On completion of the October 27 purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk tweeted "the bird is free". Then he announced his plan to charge for the verification tick. He also declared "comedy is now legal" (referencing all the hilarious hate-speech previously banned on the platform). Then when people adopted his name for satirical purposes, he banned them. After first changing his bio to "Chief Twit", widespread criticism of Musk's actions saw him switch to "Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator", then apparently genuinely ask for feedback, only to flip to mocking the idea of people complaining about Twitter on Twitter. On October 30, Musk retweeted a trolling conspiracy "theory" that the hammer attack on 82-year-old Paul Pelosi (perpetrated by a MAGA nut hunting Nancy Pelosi) was actually a gay lover's quarrel. Musk deleted it - without apology or explanation - then three days later proclaimed that under his stewardship, Twitter's "mission" would be "to become by far the most accurate source of information about the world". (On November 7 he signaled his personal dedication to accurate information - by tweeting a midterm endorsement of the election-and-science denying Republican party.)
At this point Musk had already fired fully half the company's staff - roughly 3700 employees. (This was done so quickly, dozens were then asked to return, and others have brought a lawsuit for improper notice of termination or insufficient severance pay.) He'd set the tone by making it his first order of business to fire the CEO and CFO and have them escorted from the building. Then the billionaire himself showed up hefting a porcelain sink into the lobby just so he could adolescently tweet "let that sink in". As Musk enjoyed the hollow sound of his own lols, industry and government expressed concern about his skeleton-staff's ability to maintain platform security and comply with regulation. Then the Chief Privacy Officer, Chief Compliance Officer and Chief Information-Security Officer all left. The Verge reported individual employees being told to "self-certify" Twitter's compliance with privacy laws, despite breaches in that area having the potential for billions of dollars in fines.
While Musk capered, advertisers abandoned ship. A meeting intended to bring calm by presenting new management's plan is said to have been so threadbare that some companies were pulling their funding as the session progressed. Both the executives who led the live-stream - heads of Safety & Integrity, and Client Inclusion - have since exited Twitter. Most of Twitter's revenue comes from companies booking seasons of advertising in advance.
Musk publicly blamed all this on "activists", and then threatened the people whose money he was seeking with "a thermonuclear name and shame" if they continued to shun him.
Meanwhile, his monetisation of the verified-user blue-tick - sans proper proofs of identity - led to an explosion of false accounts, including one representing "official" Tesla, which spent a day mocking that company's exploding batteries, anti-union activity, and failure in the testing of its self-driving cars to detect dummies representing children. The blue-tick changes were only reviewed briefly the night before launch, and leaks from inside Twitter claim that all of the review-team's recommendations were ignored. Even the level of the new tick-fee was seemingly improvised - a tweet interaction with Stephen King saw Musk bargain himself down from $20 to $8.
To complete the $44 billion purchase, Musk reportedly borrowed against his Tesla stock. Interest on the loan is said to be around a billion dollars a year. Twitter is unlikely to return anything like that - Crikey reports the company has only made a modest profit in 2 years of the last 10. A fortnight after the sale, Tesla stock had dropped about 15%, and Musk had sold 19.5 million shares worth approx $3.95 billion.
Two days ago, Elon The Business Genius tweeted out an advisory that, under his auspices, the company would be doing "lots of dumb things in coming months" and that he would simply "keep what works & change what doesn’t" - once again ignoring the vulnerability of the platform to speedy advertiser and user abandonment, and the real-world risks of online hate-speech and fakery. The same day, with about 20 minutes notice, he called the remaining employees together for an all-staff meeting in which he cancelled everyone's work-from-home arrangements, speculated about turning Twitter into a site like TikTok, and said out loud that "bankruptcy isn't out of the question". No coherent strategy for the business has yet been outlined.
Chief Twit indeed.
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