Twitter

Elon Musk has bought Twitter and started making changes. Lots of people have commented on the changes. Here are my thoughts.

Musk's actions are radical and seem reckless. (At least, they seem reckless to me.) Dissolving the board, terminating employment of senior managers, demanding that employees work 84-hour weeks to quickly implement a new feature (a fee for the blue 'authenticated' checkmark), and threatening to terminate the employment of employees who don't meet performance metrics are no way to win friends -- although it may influence people.

Musk may think that running Twitter is similar to running his other companies. But Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company are quite different from Twitter.

Twitter has a number of components. It has software: the various clients that provide Twitter to devices and PCs, the database of tweets, the query routines that select the tweets to show to individuals, and advertising inventory (ads) and the functions that inject those ads into the viewed streams.

But notice that the database of tweets is not made by Twitter. It is made by Twitter's users. It is the user base that creates the tweets, not Twitter employees. (Nor are they mined from the ground or grown on trees.)

The risk that Twitter now faces is one of reputation. If the quality (or the perceived quality) of Twitter falls, people (users) will leave. And like all social media, the value of Twitter is mostly defined by how many other people are on the service. Facebook's predecessor MySpace knows this, as does MySpace's predecessor Friendster.

Social media is like a telephone. A telephone is useful when lots of people have them. If you were the only person on Earth with a phone, it would be useless to you. (Who could you call?) The more people who use Twitter, the more valuable it is.

Musk's actions are damaging Twitter's reputation. A number of people have already closed their accounts, and more a claiming to do so in the future. (Those future closures haven't occurred, and it is possible that those individuals will decide to stay on Twitter.)

As I see it, Twitter has technical problems (all companies do) but their larger issues are management and leadership issues. Musk may have made some unforced errors that will drive away users, advertisers, employees, and future investors.