Things haven’t gone very well for Elon Musk since he bought Twitter. The social media giant’s financial picture, which was already on shaky ground, has worsened under his leadership.
After paying more than double Twitter’s valuation, Musk acknowledges that the company is worth less than half of the $44 billion he paid to buy it, a revelation that can't sit well with Musk's Saudi and Qatari investors.
Musk isn't just a terrible manager; he’s also been bad for Twitter’s business. As a result of his erratic decision-making, more than half of Twitter's top 1,000 advertisers have left the platform.
In addition to firing half of the company's employees, it seems that part of Musk’s cost-cutting strategy includes stiffing the company’s vendors. As of February, at least six companies had filed lawsuits against Twitter, alleging everything from non-payment of rent to the company's reneging on a private plane bill.
Based on his Twitter interactions, Musk isn’t a very nice person, either. He's facing over $130 million in legal costs over unpaid severance payments to laid-off employees.
Last month, he went out of his way to humiliate a disabled employee with the audacity to ask the company CEO about his employment status. Musk’s online bullying wasn’t quite the flex he expected, like so many of his actions since buying the company.
The employee, who Musk fired via tweet, accused of faking his disability, and called a malingerer who “did no actual work,” was Haraldur Thorleifsson, Iceland’s Person of the Year. Thorleifsson, who goes by Halli, does indeed have muscular dystrophy. He also sold his design company to Twitter in 2021. He also has an employment contract with Twitter that, if breached, could cost the company tens of millions of dollars.
Twitter’s HR department — and their lawyers — probably had a quick sidebar with Musk to explain the terms of Halli’s employment because after firing him via tweet, Musk apologized a few hours later.
With this kind of management style, it's no wonder bodyguards escort Musk everywhere he goes at Twitter’s headquarters, even the bathroom.
Bottom line: Twitter is in a slow-motion death spiral. The current picture at the company is so bleak that Musk — and by extension, the rest of us — may have been a lot better off had he paid Twitter's one billion dollar breakup fee instead of buying the company.
Everyone seems aware of how bad things are at Twitter headquarters. Everyone, that is, except Team Elon.
Team Elon can't handle the truth
When I wrote an essay criticizing the Twitter CEO a few months ago, I experienced the wrath of Team Elon firsthand. On one of the platforms where my Elon Musk post appeared, I received more comments than on anything I’ve written.
Most of the responses were rational, even the ones from those who disagreed with my take on the billionaire. On the other hand, more than a few were unhinged. For many of Musk’s fans, anyone challenging their sunshine and rainbows Twitter narrative must have an ulterior motive.
For example, one reader suggested that I was part of a coordinated attack, even wondering if Elon Musk had done something to me personally. Another challenged the claim in my piece that Musk has lost more personal wealth than anyone in history, even though his billions in losses set a new Guinness World Record.
But one Musk fan’s comment underscores the lengths to which Elon superfans go to avoid acknowledging Twitter’s rapid decline under his leadership (emphasis added):
“I was going to write a long answer but it looks like someone paid you to write this article OR you did it cause you are upset that Elon took back the most important media in the world that censored any information and voice that left didn't like, and now they have to be careful about their goofs!
To our eyes, Elon bought Twitter to make the game fair between left and right!
So, there is no point in discussing or writing a detailed answer to your one-sided, unfair article about one of the brightest minds of human history.
BTW, If you think Elon is losing on Twitter, you are wrong!
He is making big money on paid services on Twitter and he'll make up for his debts in no time.”
It’s all a Deep State conspiracy
Musk’s devotees, like many on today’s right of center, have a habit of chasing every half-baked conspiracy theory that comes their way. The problem is that these narratives, from Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop to “The Memo” from 2018, rarely deliver anything of substance.
