I have lost all patience with Elon Musk. Up until last week, I could see some rationale and a ray of hope in his Twitter monkeyshines, but renaming Twitter blew away any lingering spell.
I’ve never been a Twitter fan. I have no quarrel with folks who enjoy an adrenaline and dopamine thrill during a hot online exchange, but dashing off few characters and blasting them out to the world does not excite me, nor do I much enjoy reading blurted tweets. However, scientists, journalists, and many others have all appreciated a decade of Twitter’s rapid and live flow of opinion and information. Twitter established its usefulness for many users.
Some folks like to toss spit wads at the Twitter wall to see what sticks. That’s fine too, but it points the way to the downside of Twitter. I’m too old not to have noticed that attention-seeking, greed, and choler is always present in this world. Given the way people are, some of those spit wads will be mean and treacherous fire balls. Some heat improves a dish, but too much ruins it.
If it were easy, or even possible, to distinguish good and bad posts like sorting sheep and goats, I could see that managing a platform like Twitter would be an interesting and satisfying job. But we all have good days and bad days. My notion of good is only to a rough approximation of yours. On most points, we will differ. Sometimes we will differ a lot.
Anyone who has tried to keep peace in a family, lead an elementary classroom, or push a project team toward a goal knows how mind-stretching and frustrating taming the discourse on a platform like Twitter must be.
Did pre-Musk Twitter meet that difficult challenge? Not especially well. They were in trouble with the European Union and the FTC. Both the right and the left accused them of bias.
As a service system management product developer who has seen outfits like Twitter both succeed and fail, up to the last few weeks, I didn’t think Musk did too badly.
Musk always struck me as a little too hot for everyday consumption, but Tesla and Starlink are undeniable accomplishments. Unfortunately, massive layoffs at Twitter made sense.
Twitter has all the marks of a company that has struggled and failed to address issues. Instead of fixing problems with solutions, Twitter took the last century MBA route and hired more staff, thinking held over from the era when a coal shortage could be solved by hiring more miners.
Technology does not work that way. Typically, adding more staff delays a technical project. Twitter appears to have added bodies instead of engineering and administrative discernment, and that led to a flailing technical organization. They desperately needed trimming. Musk’s judgement was correct. A massive layoff, however cruel and harsh, was the only choice.
I’ve gone through the process of trimming a bloated staff and know how hard it is, akin to a brain surgeon extracting a tumor, but instead of a scalpel, you are stuck with a sledgehammer and pickaxe. If the result of your effort is vaguely in the direction of your goal, you haven’t done so bad.
There’s no question that Musk paid far too much for Twitter. At first, I was willing to give him a pass on that. The world’s richest man can tap his bulging piggybank and survive. Wasting money is a gazillionaire’s prerogative. Accumulating vast wealth offers experience on how much extravagance one can bear. One would assume.
The last few weeks have been bad for Twitter. It appears to have fallen into a descending spiral. Stiffing critical suppliers like landlords and cloud providers has affected operations, which decreases revenues, which further curtails resources. This is the way corporations die.
Yet another nail in the coffin: rumor says some employees still cash in vesting stock options at Musk’s inflated price of $54 per share. That will end soon. I wonder if those employees will continue to work for Musk when that fountain of gold turns into trickle of dry sand?
I expected that naming an advertising executive as CEO would inject some reality into Musk’s advertiser management and stabilize revenues, but the last change, renaming Twitter to X looks like another round of playground gags instead of advertising management skill.
Which brings me to my point: I’m an old Unix hand. X, for me, is the X Windows system developed at MIT that was the foundation for distributed graphic interfaces. Graphic user interfaces (GUIs) opened computing to a wide swathe of users. Without GUIs, computers would be impossible for most people to use.
And now, venerable X has been permanently tied to Elon Musk driving his Twitter Tesla into a bridge abutment.