Elon Musk never cared if Twitter was a business failure – he wants a political win

Why bother reinstating Donald Trump’s Twitter account? Twitter owner Elon Musk, having said that no such decisions would be made until a content moderation council was established, made the decision after running a quick Twitter poll. He also reactivated the accounts of Kanye West, who was dumped by advertisers after delusional antisemitic comments, and Andrew Tate, the misogynist “influencer” who was banned in 2017 for violating the terms of service.

This puts already nervous advertisers, who account for about 90% of the company’s revenue, in a precarious position. The NAACP has called for big firms to halt advertising on Twitter. Many of them have already done so. The Trump decision also risks a wider political backlash for the platform, especially among users. Musk is already under federal investigation for his conduct during the takeover.

Despite Musk being the world’s richest man, very little of what he has done since purchasing Twitter looks remotely like good business sense. Some of this is down to his management style playing out in a more public forum: he notoriously rules by fear, breaking the law, busting unions and firing employees who criticise him. He appears to want to establish the same pattern at Twitter, based on his apparently unassailable conviction that he knows best. But his interest in Twitter is not just commercial. He is clear that he thinks Twitter’s old management had a left bias, and that he would like to restore a friendly climate for rightist agitators. The goal appears to be to redesign Twitter, and to change its perceived politics.

So, Musk bought a platform of whose workings he knew little and began to “move fast and break things”, as the Silicon Valley motto has it. The purchase itself, adding $13bn to the company’s debt, was the first financial wound inflicted on the company. The second was the axe taken to staffing, making advertisers nervous and drawing the ire of the Federal Trade Commission. He has sacked enormous numbers of staff, beginning with a purge of about half of employees, before begging some of them to return. Meanwhile, a senior Twitter executive made it clear how little those who did return were valued, and how soon they would get the boot again. In leaked Slack messages, he called them “weak, lazy and unmotivated”, and he said they could easily be sacked again.

Musk has driven out a further estimated 1,200 staff members, including engineers responsible for managing content and ironing out bugs, after