October 27, 2023 - 7:00am
A year has now elapsed since Elon Musk took charge of Twitter with a Dad joke: carrying a kitchen sink into the company’s San Francisco HQ. (“Let that sink in!” he tweeted.) According to bien pensant opinion, the acquisition has been a catastrophe. A disaster for the social media network, which has lost both revenue and users; for the finances of everyone backing the deal; and for Musk’s personal reputation as the greatest industrialist of the post-industrial era.
This is true, up to a point. Musk’s scattergun initiatives have alienated some of his keenest supporters. Removing the ability to block — an essential anti-harassment tool for users, particularly women — was followed by stripping headlines from articles shared on the site. This week Musk exposed users to spam calls, just the latest in a list of objectively poor decisions (blocking was retained). The desire to turn the network into an “everything app” and the name change are dotcom-era fantasies of a younger Musk, ones the older man can’t seem to relinquish.
Some perspective is needed. Commentators taking delight at every misstep have some skin in the game, having come to regard Twitter as their very own safe space, basking in the credentials that the old management made specially for them, and so carefully rationed — the blue tick mark. High-profile journalists left as noisily as they could, in the manner of theatregoers walking out halfway through a particularly objectionable performance. Or they pretended to leave, but stuck around anyway.
Twitter already had deep problems, and the cosy arrangements only masked them. It had rarely made money, posting losses in eight of the 10 years prior to the acquisition. Faced with an advertising market dipping into recession, Musk had to make savage cuts. The headcount reductions don’t seem to have affected the user experience significantly.
Indeed, Musk boasts that the development team is 15-20% of its pre-acquisition size, but is five times more productive in delivering new features. The experiment has exposed one of Silicon Valley’s worst kept secrets: software development is a well-rewarded sinecure, and over-staffing is rife. If a faceless hedge fund, rather than Musk, had acquired Twitter, it would have been obliged to do much of this, too: cut costs, and seek new revenue streams.
Musk’s biggest problem is really a self-imposed one. Prior to the takeover, he had made numerous references to the “woke mind virus”, which he viewed as a civilisation-ending threat. Twitter or X, he promised, would henceforth be a haven for free speech and free thought.
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SubscribeI can’t understand what the author is trying to say. Why has the blob won? It isn’t clear from the article (not, at least, to a thicko like me).
You’re not the only one
He starts by saying that this is what fashionable progressives think:
But he never clarifies whether their opinion is valid. In fact he says that while the progressive types are constantly threatening to quit the platform, they never really do. That would suggest they are not correct in their view that Twitter has lost users.
I can’t comment on revenue or the financial health of the company but I would certainly disagree that Musk’s reputation is damaged. He seems to be wildly popular and influential if we judge this by the column inches devoted to him (including these).
Matt, I’m sorry I couldn’t provide the moral clarity you wanted in 600 words. But that might because the real picture is much more complex than the Anti Musk activists would like us to think, and sometimes you have to examine the evidence. I think Twitter has got much more interesting, but less reliable, and some of the decisions were objectively stupid. (No one says “X”).
Recall that Musk was compelled to complete the acquisition of Twitter by a Delaware court, having concluded he didn’t really want to buy it.
He has since found it much more difficult to operate in an environment dominated by NGOs which I think he underestimated. Posturing as an anti-woke warrior was relatively easy.
Thanks for replying Andrew (I love it when authors engage below-the-line).
I wasn’t looking for moral clarity at all, I just couldn’t fathom your argument.
I am sure you are right about this but I cannot see the evidence of it in the article. You say that bien pensant opinion predicted catastrophe but has it actually arrived? Have revenues tanked? Have users deserted the platform? Has Musk’s reputation taken a hit?
As far as I can see – and I don’t use Twitter or any social media and in fact don’t really read or watch any news expect for UnHerd and the Spectator – Musk seems to be as influential as ever and everyone who claims to have left Twitter never seems to do so in reality. I know Twitter, like GB News and others, struggles to get advertisers due to activist campaigns but is the company really in trouble?
As I said above, I sometimes feel that active Twitterers don’t realise that normal people haven’t even heard some of the things they take to be common knowledge. In this case, I feel I might be missing some vital information to make sense of the story.
We can’t really tell what revenue and usage are today, because Musk took Twitter (oops, X) private and he isn’t obliged to report it publically any more.
You are onto something, though. I wanted to include this detail, but cut it to make room. The active user number is the last reported public data.
I enjoyed the piece but also felt it was a bit short. I’m wondering why you were limited to 600 words given that it’s not a piece for print.
I think we should all refer to it as “X-Twitter” which sounds about right.
I thought the article was fascinating, but it ended rather abruptly. Any chance of a longer piece with a bit more moral clarity?
Fair enough – though ‘posturing’ is one of those loaded BS sneer-words that, in my view, should be read with great suspicion and almost never be used (rather like ‘rhetoric’, ‘rant’ and ‘troubling’). I don’t think Musk is posturing: he’s doing his level best for the First Amendment, though with scant help from anyone in the Corporate/ State/ Global Blob world.
I was agreeing with you.
Summed up in the final paragraph, Matt M. One could go further and argue that democracy itself is part of the great egalitarian delusion. In our less than ideal world the levers of power fall to those who are able to gain the most influence – either openly or covertly.
So is the argument that the advertising boycott instigated by Musk’s progressive enemies has worked and that he has capitulated to them in some way or is about to? If so, how? I am still not clear what is being said. Perhaps there is some news out there that I don’t know – I will go an have a look.
(I often find that people that use Twitter talk as though everyone knows what they are talking about when in reality only Twitter users have the foggiest).
Aren’t we just all spending more and more or our (post-Covid) decreasing lifespans disappearing up our own online fundaments chasing ever more ghostlike presences on the Internet ?
I saw a TV program about Iceland aeons ago and there the government turned off the TV in the Summer months to make sure that the population and kids in particular took advantage of the longer daylight hours.
Maybe we need a compulsory digital detox for every 3rd month of the year ?
Author doesn’t like Musk.
Reader does.
No mention of the Twitter files here?
Extremely important intervention by Musk, but here I only read the ‘failings’
After a while on Twitter you can distinguish the wheat from the chaff. Also to note I appear to be able to block nuisance tweets.
Musk is an enigma. He does enigmatic things. X was an enigma going someplace to happen. Look for more from this maverick genius. It’s just how he rolls…
I am reply deboosted on Twitter to the point that I have given up replying. That happened under Roth, not Musk/Yaccarino, but it is inescapable despite appealing.
Yanis Varoufakis, in his recent book Technofeudalism, has a rather different take to the author on the ‘Everything app’. It is not a youthful fantasy; it is the sole reason for acquisition.
Quoting my own review:
Gibberish
If you want to damn his post as gibberish, then explain why.
The big “I” again Jewell. As I said last week: too self-referential.
This time, your comment has some merit; your comment last week didn’t.
Anyway, my underlying point is that what Musk says about Twitter and what happens in reality are two completely different things.
Yesterday, he commented “Shocking” on a testimony detailing shadowbanning re. Ukraine, under the previous administration. The day before, Thomas Fazi was being ghost-banned and deboosted for a thread supporting his article here a few days ago.
Smoke and mirrors.
Hello
Groan, the Blob to blame again!
At least a bit of originality please. This gets v boring.
Let’s go back to TTFIC , The Taxpayer Funded Industrial Complex.