The acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk began on April 14 and concluded on October 27. In the first month of his saga, he became the largest shareholder with a 9.1 percent ownership stake. He wrote that he wants to create “a common digital town square”, where everyone can speak freely.
Elon’s actions
In the first two days, an eccentric billionaire took over the company he fired half of the employees including the CEO, CFO, and head of legal policy, trust, and safety. A week after he set an ultimatum for the rest of the employees: either work in a “hardcore environment” or leave. Probably he didn’t expect that the next 1200 employees will resign. It led to the closing of whole departments of the company. The funny thing, in Californian law there is a record that says all formalities regarding employee resignation must be done within 72 hours after it. For Twitter, it was hard to do, because the department which was responsible for this action was closed. The CEO of Tesla scrapped the company’s work-from-home policy, but after those events, he had to temporarily close offices. Everything led to lots of bad press on Elon Musk, the creation of #RIPTwitter, and 4 million dollars lost per day.
Funny paradox
Everyone wants to see Twitter dead and it makes this media source as alive as it never was. The platform now is doing very well, besides the internal problems of the company, they are making all-time highs almost every day. Last week there were 1.6 million daily active users. Moreover, a lot of Elon’s fans are ready to work for free just to help their “hero”. I think that Twitter’s mission is the thing that makes it special. The platform is elevating citizen journalism and by that, they are competing with mainstream media oligopoly, forcing them to be more accurate. There is freedom of speech, but as Elon Musk said, not freedom of reach. It means that negative/ hate tweets will be deboosted. You won’t be able to find them unless you specifically seek them out.
What do you think about Elon’s recent moves? Is Twitter going to die or rather thrive?
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Elon’s new adjustments in the twitter office policies might seen unethical by various pressure groups, however it is very logical and has been executed perfectly. By simply upgrading the work tone of the office and kicking out the corrupted leaders in twitter, Elon managed to drastically decrease its yearly costs by such a short period of time. Ofcourse there would be some internal bugs in the system at first but this is only but a natural reaction considering 1200 employees left realising they now need to do actual work instead of minimum weekly effort. Overall this has been a successful move by tesla’s CEO and it is most definitely going to push twitter towards a greater path.
It’s crazy what is going on with Twitter! It’s still interesting from a psychological point of view to see how people respond to Musk’s actions. Nonetheless, I’m curious about Twitter’s future development after all of the steps taken to increase “efficiency” in the company.