‘Catastrophic’ and chaotic first month at Elon Musk’s Twitter

It’s been just over a month since Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44-billion. In that time, he’s fired the top management, decimated its staff, destroyed the remaining employees’ morale and sent advertisers fleeing, fearing that he’ll shatter the content moderation that kept disinformation, hate speech and right-wing crazies in check.

He’s reinstated Donald Trump, who bizarrely hasn’t taken up the offer – supposedly because the former US president is tied to his own Truth Social platform.

Musk warned that Twitter was losing $4-million a day – and then seemingly made that shortfall even worse by freaking out the advertisers with his scattershot management style and constant about-turns.

There’s a theory that he is “shit talking” Twitter to get a discount on the banks, which own $13-billion of the social platform’s debt (that was part of his deal to buy Twitter), so he can buy it at 40c to the dollar.

It’s one of the many theories that Musk, whose “academic” credentials include Pretoria Boys High, is somehow contriving to reinvent Twitter in a better way.

It’s obviously rubbish. If Musk has some grand plan, it’s hard to discern.

As NYU Stern Professor Scott Galloway has pointed out, Musk’s purchase of Twitter is not a company unravelling, but Musk himself losing it. It’s hard to disagree. Nothing the Pretoria schoolboy is currently doing seems to make sense. Many commentators point to some inherent genius strategy that nobody else but Musk can see.

Instead, it’s like the Springbok game plan of figuring it out as you go, while making many, many mistakes, and unforced errors at every turn. Perhaps Musk has more Springbok in him than he’d like to admit.

Whatever plan Musk allegedly has,

it clearly isn’t working. With 90% of Twitter’s revenue coming from advertising, the Black Fridays and Cyber Mondays of November should have been a bumper crop. Instead, warned a Twitter revenue analyst in Europe, “we are seeing a significant decline in bookings”. Advertising income in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) has fallen 15% year-on-year, while weekly bookings have shrunk 49%, according to the tech publication Platformer.

At the end of October, revenue analysts calculated that about $15.7-million in EMEA revenue was threatened by advertisers pausing their campaigns, the publication revealed. In the UK, there is an expected loss of $12-million.

These losses are even worse considering there is a minor, controversial sporting event happening in Qatar. Generally World Cup years are bumper times for advertising and marketing – which makes Musk’s value destruction of Twitter even more bizarre.

“It’s catastrophic,” a former Twitter executive told Platformer. Indeed it is.

Musk’s changing of his Twitter bio to the sarcastic “Chief Twit” doesn’t seem so humorous any more. Certainly not for Musk himself, who made a spontaneous and seemingly ill-considered offer for Twitter, forewent due diligence, had post-offer regret, spent months trashing its 5% spambot statistic and its top executives, and then realised his attempts to back out of the deal wouldn’t work.

So he went through with the deal and arrived at its San Francisco HQ with a sink, seemingly to make the corny comment “let that sink in”. Not the best situational comedy from the “free speech absolutist” who announced Twitter had got its sense of humour back, and then banned lots of comedian accounts that parodied him.

Whether he is “shit talking” to buy his own debt back or has some deep plan, all the world can see is chaos. No wonder advertisers are rushing away.