() — When Elon Musk first agreed to buy Twitter, he promised to make the company “better than ever,” with more transparency, fewer bots, a stronger business, and more of what he called “free speech.”
But six months after Musk took control of Twitter, the future of the company and the platform has never been less certain.
After acquiring the social media platform for $44 billion in late October, Musk now values Twitter at around $20 billion, and some who are keeping track of the company believe even that estimate is probably high. Musk repeatedly warned that Twitter could be at risk of filing for bankruptcy just to claim he had brought it back from the brink by cutting costs, both by laying off 80% of Twitter staff and by allegedly failing to pay some of its bills, according to multiple demands. But it’s unclear how and when Musk could make Twitter grow again.
Twitter’s CEO has antagonized journalists and media outlets who have long been central to the platform’s success, oversaw policy changes that threaten to make Twitter less secure or less trustworthy, made the platform less transparent for researchers and scared off many major advertisers. Musk’s main plan to grow Twitter’s business, through a revised subscription strategy, has resulted in a lot of chaos, and only a limited number of actual subscriptions.
In the process, Musk has also changed his own reputation. Once known to much of the public primarily for his innovative efforts to launch rockets and build electric cars, Musk has spent much of the past six months making headlines for controversial policies and feature changes to Twitter, draconian cuts in staff which resulted in frequent interruptions of service and briefly banning several prominent journalists. He has also tweeted a long list of eccentric comments from his personal Twitter account, including share conspiracy theories and publicly mocking a Twitter worker with a disability he wasn’t sure if he was fired.
“If I had done nothing but cut costs, then Twitter would have been fine,” said Leslie Miley, a former engineering manager at Twitter, who founded her own product safety and security team and left the company in 2015. Since then she has held positions at Google, Microsoft and the Obama Foundation. “If you would have let everyone go, treated them with respect, and let the service run for two years, you would probably be fine.”
Now, however, Miley said she hopes Twitter will “eventually go the way of MySpace.”
“It’s going to take a little longer… [pero] I think Twitter is on its way to irrelevance,” he said, “there is no strategy to acquire or retain users because you are not offering them any value.”
Twitter, which has cut much of its PR team under Musk, responded to ‘s request for comment on this story with the autoresponder from its press email that it has used for weeks: a poop emoji.
Breaking into the digital town square
For years, what set Twitter apart from other social platforms was that it served as a hub for real-time news. It was a place for ordinary people to read and even chat with celebrities, business leaders, and other newsmakers.
Many of Musk’s recent moves on the platform threaten to undermine that purpose, not to mention the larger information ecosystem, and it’s unclear that the efforts will improve the company’s business.
“Twitter has never been perfect, it had a lot of problems, but it was a critical global infrastructure for information that Elon Musk is now systematically, frankly, vandalizing,” former Twitter Global News President Vivian Schiller told . in a recent interview.
More recently, Musk removed the legacy blue checkmarks that verified the identities of featured users, saying he would instead make them available only to those who pay $8 a month for Twitter Blue in order to “treat everyone equally”.
“There shouldn’t be a different standard for celebrities,” Musk said in a tweet earlier this month.
But the move may make it easier for bad actors to impersonate high-profile individuals and make it harder for users to trust the veracity and authenticity of information on the platform. What’s more, Musk decided to endorse blue marks for certain celebrities, including Stephen King and LeBron James, effectively creating exactly the “different standard” for celebrity wearers that he had said he wanted to avoid.
Now, Musk says that content from verified users will be promoted on the platform, which could make it harder for users who can’t afford a subscription, or just don’t want to pay Musk for one, to find an audience on the platform. And the new paid verification system won’t necessarily remove bots from the platform, an issue Musk spent months railing against while trying to get out of the acquisition deal last year, according to Filippo Menczer, a professor of computer science at Indiana University and director of of the Observatory of Social Networks.
“You can create fake accounts and pay US$8 [por una marca azul]… so if you’re a well-funded bad actor, you can do more damage now than before,” Menczer said. “And if you’re a trusted source and you’re not well-funded, your information won’t be as visible as it used to be.”
