I checked the latest pages and didn't see this posted.
Elon Musk was always going to destroy Twitter. The real surprise is how fast he was able to wreck it.Jenny Chang-Rodriguez/Insider; Chesnot/Getty Images
Elon Musk has killed the one thing that made Twitter special
It's been less than a year since he bought it, and
Elon Musk's Twitter is already well on its way to suffering a fate worse than death — irrelevance.
The platform, which Musk promised to turn into a free-speech, bot-free haven, is glitchier, bottier, and spammier than ever. In May, when Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida announced his presidential candidacy on Twitter, a parade of malfunctions turned what should have been a historic moment for the company into a mess. Twitter hasn't even been able to hold it together during the news-making events it's known for — such as while
Rihanna was performing at the Super Bowl halftime show. And pretty much every new "feature" that Musk rolls out — from an increase in the length of tweets to the now infamous "rate limit" that prevents users from seeing more than a set number of tweets a day — has made the product worse.
Twitter is at its core an advertising business — the last public financials showed that over 90% of its revenue came from ads. To succeed in that business, it needs both the users who generate content and the clients who buy ads to believe it is a stable, reliable place. If an advertising platform can't be trusted during the Super Bowl of advertising — the Super Bowl — then what good is it?
And now there is growing competition. On Thursday — a couple of weeks after Musk challenged him to a cage fight — Mark Zuckerberg's
Meta launched Threads, a social-note site fused with Instagram. In less than 24 hours, Threads had over 30 million users, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jennifer Lopez, and Steph Curry. For Musk, this should be more embarrassing than getting wrecked in the ring. Clearly in some kind of mood over Threads' overnight success, he wrote on Twitter: "It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter, than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram."
Yeah, OK, chief.
Being relevant was Twitter's core strength as a platform. It never really made money, and it was never the biggest social network. But when something was happening, people immediately went to Twitter to know more. Its appeal was its ability to collect information about the present moment, whether it was the death of a notable member of society, a weather event, or traffic. Unfortunately, Musk's fumbling is rubbing all that relevance away and giving other platforms an opening.
Musk has said he might turn Twitter into an "everything app" — a one-stop shop for anything from ride-hailing to shopping. But what's more likely is that he will turn it into former President Donald Trump's Truth Social — a digital megaphone for a single, raging narcissist and all the people who fawn over him.
How you do a turnaround
In the early days of Musk's Twitter takeover, I told you he was overpaying for the company. Once the deal went through, I said he had no real plan to turn the business around. In those respects, I think it's fair to say I was right. That said, all this is unraveling much quicker than I thought it would.
Twitter certainly needed a turnaround. Even before the takeover, it needed new management, a reevaluation of the business, and investment in product innovation to bring in new users. Unfortunately for Twitter, Musk is not a traditional turnaround guy. In fact, he's not a turnaround guy at all. All the businesses he has started were first movers in nascent industries. What made those businesses successful won't work at Twitter, but Musk tried it anyway. He fired over 70% of Twitter's staff with absolutely no respect for their institutional knowledge. He acted as if he alone could be the advertising business (like he was at Tesla). And he didn't bother to get to know what users wanted out of their Twitter, assuming instead that his hopeless addiction to tweeting had already given him all the answers. But unsurprisingly, being a billionaire "reply guy" does not give one a clear sense of why everyday people are using the product.
I'll give you an example. For years, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the agency that controls New York City's subways and buses, used Twitter to send out automated alerts about emergencies and service changes. It was a symbiotic relationship for the site — users depended on the platform for timely updates about stalled trains and late buses, while the MTA had a quick, reliable way to reach customers.
Musk decided in April to abruptly cut off access to the Twitter program that allowed the MTA to send out automated alerts after it ran relatively smoothly for years. Musk — who is frantically looking for cash in Twitter's couch cushions — wanted to charge users for access to this feed, known as Twitter's application programming interface. He thought that national weather services, governments, and emergency-response agencies all needed Twitter more than Twitter needed them. The MTA estimated it could cost it $50,000 a month to retain access, but instead of paying up, it called his bluff. The MTA returned only when Musk reversed his decision and allowed government agencies to come back at no charge. The situation forced Musk to show his hand, and it was a weak one.
"The only difference with Twitter and Musk's other companies is that he's treating Twitter users worse than he
treats his employees," Vicki Bryan, the founder of the bond-research service Bond Angle, told me over the phone.
Twitter's product is also suffering because Musk notoriously
doesn't pay his bills on time, a tendency that has frustrated
Tesla's suppliers for years. Now it's frustrating Twitter's landlords and Goldman Sachs, which is holding
bad property loans because Musk refuses to pay the rent for a handful of the company's offices.
Elon has normalized twitter outages and poorly thought out, untested updates.
Elon bout to get a ton of people audited for failing to report taxable income, I don't see any legal documentation on this shyt... probably a turd emoji anyway.
