Elon gone, but Twitter’s woes set to continue
There’s really only one word you can use to describe the opening stages of Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter – chaos. That’s why only a fool would attempt to predict what might happen next… so here goes.
The story is moving so fast that even as you read this the landscape may well have shifted further, but as I write Musk has finally responded to the Twitter poll in which he asked users if he should step down as the company’s CEO, and they voted yes.
He says he’ll step down as soon as he finds someone foolish enough to take over. And I don’t think he’s joking. Whoever it is will have a big job on their hands.
Although it’s important to note that, by Musk’s own admission, he will still be in charge of the “software and servers teams”. And he will also still be the owner of the company whoever is CEO – it’s hard to imagine him not having a continuing final say on the direction Twitter takes. I think we will see more chaos, more features added and then taken away, more desperate scrambling to shore up the company’s finances as advertisers continue to slip away.
Musk will eventually decide his commitment to what he calls “free speech”, which he has already shown to be selective, is unsustainable. Advertisers do not want their messages shown alongside the more unsavoury side of Twitter users’ output.
Then he’ll either hand the whole mess over to someone else and go back to his day job at Tesla and SpaceX, or he’ll sell up at a massive loss. Either direction remains perilous for Twitter, and there are no guarantees the company will make it to the end of 2023 intact.