- Late in the evening on October 27th,
Elon Musk officially took ownership of Twitter
and wasted no time overhauling
basically everything about the company.
In a matter of days, he's fired the board of directors,
installed himself as CEO,
and made a string of increasingly chaotic product decisions.
He's talked about relaunching Vine.
He's talked about establishing a new oversight board
for moderation decisions.
The biggest new project is getting all the verified accounts
to pay $8 a month for their blue check
and if the engineers can't ship an update
in the next week, they're fired.
Looming over everything is the threat of massive layoffs,
touching nearly every part of the company.
Whatever happens, this is gonna have a huge
and lasting impact on what it's like to use Twitter.
So what is Elon Musk's version of Twitter
actually gonna look like?
Twitter was part of the first wave
of social media companies,
founded just one year after YouTube
and two years after Facebook.
But where those two became billion dollar businesses,
Twitter has really struggled.
Lots of people use the platform, but as a business,
it's inconsistent at best,
struggling for profitability
through a rotating cast of CEOs.
As Mark Zuckerberg put it,
"it was like they drove a clown car into a gold mine."
As of last quarter, Facebook has about 10 times more users
and makes 10 times more money than Twitter.
From April to June, Facebook made a profit of $8.4 billion
and Twitter lost $344 million.
That's a lot of money to lose in three months.
And after 15 years of fitful profitability,
Twitter was looking at a very real possibility
that the company would just run out of money.
Into that mess steps Elon Musk.
Even as Twitter was failing as a business,
it had become really influential with a core set of users,
particularly people who work in the media.
So when Twitter made controversial moderation calls,
like banning Trump or blocking a New York Post article,
it could have a huge overall effect.
As Elon became more prominent on Twitter,
he also became more prickly
about the platform's moderation choices.
And unlike basically every other person on Earth,
he was in a position to raise tens of billions of dollars
just to buy the thing.
- This is not a way to sort of make money.
Having a public platform
that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive
is extremely important to the future of civilization.
I don't care about the economics at all.
- So in theory, this approach could work.
Whatever you think of him, Elon Musk has a long history
of running mission-driven companies
and if you squint a little,
you can imagine Twitter being run the same way.
But basically everything Elon has done
since he made this offer
has made the deal seem like a slow motion disaster.
After charging in hard with the $44 billion offer,
he spent most of the year trying to weasel out of the deal
because of some pretty specious claims about bot activity,
eventually caving once Twitter took him to court.
Now Elon really owns Twitter.
He's made himself CEO and he can do whatever he wants,
but mostly what he seems to want to do
is make life difficult
for the people who actually work there.
You can argue some of this makes sense.
Twitter really does need to reduce its costs
and the whole reason Elon bought it in the first place
was because he thought they were doing a bad job.
But the fact that it's happening so quickly and haphazardly
raises the real possibility
that there just won't be anyone left
to keep the platform running.
Twitter's reputation as social media's ugly duckling
also works against it here.
Anyone with the skills to really help Twitter succeed
could make a lot more money at Facebook or YouTube
and they wouldn't have to deal with working for Elon.
At a company like SpaceX or Tesla, you might stick around
because you really care about electric cars
or private space flight.
But at this point, it's hard to imagine
anyone really feeling that way about Twitter.
Then there's Musk's view of free speech.
His basic idea is that Twitter should do less moderation,
which is a reasonable enough idea,
but in practice,
it's meant gutting Twitter's trust and safety team
at the same time that the platform is seeing a huge surge
in tweets using racial slurs.
Whatever you think about the abstract ideas in play,
this is not gonna tempt in any new users or advertisers.
What's left looks an awful lot like a death spiral,
where staff chaos creates user experience problems,
which leads to fewer users and less money,
which leads to more staff chaos and more platform issues.
For all Elon's experience,
he's never run a social network before
and he's not gonna have a lot of runway
to turn Twitter around.
If he really can't,
he may have just bought a $44 billion trash fire.
Thanks for watching.
It's been a busy week of updates,
but you can catch it all on theverge.com.
- [Director] Sweet, that was great.
- Did you like the point?
That was like...
That's what gets me.