Menczer added that the result could be “less free speech, because you’re drowning out ordinary people’s speech by people who have the technical skills or the money to rig the system.”
Twitter’s decision to charge users for your API it will also make it more difficult for researchers to identify and alert the platform to inauthentic activity, Menczer said, and could disrupt other positive uses of the platform that have contributed to its reputation as a news hub. Weather agencies, for example, they have warned that the change could make it more difficult for them to issue automated emergency weather alerts.
Removal of advertisers and users from Twitter
Any social network lives or dies on its ability to retain and attract users, and there are real reasons for Twitter to care.
Several users, celebrities, and media organizations have said they plan to leave Twitter due to Musk’s recent policy changes, which often appear to have been made on a whim without any real principle.
NPR, BBC and CBC they left twitter after taking issue with a controversial new “government-funded media” label that they say was misleading. CenterLink, a global nonprofit organization that represents hundreds of centers that serve LGBTQ communities, said it would no longer use Twitter after the platform removed protections for transgender users from its hate speech policy. And some high-profile users, like anti-bullying activist Monica Lewinsky, have threatened to leave the platform over the blue tick change, now that they may be at greater risk of phishing on Twitter.
Few alternatives remain that offer Twitter-like features and scale, but it has emerged a growing list of new competitors since the Musk acquisition. At least one big rival, Facebook parent Meta, has also confirmed that it is working on a service that looks a lot like Twitter.
“Pretty much everything he said he was going to do, he’s screwed up in so many ways,” Miley said. “If it wasn’t so damaging to the people and organizations that have relied on the platform, it would be funny. But it’s really not fun because it has degraded people’s ability to communicate effectively.”
All the chaos has made it difficult to convince advertisers, who previously made up 90% of Twitter’s revenue, to rejoin the platform, after many halted their spending in the wake of the Musk acquisition over concerns about rising revenue. hate speech, as well as confusion over the layoffs and the future direction of the platform.
Only 43% of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers as of September — the month before Musk’s acquisition — were still advertising on the platform in April, according to data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.
Musk, for his part, has said that Twitter usage has increased since he took over and that advertisers are steadily returning to the platform. But because he took the company private, he is not required to make any financial disclosures and the company’s supporters must take his word for it.
Musk’s reputation
Musk built his reputation on his work at Tesla, helping launch a widespread shift from gas-powered cars to electric vehicles and turning SpaceX into a space transportation giant. Now, he appears to be attempting a similar overhaul at Twitter: turning the tried-and-true digital advertising business upside down in favor of a subscription model that no other social media platform has been able to find large-scale success with.
“I give him some credit for trying a different business model, I think the user data-based business model is pretty abusive,” said Luigi Zingales, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, though Musk also has tried to improve Twitter’s targeted advertising business.
Some other tech companies have followed suit in some places. Facebook parent Meta has copied Twitter by launching a paid verification option. And Meta, along with other tech companies, have gone through multiple rounds of cost cutting since last fall. Twitter seems to have covered some of these ideas, and the somewhat more principled approaches of other companies made them look better by comparison.
For Twitter and Musk, the stakes are high for success: Musk’s relationships with banks and investors for future projects they could depend in part on his performance at the social media firm, for which he took on billions of dollars in debt to buy. Banks will “sit back and say, what kind of credibility does this guy have? Are we going to find him making these risky bets that actually throw our money down a hole?” said Columbia Business School management professor William Klepper.
Any change in Musk’s reputation since his time at the helm of Twitter could also have a ripple effect across his broader business empire, making potential investors, recruits, and clients think twice before betting on one of his companies. . Tesla shareholders recently complained to the company’s board that Musk appears “overcommitted.”
“Your reputation has gone down significantly with Twitter…and once you lose it, it’s very hard to get it back,” Klepper said. “It would be a good opportunity for [Musk] reconsider whether or not it’s…really leadership material.”
Musk vowed in December to step down as Twitter chief executive after millions of users voted in favor of his departure in a poll he posted on the platform. But for now, he’s still the “Boss in Tweet.”
