great restaurants and spas peppering the area — you can feel the town’s embrace of its history of relaxation and recuperation.

We’ve got 48 hours until our matinee live show on Sunday afternoon, and it’s not too late to get tickets. I am fully confident in saying you won’t regret it. Special shoutouts to our sponsors for the event, The Dignity Index and Incogni, who helped make all of this possible! I’ll have more to say about these awesome organizations and products this weekend.

Now, on to a 9-minute read where I take a good, hard, long look in the mirror.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine sent me a screenshot of a tweet I had posted in 2022:

He didn’t have to add any context — I knew his point was wow, look how wrong you were. 

We had a laugh and talked about why the take was so bad (more on that below). And then it got me thinking: What other things have I whiffed on in the last few years? 

Here at Tangle, we regularly revisit our past writing and reporting to see how it’s aged and note when we’ve changed our minds. I’ve also written before about things I’ve gotten wrong (and right) as a way of both holding myself accountable and growing as a thinker. But those exercises are usually an annual recounting of our own analysis, opinion writing, or predictions. Having a bad take is a very specific kind of thing, different from missing something in a piece of analysis or stating an opinion that doesn’t quite pan out or match up with reality. For example, it might be my opinion that Los Angeles’s electorate was ripe for an insurgent candidate, but my take was that Spencer Pratt would give Karen Bass a run for her money.

A take, I’d say, is about formulating a view in real time — reacting to the news with some kind of novel or distinguishing angle. In the case above, everyone was freaking out about Elon taking over Twitter, and my take was that he actually wouldn’t change the platform all that much. 

I was wrong. Very wrong. And it made me think about other takes of mine that have aged poorly over the years. So I asked my team to help me compile a list of some of my worst takes from the last five years, and together we came up with today’s piece. I’ll share some reflections after each take, then at the end, try to identify patterns in where I erred.

Elon won’t meaningfully change Twitter.

What I said (October 4, 2022): “I honestly don’t think Twitter is going to change that much under Elon. In 5 years, I suspect we’ll view it as one of the great overreactions of 2022.” 

What actually happened: Twitter, now X, has changed a lot. Perhaps most notably, Musk completely upended the platform’s verification policy, and any account willing to cough up a few dollars per month can now get the coveted “blue checkmark” that used to be reserved for significant public figures. This has made discerning the authentic accounts from the fakes — and the people with real-life followings from the random keyboard warriors — much harder.

At the same time, bot activity, engagement farming, and spam all seem to have gotten much worse. And no discussion about bots on X is complete without talking about Grok, the Musk-owned chatbot, which is all over the platform responding to people and “fact-checking” posts (the responses to many posts are choked with users asking Grok to explain it to them). The algorithmic “For you” page seems like a mirror of Musk’s politics, something that has been fleshed out in reporting alleging he thumbs the scales. Graphic violence and pornography are also harder to avoid than they were before, and while more previously banned accounts are back, Musk’s X is hardly a bastion of free speech; plenty of accounts, especially those that draw Musk’s ire, have been banned or throttled.

Some changes were not directly tied to Musk’s actions, and others have been good. For instance, many people on the left fled the platform for Twitter copycats like Threads or Bluesky, making the platform less ideologically diverse. Musk didn't decide they should leave; they did it themselves — though of course plenty of people blame him for the exodus. The new feature that shows a user’s geolocation is a big boon to transparency on the site. And helpful tools like Community Notes (which Musk rebranded) were scaled up substantially, becoming genuinely valuable features of X. I think Community Notes can still be improved, especially for timeliness, but some of those improvements are already coming: Musk said last week that a new feature will notify people who interacted with a post that now has a Community Note, which is a great update.

But undeniably, nearly four years after sending this tweet, the platform has changed in big and small ways. 

Biden won’t pardon Hunter.

What I said (June 10, 2024): “I really don’t know what will happen if Hunter gets convicted. I have a hard time imagining him going to jail as part of his sentence, and I also think it is incredibly unlikely (and would be very unwise) for President Biden to get involved in any way (like by trying to pardon him).”