Why Did Elon Musk Destroy Twitter?

Wealth is something that, no matter who you are, inspires a reaction.  There are a variety of responses that people can have to it, of course, and not all of them good.  The phrase "eat the rich" is bandied around as a jocular (probably) phrase for a reason.  In a world where income inequality has hit a breaking point, the gaps between CEO's and their lowest-paid employees increasing ten-fold and union threats from actors to teachers to (quite possibly a week from now) UPS workers showing just how angry people are with their compensation, the wealthy are bandied around like a swear word by many parts of the world right now.

Wealth, however, has also ignited fantasies.  For centuries we've been obsessed with those who possess the most cash, with everything from society pages in the newspapers to Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous-type programming to the Republican Party picking as its leader a man who has made his name synonymous with a specific type of gauche money-parading, people are obsessed with talking about wealthy people, and projecting a certain type of fantasy onto people with a great deal of money.

It stands to reason, therefore, that the richest man in the world would mean different things to different people, and presently, that person is Elon Musk.  The list of companies on Musk's resume is impressive on its surface.  He is currently the CTO of Twitter, one of the world's most vital social media companies, he has also played a role in the leadership of SpaceX, Tesla, & PayPal.  Musk has gained a reputation of being a genius, someone who is one of the leading minds of his era, and someone whom a large amount of (young white men) on Twitter hero-worship.  But Musk's leadership of Twitter, the only social media site I use regularly, has been shockingly bad, and I think it begs the question-is Musk's reputation earned or purchased?

Musk has a history of buying his way into promising companies like PayPal and Tesla, and in both of these cases, he appears to have let the powers-that-be in those companies do what they needed to do to succeed.  That hasn't been the case with Twitter, and it's worth wondering why.  Musk bought Twitter, a publicly-traded company, and turned it private in the process.  He immediately started by uprooting the company culture that had been in place by previous CEO Jack Dorsey, and started to have mass layoffs, in many places where it felt like this was foolish, including in areas like content moderation & system functionality that are vital to a social media company's success.

But it was the policy decisions that were the most baffling.  It's not surprising that Musk made an elevated subscription service for the site.  Other social media sites (like YouTube) have done this, after all.  But the subscription service quickly became a joke, and altered the site's culture.  The subscription service came with a blue checkmark, which until that point was something that you needed to verify yourself.  One of, if not the most useful things about Twitter for most of its users was understanding that a blue checkmark meant that the person was actually the person who was tweeting.  Anyone could impersonate Katy Perry, but only one account was going to be Katy Perry-the one with the blue checkmark.  Quickly after this, this meant that a blue checkmark was essentially worthless, because it was just a status symbol.  While Musk reversed to a certain degree with other colors of checkmarks (for government officials and for companies who advertised on the platform), combined with the system outages, this made the site increasingly unusable.

Most of Musk's decisions, in fact, seem to have been focused entirely on making Twitter harder for its devoted user base to actually use.  He removed Dorsey's policy about the spread of Covid-19 misinformation, and unblocked previously banned accounts like those of Donald Trump & Jordan Peterson.  It drove legitimate news organizations like NPR & the CBC off of the site.  He implemented a "tweet limit" for his site, which seemed less to be a policy decision and more to cover up for an increasingly shoddy website, which at one meant that Twitter Circle tweets were made public despite them not supposed to be private.

This week, he implemented two more changes, implementing a limit to the number of DM's a person can send on the website (which I just hit...I use Twitter as my email for certain friends so it adds up quickly), and then changing the entire name of the site from "Twitter" to "X."  Every single one of these things have been met with ridicule by any unbiased observer and certainly by the bulk of the people who actively use the site...and it begs the question, what exactly is Musk doing here?

Twitter was a valuable tool, though it's hard to tell if you could still call it that now, the equivalent of Elon Musk taking a sledgehammer to a classic Cadillac rather than restoring a couple of parts to get it running again.  I loathe the term "content," but in this case I'm going to make an exception because it's kind of what this is-Musk owned a platform where the most important people in the world gave him "content" for free.  Taylor Swift, Stephen King, Michelle Obama, Roger Federer...they all regularly used Twitter.  Do you know how much it would cost an advertising company or a movie studio or a publishing house to get these people to give you their thoughts of the day...and Musk got it for free?!?  Twitter was always a struggle to monetize, because unlike Instagram or YouTube it's harder to make advertisements organic to the experience, but it's there.  Someone with enough innovation could see a site that had hundreds of millions of people sharing their wishes, dreams, crushes, and interests and could turn that into something that turns a profit (hell, that's what Facebook did).

So it's either two things here, in my opinion, that have to be true-there's not really an in-between.  The first is more nefarious, and what I initially thought.  Twitter was home to not just mega-celebrities, but more importantly it was a place to get of-the-second information about a news item or for journalists to share information.  If you are hearing about a school shooting, you go to Twitter.  If you are watching on election night, Twitter has the answer well before any major network is telling you anything.  During the early stages of Covid-19 vaccination, Twitter was the best place to find out where to get your Pfizer shot.  Twitter is the single biggest new asset for journalists and researchers since the invention of Google, and a great asset to help democratic nations ensure freedom of the press, petition, and assembly.  Musk, who has celebrated far-right issues like attacking Dr. Anthony Fauci, and has been sympathetic to the views of Donald Trump & Tucker Carlson, could spend $44 billion on a company without changing his lifestyle at all (he's that rich) and run it into the ground simply for the joy of making democracy harder.

For most people, that would be the worst case scenario, but I suspect for Musk, there's something even scarier, and with the renaming of Twitter, I kind of wonder if it's true: Elon Musk is a terrible businessman.  History is littered with wealthy men who came in and stood on the backs of smarter, savvier figures, and came out looking like the genius because they had the biggest pile of gold coins because of the company's success.  Musk, however, gives off the vibes of someone who bought something he didn't understand, and tried to treat it like he thought he understood it.  He didn't listen to most of his users, he made changes that made the company more valuable to his core group of sycophants (who loved the idea of annoying the people who used to try to moderate & ban them, and who had blue checkmarks for actual achievements and not because they paid the price of a cup of coffee to get them).  But the problem with trying to turn "own the libs" into a business model is that that only works to take something down.  You can't denigrate the majority of the population with a company as big as Twitter without losing money in the process, and as a result Musk feels like he fell for his own hype.  Twitter (or now X...I still call it Camp Snoopy & the Sears Tower, so I ain't budging there) will probably exist forever in some facet of the internet.  But Musk has made it impossible for it to ever be something of proper value again.  It's not clear if BlueSky or Threads will be the replacement, or if something totally new comes along, but eventually Musk will have a true representation of what uninspired, lazy thinking gets you, and for the first time in his career, he'll have an example of what happens when you actually put him in charge and not just let his money talk.