The fact that Musk’s ownership of Twitter has turned out to be a train wreck isn’t surprising, but the speed with which it’s happened is truly breathtaking.
Poor Twitter, though. A more or less functional company with great reach, appeal and even utility is dying horribly. HORRIBLY. From a certain POV it’s an utter horror show. I feel for all those people that just lost their jobs over one man’s insane hubris.
But, yeah it is bizarrely entertaining as an utterly jaw-dropping shit-show.
My only concern is where the OSINT reporting on the Ukraine war is going to be available if Twitter shuts down entirely.
Yes, it’s rare, but it sometimes does happen. My counterexample would be Lou Gerstner, who famously brought IBM back from the brink of disaster to become a thriving company again. I don’t know anything about Eisner but Gerstner was pretty much the opposite of Musk – a down-to-earth pragmatist who knew how to run a business and to understand and leverage its strengths, and AFAIK not burdened by any ambitions to establish human colonies on Mars or Venus. 
I find it very depressing. As I’ve said, I use Twitter a lot, so to see it being destroyed is exasperating.
I’ve no doubt you can cite counterexamples. The thing is, if the ratio isn’t OVERWHELMINGLY in favour of the parachuted CEO, they’re not worth the money they’re paid. The number of successes rather strongly suggests that the successes are effectively random.
This doesn’t mean Eisner and Gerstner weren’t talented men, because they were. Clearly, though, the likelihood of the star CEO being the right one to turn the company around is just luck.
This would be my favourite, but so far as I can tell it’s fake:
This appears to be real, though:
I think Musk thinks he understands this, in the sense that the advertisers are the revenue base, but he also dislikes the model (because it represents an externalization of authority that can impose pressure to moderate content, thereby interfering with the company and its users “freely” expressing themselves) and believes he’s smart enough to do something “better” (because he’s Musk and he enjoys the smell of his own farts).
For me, the truly remarkable gap in Musk’s comprehension is found in his obsessive tinkering with the verified-user label and mechanism. He uses disparaging language like “lords and peasants” to describe the old paradigm, where some people are important and everyone else is a lower-status peon (or a bot), and he says the paid-checkmark icon will “democratize” the platform, taking away the power of the “lords” and putting everyone on an equal level.
But the entire appeal of Twitter’s platform is that, for better or worse, we are interested in what those “lords” have to say. We enjoy the conversations that are sparked by and revolve around their statements, as well as the opportunity to interact with them (reply and hopefully get a response). Nobody opens Twitter to dive into an undifferentiated pool of millions of people chattering indiscriminately at one another. You start with the obvious people for your particular interests, whether it’s Chrissy Teigen, or Christiane Amanpour, or Wayne Rooney, or whoever. If you see someone in the replies who makes an especially good point, you might follow them as well. If you consistently make good replies yourself, you might accumulate a follower base of your own. It’s a hub-and-spoke branching model, and it all starts with those high-profile personalities. They are the anchor points for the mass appeal of the platform, the centers of gravity to which followers are initially attracted. And the reason people feel comfortable following them? Verification. We know this is the official voice of, say, Taylor Swift, unfiltered and unmanipulated by any corporate agenda beyond her own social-media management team.
Musk seems bizarrely fixated on this, resentful of the fact that these “lords” are the prime attractor. It seems intensely personal for him. One could speculate endlessly about the psychology that supports this attitude (pure ego? a lingering echo of having been bullied as a youth?), but wherever the resentment comes from, it seems to be an emotional driver for many if not most of his changes.
But this is also the glue that holds the conversational network together. In the advertising model, it’s the reason the business is able to offer millions of eyeballs to marketers, because those millions of eyeballs have come to see what prominent people are saying, and to talk back to them. You can criticize this if you like, arguing that it’s a vestigial remnant of our primate-brain wiring, our instinctive deferential and/or competitive interest in the alpha members of the tribe, but it’s the reality of how we as human beings function psychologically. But the thing is, this reality is also meaningful for his alternative business model, based on direct revenue. Nobody will pay to use the platform if there isn’t rock-solid assurance that the “lords” are who they say they are. If Twitter devolves into a sea of anonymous voices babbling at one another without mountaintops to define a structure, the whole thing will dissolve into, well, 4chan.
To whatever arguable extent Musk was successful with Tesla and SpaceX, he and his ego were fed by the sense that he was a pioneering trailblazer, out ahead of the pack, a unique voice. But on Twitter, this is working against him; he seems unable to process the reality that the network has many, many points of interest, and functions specifically because users organize themselves, and revolve, around those points.
One thing’s for sure: In the future, there will be no confusion about the definition of the word “hubris,” or about the best modern example of it. Someone will use the word, someone else will ask what it means, we’ll point at Musk and say “what he did at Twitter,” and everyone will nod with understanding.
I can’t verify this because I don’t have an iphone, but apparently Twitter Blue is now offline.
The Chiquita tweets are hilarious.
We should invite them over here…
Look, everyone knows the important part of the wheel is the rim, because that’s the bit that touches the ground. It’s so much more efficient to just get rid of the hubs! And any reports that the wheels are now coming off are totally fake news.
…this transcript of the all-hands meeting has convinced me that Elon Musk is probably the stupidest person on the planet.
He thinks he can pivot Twitter into being a banking-platform, a Youtube competitor and the new TikTok.
I don’t proactively do anything to follow anyone on Twitter. But on the basis of tweets I’ve seen linked to or quoted on sites like this one, I hope that after the final flush is put on the Twitter toilet, Patton Oswalt finds a new social media outlet quickly.
I find it fascinating that the chances that one day a twitter logo might be the only thing that aliens find on Mars just went from zero to some.
In my superficial understanding of Twitter, this seems to me to be the essence of why it is (was?) successful. I’m not a regular user, but a few times I’ve tweeted directly to an author or TV person and gotten a direct reply. That’s not only very cool, but it’s the only place where this can happen, at least in a timely fashion.
What was it about this model that Musk thought was broken and needed fixing?
Or does he truly NOT understand that this direct, unfiltered contact with the “lords” is what makes Twitter unique?
After announcing the gray checkmark three days ago, and then killing it two days ago, Elon has now un-killed it.
Very Stable Genius at work here, folks.
As near as I can tell, it was because this model allowed people to mock Musk’s posts, in real time.
I have to say it is going about as well as I expected. Musk is a no-talent clown and not a genius, real-life Iron Man. I would almost say it is going worse than expected because I thought there was some possibility that have $44+ billion (plus TSLA value) on the line might make Musk think “Ok, I cannot f*ck this up” but I think he’s like so many other people who got fame and started to believe their own hype (mandatory TFS video I am the hype! - YouTube) and he thinks he’s a genius businessman. Musk seems determined to destroy what little remained of his reputation except among the most hardcore of Muskrats, and his fortune.
And if he can’t swallow his pride and show the FTC the appropriate level of deference and compliance, there’s a nonzero chance he goes to prison as well.
That would be a shame.
pops champagne