I wonder if Musk— if he could turn back time— would forgo purchasing Twitter. It seems to have been a bad business decision and a bad reputational decision. His investment in Twitter may be worth nothing at all and he’s dragged Tesla down 64% in the last year— when the Twitter drama began— its worst-ever drawdown. Why? “[T]he risk of operational miscues at Tesla has grown as Musk focuses on restructuring Twitter. ‘Musk has gone from a superhero to Tesla’s stock to a villain in the eyes of the Street as the overhang grows with each tweet,’ Wedbush Managing Director Dan Ives, who has become increasingly critical of Musk in 2022, told Yahoo Finance… ‘Tesla’s brand has become more polarizing,’ Goldman Sachs analyst Mark Delaney said in a note this week. ‘We believe that Tesla’s brand has significant value related to the company’s leadership position in clean energy and advanced technology. Having consumer focus related to Tesla shift back to these core attributes of sustainability and technology will be important in our view if Tesla is to meet or exceed long-term investor expectations for Tesla.’” And now,Indonesian billionaire KoGuan Leo, the third-largest individual shareholder of Tesla shares, is demanding Musk step down as CEO.
Linette Lopez, writing for Business Insider, this morning predicted Musk would take Twitter "down in flames." She described Musk's modus operandi: "Enter a field with very little competition. Claim that your new company will solve a massive, global problem or achieve a seemingly impossible goal. Raise money from a fervent group of true believers and keep them on the hook with flashy, half-baked product ideas. Suck up billions from the government. Underpay, undervalue, and overwork your employees. Repeat. Twitter is the antithesis of an 'Elon Musk company.' It's an influential but small player in a field that is dominated by giant, well-funded competitors. The government is more likely to put the clamps on Twitter than give it some windfall contract. And Twitter's employees have options: They can leave and work for companies that treat them much better than Musk ever would. But perhaps most importantly, a lot of people think Twitter— and Musk's ownership of the company— is part of a global media problem, rather than some grand solution. And without a big, world-changing promise to paper over his sophomoric product ideas and erratic management, Musk's Twitter takeover is doomed... There is no pivot in which Musk suddenly becomes serious and starts acting like a normal executive. The frenzied, callous, throwing-ideas-at-the-wall boss from hell you see on Twitter is the one people actually get in Musk world. It's always been that way. Somehow, during a bull market, in a decade when tech was on top of the world and he was the king of it— that style worked. Now it won't."
This morning, writing for New York Magazine, Chas Danner reported on the latest Musk-created turmoil at Twitter: a new rule suspending Twitter users who share details of their profiles on other social media sites, not just Mastodon and Post, but even Facebook and Instagram, apparently freaked out that Twitter is hemorrhaging users. Sharing the links to Mastodon and Post accounts in tweets and in Twitter profiles has become commonplace. (You can find me on Post here and, although I’m not really much of a fan and don’t post much here, on Mastodon too.)
“The practice,” wrote Danner, “has become particularly common among people who have been critical of Musk’s regularly outlandish behavior and/or the new direction of Twitter under his leadership. But even for users who have not fully fled the platform, posting ‘where else you can find me’ details has emerged as a kind of insurance policy in the event of Twitter’s demise, either due to technical issues following the gutting of the company’s workforce, or any kind of sudden departure of users en masse in response to what Musk is doing to the platform. Now Twitter is apparently forbidding its users from talking about where else they post. Under the new policy, Twitter announced Sunday that ‘at both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms’— including, as of now, Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Post, and Nostr, as well as hub pages that aggregate someone’s profile links like linktr.ee and lnk.bio.”
Violators of this policy will be subject to tweet deletion, temporary account locks, and temporary or even permanent bans. Twitter suggests that cross-posting content from the banned competitors is still allowed, but it’s far from clear how that will actually play out in practice. Indeed, it’s far from clear how the overall policy will even be enforced. On Thursday, the company began blocking tweets which included links to Mastodon, and it’s possible that similar link or language-banning may eventually be automated for additional sites. It’s also notable that Twitter’s biggest competitor, TikTok, is absent from the list of prohibited sites.
…At best, even if the new policy isn’t universally enforced, it gives Musk and Twitter another tool to selectively silence critics on the platform— which is precisely what already appears to have been happening in recent days.
Starting Thursday, a number of journalists who cover Musk have had their accounts suspended for what Twitter and Musk claims were policy violations. On Saturday, the account of Washington Post tech journalist Taylor Lorenz was suspended without explanation. Her last tweet had been directed at Musk, asking him to comment on a story she and her Post colleague Drew Harwell (whose account was suspended on Thursday) were working on.
In a reply to a tweet about her ban on Sunday, Musk claimed it was a “temp suspension due to prior doxxing action by this account” that “will be lifted shortly.” In other words, Lorenz’s account was retroactively suspended for some past violation. When she appealed the suspension, Twitter replied that the judgment was permanent and could not be appealed. A short time later, her account was restored.
While Musk continues to insist that freedom of speech is Twitter’s new north star, so far it has looked a lot more like an asterisk.
