He thought that national weather services, governments, and emergency-response agencies all needed Twitter more than Twitter needed them. Musk - who is frantically looking for cash in Twitter's couch cushions - wanted to charge users for access to this feed, known as Twitter's application programming interface. Musk decided in April to abruptly cut off access to the Twitter program that allowed the MTA to send out automated alerts after it ran relatively smoothly for years. It was a symbiotic relationship for the site - users depended on the platform for timely updates about stalled trains and late buses, while the MTA had a quick, reliable way to reach customers. For years, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the agency that controls New York City's subways and buses, used Twitter to send out automated alerts about emergencies and service changes. But unsurprisingly, being a billionaire "reply guy" does not give one a clear sense of why everyday people are using the product. And he didn't bother to get to know what users wanted out of their Twitter, assuming instead that his hopeless addiction to tweeting had already given him all the answers.
He acted as if he alone could be the advertising business (like he was at Tesla). He fired over 70% of Twitter's staff with absolutely no respect for their institutional knowledge. What made those businesses successful won't work at Twitter, but Musk tried it anyway. All the businesses he has started were first movers in nascent industries. In fact, he's not a turnaround guy at all. Unfortunately for Twitter, Musk is not a traditional turnaround guy. Even before the takeover, it needed new management, a reevaluation of the business, and investment in product innovation to bring in new users. That said, all this is unraveling much quicker than I thought it would. In those respects, I think it's fair to say I was right. Once the deal went through, I said he had no real plan to turn the business around. In the early days of Musk's Twitter takeover, I told you he was overpaying for the company. But what's more likely is that he will turn it into former President Donald Trump's Truth Social - a digital megaphone for a single, raging narcissist and all the people who fawn over him. Musk has said he might turn Twitter into an "everything app" - a one-stop shop for anything from ride-hailing to shopping. Unfortunately, Musk's fumbling is rubbing all that relevance away and giving other platforms an opening. Its appeal was its ability to collect information about the present moment, whether it was the death of a notable member of society, a weather event, or traffic. But when something was happening, people immediately went to Twitter to know more. It never really made money, and it was never the biggest social network. Clearly in some kind of mood over Threads' overnight success, he wrote on Twitter: "It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter, than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram."īeing relevant was Twitter's core strength as a platform. For Musk, this should be more embarrassing than getting wrecked in the ring. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jennifer Lopez, and Steph Curry. In less than 24 hours, Threads had over 30 million users, including Rep. On Thursday - a couple of weeks after Musk challenged him to a cage fight - Mark Zuckerberg's Meta launched Threads, a social-note site fused with Instagram. If an advertising platform can't be trusted during the Super Bowl of advertising - the Super Bowl - then what good is it?Īnd now there is growing competition. To succeed in that business, it needs both the users who generate content and the clients who buy ads to believe it is a stable, reliable place. Twitter is at its core an advertising business - the last public financials showed that over 90% of its revenue came from ads. And pretty much every new "feature" that Musk rolls out - from an increase in the length of tweets to the now infamous "rate limit" that prevents users from seeing more than a set number of tweets a day - has made the product worse. Twitter hasn't even been able to hold it together during the news-making events it's known for - such as while Rihanna was performing at the Super Bowl halftime show. Ron DeSantis of Florida announced his presidential candidacy on Twitter, a parade of malfunctions turned what should have been a historic moment for the company into a mess. The platform, which Musk promised to turn into a free-speech, bot-free haven, is glitchier, bottier, and spammier than ever. It's been less than a year since he bought it, and Elon Musk's Twitter is already well on its way to suffering a fate worse than death - irrelevance. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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