Twitter is dying and Musk is to blame
Elon Musk is undeniably a prominent public figure, viewed as a god to some and a complete idiot to others. He proved long ago that he’s not your average tech mogul, tweeting “69 days after 4/20” on our unfortunate shared birthday and failing at casual market manipulation when he threatened to privatize Tesla stocks.
Musk has been an idiot for a lot longer than people would like to admit, but we might have finally reached a point where even his most devout followers won’t back him up. Musk has been praised by his cult of supporters for being an innovator in electric vehicles, space exploration and white-collar crime. However, his days of appreciation might be over after his last series of questionable moves.
According to CNBC, Musk made an offer back in the spring to buy Twitter for an astounding $44 billion. He quickly backtracked and tweeted, “My offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate.”
Although it’s nice in theory to think that one can just “take backsies” a $44 billion deal, alas, not even Lord Musk could weasel his way out of this one. He finally caved when Twitter started to follow through with the lawsuit they promised, forcing Musk to buy Twitter for the original offer just weeks before the case was set to be heard in court.
Musk has been the official “Chief Twit,” as he called himself in his Twitter bio, for less than a month, and has already proposed some disastrous new additions to the platform.
After he fired nearly half of Twitter’s employees, questions have been raised about how Musk plans to go on without key engineers. Musk jumped to undo some of these layoffs after realizing that he may actually need some of these employees to keep the company afloat. He claimed that some of the layoffs were “accidental” and tried to convince his few remaining employees to encourage their former coworkers to come back.
Musk’s supposed support of “free speech” began to be tested shortly after he took over, with a spike in tweets of racial agitation, election conspiracies and some straight-up slurs. How does Musk propose to solve this? By forcing users to pay $8 a month for blue check verification.
Creating a town square of free speech is a great idea– until it starts to encroach on those precious profits.
Since his pay-to-play scheme has been imposed, hundreds of users have created accounts pretending to be celebrities and companies. One user impersonated Eli Lilly, a company that produces insulin, pretending that insulin was now being given out for free. This led to the loss of billions of dollars and a public apology from the actual company.
We don’t need innovation in our bedrock social infrastructure just yet; we need a safe space for people to share ideas without causing large-scale impersonation or encouraging violence or unmoderated hate speech. Musk is taking the failing upward approach he uses to run his other companies to Twitter, which has a very limited margin of error.
Is very clear to outsiders that Musk has no long-term plan for how Twitter is going to function. He’s not a tech wizard. It’s hard to perceive him as anything other than a First Amendment advocate-turned-billionaire fascist dictator who refuses to take responsibility for his actions. He thought that he could eradicate all of Twitter’s algorithm fail safes and those at the company that maintained them without any consequences.
Twitter is slowly becoming unusable, with verified user tweets drowning out the opinions of regular users and Musk’s personal tweets dominating the top of everyone’s feed. Twitter is for making jokes about mental illness and insulting people on the basis of looks, not watching the CEO unravel in real-time.
We will just have to wait and see how Twitter can stay afloat or how much money Musk is willing to dig from Tesla to keep inflating Twitter stocks. Someone is going to run out of money, and I’m placing my bets on the meme lord oligarch himself.