4/29/2023
Elon Musk is regarded as a bold and innovative entrepreneur, but his actions on Twitter have been a mixed bag of bold & stupid — note that “bold” doesn’t equate to being “good”. Hell, Musk’s acquisition of Twitter was accidental, a result from him being legally threatened to uphold his agreement. Trolling works differently when it involves a $44 billion buyout. Elon tried as hard as he could to back of the deal, but shit like that happens when you waive your due diligence rights.
Musk’s strength is his ability to generate media attention, albeit mostly negative. If his strategy involves staying in the headlines with consistent controversies, it begs the question “what comes after that?” Sooner or later he’ll either destroy his reputation beyond repair, or his behavior will become so normalized that it just won’t make headlines anymore. When I say “injure his reputation beyond repair”, I believe that’s already happened in many people’s eyes. The turning point will be when his investors stop drinking the Kool-Aid — which I’m surprised hasn’t happened yet when stuff like a Tesla engineer admitting the company faked their autopilot video have already been reported on.
A short roadmap of events leading up to Elon Musk buying Twitter — https://www.expressvpn.com/blog/twitter-in-numbers/
I decided to briefly write about Elon Musk’s many bizarre (& often bad) decisions he’s made since becoming the boss of Twitter. I won’t go into great detail on each topic, but links to more in-depth articles will be sprinkled throughout for those interested in reading further. I doubt I have the research abilities or attention span to document every stupid thing he’s done, but I’ll attempt to cover the big ones up to this point.
Many of Elon’s followers regard him as a genius entrepreneur, but how do they explain his complete fuck-up in acquiring the social media platform? He made a lucrative $44 billion dollar commitment as if it were nothing, spent months trying to wriggle out of the agreement, then tried to save face by saying he would “honor his deal.” It doesn’t take a genius to question if that were the case, why did Elon spend months trying to get out of it? Even more questionable is how he waived his due diligence during negotiations, then later claimed bot numbers were inflated. All this would’ve been discovered with proper due diligence.
This is not how a clever businessman should conduct himself, fucking himself in the ass for the sake of his ego.
I won’t fault Elon for reducing the Twitter headcount to save money. Many tech companies have inflated numbers, if even just to keep that talent from working at a rival company. But firing 75% of the 7,500 working at Twitter is extreme.
Many of Twitter’s top executives quit or were fired shortly after the takeover: chief executive Parag Agarwal, chief financial officer Ned Segal, general counsel Sean Edgett, & head of legal policy, trust, and safety Vijaya Gadde. This mass firing happened even after an open letter warned that:
Twitter’s number of employees. I wonder what change occurred in Nov ‘22? — https://www.expressvpn.com/blog/twitter-in-numbers/
“…such an action would be reckless, undermines our users’ and customers’ trust in our platform, and is a transparent act of worker intimidation.”
To add salt to the wound, those fired were promised severance pay… that ended up being less than the agreed amount. Maybe Musk needs another court battle to be convinced. From a CNN Business article:
“Musk boasted about offering laid off employees three months of severance, which he said was more than what was legally required of the company. Months after being let go, many employees were only offered one month of pay in exchange for agreeing to various terms and conditions.”
An article from The Observer stated that among the departures, 90% of Twitter’s engineers have either been fired or have left voluntarily. That overwhelming departure should be setting off alarm bells for future site maintenance.
It’s no surprise that APIs are extremely popular for Twitter users — some may not even know they’re using it. From researchers gathering data to third-party apps, a lot of interaction is done through APIs. In his latest attempt to turn a profit, Elon Musk announced that Twitter will start charging for Twitter API access. That already sounds pretty bad, but it gets worse when you read the details. From a Wired article:
“The cheapest, Small Package, gives access to 50 million tweets for $42,000 a month. Higher tiers give researchers or businesses access to larger volumes of tweets —100 million and 200 million tweets respectively — and cost $125,000 and $210,000 a month.”
You didn’t read that wrong — the “cheapest, smallest package” begins at $42,000 a month. Is Musk arbitrarily picking this audacious number because it has “420” in it? This man loves to meme way too much.
What worries me is how this greedy proposal opened the eye’s of other social media companies whom want to follow suit. Reddit just announced that in a few months they’ll also be charging for API usage. Reddit is currently playing their cards close to their chest and not announcing rates for API use, which leaves developers worried. This can potentially funnel users into either quitting the platform or being forced to use Reddit’s own subpar app — because many third-party apps will be effectively broken overnight. Some users won’t even know why their third-party app no longer works.
The strive for constantly increased profits year after year is sickening, especially when it completely destroys its user’s experience.