Twitler

[claidheamhmor]

Anyone who had any illusions that Elon Musk could competently run a business must surely have lost them by now.

After a court forces him to follow through with his offer, Musk buys Twitter at a vastly inflated price, taking out billions in expensive loans to do so (because Musk's fortune is in stock, not in cash). 

He fires half the staff without bothering to see what they actually do (and is forced to re-hire some). He's now facing legal issues in states and countries where it's illegal to let staff go like that. 

Then he revokes all work from home, exceptions approved only by himself. He obviously thinks people only work when he's watching them. Many other staff resign.

Then he sends an email saying all staff are expected to work extra long hours, and those that don't like that can take severance. Many do, because they can easily get new, better jobs.

He terminates most teams that handle content moderation (like the team that watches for child porn).  And he invites fascists, Nazis, abusive people, and other problematic banned accounts back onto the platform. Unsurprisingly, advertisers leave in droves. Musk starts a fight with Apple, a company than can snuff Twitter out in a keystroke.

I work in a large IT organisation. We here know what happens when you lose staff. Management don't always know what people do, but the systems are fragile, and held together with people and their processes. Losing almost entire teams...that could well be fatal. It's not quick, but over time, systems will degrade and fail. The guy who gets the notifications for expiring certs, the people checking mailboxes, the infrastructure team watching for disk space alerts...if they're not around, things will fail eventually. There's a huge amount of institutional knowledge that's been lost. Timeline, two-factor auth, and comment issues are already happening. 

Musk has a lot to lose here...

Comments

[eve_prime]

Since I'm not personally very emotionally invested in Twitter, I find it rather amusing to watch him flail.

[bsgsix]

Musk has always been an incredibly self-serving individual - watching his worshippers bow to him has always caused me a small amount of eye-rolling amusement. But he has, once again, gone too far, and I think even his cult followers are (in part) catching on. He ran a massive platform into the ground. The layoffs and demands are so extreme that I personally know people whose livelihoods have been destroyed by this greedy, self-righteous billionaire. The fact he's asked some of them back, and that most are saying no, is quite telling. His general ego won't care, but we know how he cares about his money, and *that* greedy part of him must be a bit concerned.

And as you said, it's not that he has cash in pocket to handle this; no billionaire like Musk does. His money is in stock. If he wants to risk his own money, that's one thing (because he's not self-made; we all know this by now). He's risking other people's finances, and has already ruined people's careers and economic security. The good this one person could have done for millions was overshadowed by ego. It's clear why he's a Nazi-supporting Trump-lover; Trump operates under the same delusions of grandeur. Musk was all too happy to welcome that back.

The feud with Apple is so laughable to me. People (including myself) have fled Twitter - we see what he did and continues to do, and we won't support it (or be suckered into paying to support it). For Musk to attack Apple, which will never have the same issue with customer acquisition as anything Musk "makes" or "provides" (quotes necessary there) is, again, a fool's display of ego.

When you fire 56%+ of Twitter's staff - including their content moderation AND accessibility staff, which is the absolute reason I deactivated Twitter, on top of the fact that supporting Musk feels like waving a Trump flag in my own front yard - chaos will ensue. Musk doesn't know - he's not the genius businessman people flout him to be. But people who work in tech know. My husband works for the EPA, providing a great deal of their infrastructure, and that is (maybe a biased opinion, maybe not) a far more important need than Twitter. I cannot begin to imagine what would happen if the government laid off 56% or more of the EPA's tech staff. It would be worse than Twitter's downfall, that is for certain. The failure would be immediate. Twitter can't be more than a few steps behind that, and Musk doesn't have the resources to handle what he's lost.

Basically, he played the arrogant Icarus, he flew too close to the sun, and all his fake Dogecoin can't buy his way out of that. Twitter will be a shell of what it once was, and frankly, with the exception of those who need Twitter to make money (employees, small businesses who rely on a large network to find clients, etc.), I'm not at all sad to see it burn to ash on the ground.

(Unrelated PS, but I really like your user icon!)

[claidheamhmor]

I think it's going to be a bit of a disaster for Musk, both image-wise and financially. At least, I hope so. His arrogance has been destroying lives.

My icon is a special snowflake. :)

[mandyist]

He does have a lot to lose. He is such a wrong 'un.

I feel governments stepped in over other mass corporate failures (Enron in US, Carillion in UK). Why aren't they stepping in to prevent a Twitter failure?

[claidheamhmor]

Maybe because it's all self-inflicted by one person? He doesn't seem to mind socialist intervention though, given the handouts he's taken for his companies.