The New Twitter Fail Whale

Introduction

Elon Musk bought Twitter for 44 billion US dollars, a huge amount of money. The value of a social media company is less in the software it runs and more in the value of the installed customer base. The real difficulty in starting a new social media site is attracting enough of a user base that it becomes interesting to advertisers. Without advertisers, your social media site will go broke quickly. Running or renting a server farm is expensive, along with all the costs of administration and bandwidth.

It seems that since taking over Twitter, Elon Musk is misstepping with every decision. In this blog post, we’ll look at why these decisions are going so badly.

Employee Loyalty

When Elon took over Twitter, he assumed that all the employees would worship his every word and instantly give him unconditionally loyalty. When Elon said jump, he expected everyone to say “how high”. Instead he received arguments about how dumb his commands are. So why aren’t all the employees instantly worshiping at the feet of the Musk?

1. Financial. By buying out all the shares the way he did, he removed all the employees’ golden handcuffs. These are incentives to stay, usually in the form of stock options or stock grants. Now that Twitter is no longer listed on the stock market, all of these are paid out. This means all the good employees received a healthy whack of cash when Twitter changed hands. Now that competing companies are snooping around, it is easy to  change jobs without worrying about losing your stock options. Plus with the extra cash many employees are using that to start their own businesses.
2. Criticizing everything they have done as crap. Coming in and saying all their hard work is bloated crap and that the software engineers at Tesla could have done a 10x better job, does not foster loyalty. It really pisses people off.
3. Unnecessarily interfering in the business. Elon claimed Twitter runs all these  bloated unnecessary web services and ordered them all shutdown. This shutdown the two-factor authentication service along with several other important systems. Doing things in this sort of trial and error manner isn’t building any confidence in his management style.
4. Twitter spent a lot of time cleaning up the service, removing racists and other hate mongers. Elon felt this was interfering with free speech, coming in and threatening to allow all the racists back on the platform, doesn’t sit well with all the fairly liberal software engineers in the San Francisco Bay area. It also worries employees who understand the laws in other countries like the EU, where this could lead to bad legal problems. Further this is terrifying advertisers and causing them to abandon the platform in droves.
5. Unilaterally canceling all work at home. Basically saying if you don’t come into the office, then you are fired. Basically, the employees called his bluff and forced him to back down. This is probably one key thing that has empowered the employees to push back.
6. Firing people indiscriminately. Elon has fired many employees, but had to try to woo many back to work when he later found out they perform a critical function. The funny one being firing the person that manages controlling employee access to buildings via their badges. Last week they had to close all the Twitter offices because they couldn’t control who had access.
7. Demanding all remaining software engineers email him the details of their last 10 commits and then attend a meeting of all SEs at Twitter HQ. Suspect this goes over really well with the usual SE type introverts.
8. The whole Twitter blue/Twitter verified debacle where all of a sudden anyone can pay $8 and become any celebrity or corporation they like. Eli Lilly lost billions in stock valuation when someone verified as them announced they were giving away insulin for free. Launching this initiative off the top of his head, without any study or accepting any feedback has been a disaster. This has damaged Elon’s credibility, perhaps even affecting Tesla and SpaceX.

I think this will become a classic MBA type case study in how not to do an acquisition of a tech company.

How Long Will it Last?

Elon’s supporters say Elon is a genius, don’t underestimate him, this will all turn out for the better. Twitter will be leaner and meaner and will out compete everyone else.

Elon’s detractors say that with the infrastructure and security teams gone, the whole system is running on borrowed time and the whole system will suffer a cascading failure taking Twitter offline. Beyond that, will the firing of all the content moderators open Twitter to all sorts of law suites? Especially in places like the EU.

As of this writing, Twitter is still up and running. However most of the posts are people announcing their new user id on Mastodon, an open source Twitter competitor. My mastodon id is @smist08@mastodon.online.

Summary

Writing this blog will disqualify me from working at Twitter, Tesla or SpaceX. On the other hand, after seeing how Musk runs things, I won’t be buying a Tesla as my next car.

At this point it looks like Twitter is crumbling quickly right before our eyes. I hope Elon surprises us and pulls things back from the brink. But right now the end looks nigh.