Indeed, the commenter’s contention that, before Musk, Twitter “censored any information and voice that left didn't like,” referring to the so-called Twitter Files, is more of the same right-wing nothing burger. Joan Donovan, the Research Director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, recently described the right’s latest shiny object:
…the “Twitter Files” are a desperate attempt to legitimize a well-worn conservative narrative that the suppression of Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” proved collusion between the so-called deep state and social media companies. Tweets laced with allegations that former Twitter executives purposefully stopped aggressive moderation of child exploitation often subsume the Twitter replies, but the details of the “Twitter Files” do not seem to hold new revelations. Instead, they serve the purpose of demonizing Twitter’s former content moderation executives to make it seem like they were prioritizing the moderation of political disinformation above child exploitation…
In fact, what the “Twitter Files” reveal is what we already knew about social media governance from the “Facebook Files”: Social media corporations spend a large amount of time and resources discussing how to bend the rules so that politicians and celebrity influencers don’t get suspended. To pretend that the “Twitter Files” illustrates internal political bias on behalf of the old regime is to ignore the reality that Musk’s new regime is much more politically motivated.
Musk promoted the Twitter Files as a blockbuster whistleblower story on par with 2021’s Facebook Files. In reality, most of the “evidence” of a left-wing conspiracy in the Twitter Files occurred under the Trump administration (Trump appointees led both the Department of Justice and the FBI while Joe Biden was a private citizen. In the end, the only whistleblower involved in the big reveal was the company’s new owner.
We’re being silenced!
Then there's the assertion that Musk’s acquisition of Twitter was about making “the game fair between left and right.”
This talking point, a favorite among Musk fans and Republicans, argues that social media favors liberals while tamping down conservative voices. The only problem with the argument is that it simply isn't true.
In 2021, Twitter commissioned a study, later published in the peer-reviewed journal PNAS, that found just the opposite:
The authors analysed the “algorithmic amplification” effect on tweets from 3,634 elected politicians from major political parties in seven countries with a large user base on Twitter: the US, Japan, the UK, France, Spain, Canada, and Germany.
Algorithmic amplification refers to the extent to which a tweet is more likely to be seen on a regular Twitter feed (where the algorithm is operating) compared to a feed without automated recommendations…
The researchers found that in six out of the seven countries (Germany was the exception), the [Twitter] algorithm significantly favoured the amplification of tweets from politically right-leaning sources.
Overall, the amplification trend wasn’t significant among individual politicians from specific parties, but was when they were taken together as a group.
The study, conducted using data from over 46 million unique users, also considered whether the platform's algorithm disproportionately favored news content based on ideology:
To this end, they measured the algorithmic amplification of 6.2 million political news articles shared in the US. To determine the political leaning of the news source, they used two independently curated media bias-rating datasets.
Similar to the results in the first part of the study, the authors found that content from right-wing media outlets is amplified more than that from outlets at other points on the ideological spectrum.
This part of the study also found far-left-leaning and far-right-leaning outlets were not significantly amplified compared with politically moderate outlets.
Musk’s fan base consists mainly of right-wing ideologues who see themselves as victims of a system that often works in their favor. Never mind that they control the most-watched cable news network (Fox News) and the top financial publications (The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s). Conservative pages routinely rank in the top ten on Facebook.
Finally, Musk is not “making big money on paid services,” at least not yet. The fact is, his strategy to shift Twitter’s business model isn’t working well at all.
He’s managed to render the once-coveted blue check mark worthless by giving it to any user willing to fork over $8. And since relaunching the service a few months ago, the company has only added about $11 million in mobile subscriptions.
By Musk’s own calculations, Twitter has a negative cash flow of about $3 billion. With nearly $13 billion in acquisition debt, the company’s future is uncertain. So far, the only thing Musk’s Twitter acquisition has accomplished is re-platforming white supremacists, chasing away advertisers, and losing boatloads of money.
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"The employee, who Musk fired via tweet, accused of faking his disability, and called a malingerer who “did no actual work,” was Haraldur Thorleifsson, Iceland’s Person of the Year."
Wow! Talk about doing no actual work... all he had to do with look this guy up for himself and he would've seen who he was, I mean did a quick search myself, which took seconds, and saw that this is an important and reputable guy. Musk sure knows how to pick who he picks on. lol