Elon Musk is currently in the process of destroying any and all good will generated by Twitter, the website built for people to argue on. Twitter’s European team found that they were left unpaid last week, specifically those in the United Kingdom and Germany, with several people completely left unpaid with no real explanation. Thematically, Musk also demanded a payroll audit to confirm that the people that he was paying at Twitter were “real,” which is one of the more confusing ideas I’ve ever heard of.
Musk’s onerous Twitter deal combined with his general lack of basic common sense has left the company saddled with billions of debt and declining revenue, partly due to advertisers like Apple deciding to cut ties with the company due to the chaos of Musk’s existence. Musk now claims that Apple has threatened to remove Twitter’s app from the app store, but “won’t tell them why,” which makes absolutely no sense and, as with many things with Elon Musk, may just be what he wants to be the truth. Musk also decided the best time to fire more people from Twitter would be the night before Thanksgiving, I assume because they were insufficiently “hardcore.”
The common thread with all of these situations — other than Elon Musk — is how utterly needless and pointless many of Musk’s actions are. There was no reason for Musk to acquire Twitter — he already has billions of dollars and over a hundred million followers on the platform. There was no reason to do so in a way that saddled him — well, let’s be honest, the company — with $13 billion of debt. There was no reason to fire the entire trust and safety board, and while some may suggest that layoffs were necessary, there was no good reason to lay off 50% of the company, as proven by the fact that Musk had to rehire people. Musk could have done a great deal of good by taking even a few days to take stock of what he’d just purchased, but his needless greed and need for attention meant that he couldn’t help but start reducing numbers without any concern for what those numbers mean.
It would not have been hard to “fix” Twitter, if you believe that Twitter needed fixing. Musk refused due diligence when purchasing the company, which means that there is almost no way that he could have a complete picture of the company’s finances, culture and structure. There was no reason to rush this process — Musk is already wildly rich, and fully capable of raising further capital by selling his Tesla stock — other than for Musk to prove that he’s the…
