Revenue slumps, Tesla woes and a ‘quit’: Musk’s wild Twitter reign so far Elon Musk

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When Elon Musk walked into Twitter’s offices on Oct. 26 carrying laundry, a day before he was to buy the platform for $44bn (£38bn), it was the first sign that his ownership tale was not going to be conventional. “Let it sink in!” he tweeted. Everyone swept up in what followed—from thousands of Twitter employees to advertisers and critical journalists—certainly now has.

Musk’s reign has since proven unpredictable and contentious, with the Tesla CEO losing the title of world’s richest man in the process. Here are some notable moments from the eventful past 10 weeks:

Separate half of the workforce

Once Musk took over Twitter, he fired top executives including: CEO, Parag Agrawal; Ned Segal, Chief Financial Officer; and Vijaya Jade, Head of Legal Policy, Trust and Safety. Days later, he laid off 50% of the company’s 7,500-strong workforce with affected areas including a communications team, an organization unit that helped counter disinformation, and a human rights team.

More departures followed a bizarre episode in which Musk set employees a mid-November deadline to commit to working “long hours at a high intensity” and being “extremely hardcore” or leave with three months’ severance pay. That led to another 1,200 employees leaving, according to one estimate. Musk now says Twitter has about 2,000 employees. Around the same time, it was reported that Twitter had let go of 4,000 contractors in areas including content moderation and engineering.

In response to predictions of Twitter’s demise in late November, Musk tweeted: “Wasn’t Twitter supposed to die by now or something…?” However, the platform, which faced warnings of technical problems after several expert staff members left, suffered an outage on December 28 that affected some users.

Musk said the firings were necessary because Twitter was losing $4 million a day. That’s a scary number for a business that must make over $1 billion in payments on the nearly $13 billion in debt that’s now on its balance sheet, as part of financing the acquisition. Musk said this month that Twitter faces a “negative cash flow situation of $3 billion a year” but claimed the company should be “almost” on cash flow — even after his efforts to cut costs.

Twitter made the mistake of relaunching its premium service, Blue. Photo: NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock Outbound advertisers and subscription setbacks

Musk acknowledged that Twitter suffered a “massive drop in revenue” after the acquisition, which he blamed on campaign groups lobbying advertisers over the future of content and security guidelines under Musk’s leadership. Carmaker Audi, drugmaker Pfizer and General Motors were among the brands that paused spending on the platform in the immediate aftermath of the takeover. This is a fundamental problem for a company that earned 90% of its more than $5 billion in revenue last year from advertising.

The ad freeze deepened following a botched relaunch of Twitter’s Blue Premium service, which saw a group of impersonators take advantage of opportunities to launch verified “mock” company accounts for just $8 per month. Affected companies included pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly & Co and Musk’s Tesla, which led to the temporary suspension of service.

Work is underway to repair the damage. Twitter is working with the Global Confederation of Advertisers, whose membership it says accounts for 90% of global ad spending, to address advertiser concerns, as well as relaunch Blue without a resurgence of the fake account issue.

The new service offers verified status — via a blue tick or check mark — for $8 a month or $11 a month on their iPhone. Musk believes mass verification is the best way to defeat pesky spam accounts, one of his Twitter accounts being bête noires. Other perks promised by the subscription service include an edit button, a 50% reduction in the number of ads in a user’s feed and the ability to post longer tweets.

Musk reinstated Donald Trump’s Twitter account, among others. Photo: Stanislav Kojiko/SOPA Images/Rex/Shutterstock Banned accounts reinstated

Mask has lifted the suspension on accounts run by Donald Trump, former British-American kickboxer Andrew Tate – who was banned for severely misogynistic posts and was arrested Friday in Romania on charges of human trafficking, rape and forming an organized criminal group. — and Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, among others. American rapper Yee – formerly known as Kanye West – was also reinstated but suspended again after he tweeted an image of a swastika emblazoned with the star of David.

At the same time, Musk announced a new content policy of “freedom of speech, but not access,” stating that “negative/hate” tweets would be “de-posted” and no ads would appear near them.

The reinstatement was another sign of the inconsistent behavior that will see Musk’s tenure, weeks after he announced that no decisions would be made about returning to his position until the newly announced Content Moderation Council met. He blamed the apparent decline on unnamed “political/social activist groups”, accusing them of persuading advertisers to stay away.

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In mid-December, Musk contradicted his stance on free speech by freezing the accounts of prominent tech journalists at CNN, The Washington Post, Mashable and The New York Times. It accused them of breaching Twitter’s newly created guidelines that bar users from posting “live location information” that would “reveal a person’s location, regardless of whether such information is publicly available.” This guideline was created as an apparent justification for suspending, @ElonJet, the Twitter account that has long annoyed Musk by showing the location of his private jet via publicly available information.

The journalists were reinstated days later, after Musk released a poll on his Twitter account that gave a majority in favor of lifting the suspensions. But Musk’s targeting of the journalists drew condemnation from the United Nations, the European Union and campaign groups.

Also in December, Musk released internal documents to Twitter to select journalists for a project he called “Twitter Profiles.” The documents showed the internal process behind the decisions to suspend Donald Trump’s account in 2021 and the platform’s response to the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Another excerpt from the files raised questions about Twitter’s dealings with the Pentagon.

Tesla stock value is down 70% to $122 in the year to date. Photo: Action Press/Shutterstock Pulling a Tesla to it

Musk’s status as CEO of Tesla is key to his fortune and made him the richest person on the planet, before losing the title to luxury businessman Bernard Arnault in December. The electric car maker, in which Musk has a significant stake, has only gotten worse as his interest in Twitter has grown. Musk’s involvement with the platform first came to light in early April with revelations that he owns a significant stake in the company, followed weeks later by a deal to buy the company, which he initially walked out of — prompting legal action — before returning to full two months earlier.

In the year to date, Tesla shares have fallen 70% in value to $122. Some of this is specific to Tesla, such as slowing demand and fears of Covid shutdowns at its Chinese factories, but Musk’s frequent sales of Tesla stock to fund his Twitter purchases – despite saying in April that he had little more to plan – as well as concerns that he is also That too much focus on the social media platform has also pissed off investors.

“Musk has lost credibility with the broader investment community given broken promises (selling stocks over and over…), the Twitter fiasco, the opening of the political storm on Twitter, and the deterioration of the brand for Musk and Tesla, resulting in a complete disaster,” said Dan Ives, managing director at Wedbush Securities, a financial services firm.

The majority of Twitter users voted for Musk to step down as CEO. Photo: Andre M Chang/ZUMA Press Wire/REX/Shutterstock “Resignation” as President

Musk said on December 20 that he would step down as CEO of Twitter “as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!” His announcement followed a poll on his Twitter account in which users voted decisively in favor of him stepping down. The pledge also followed court testimony in November in which he said he expected to “reduce my time on Twitter” after an “initial explosion of activity”. Whoever takes on this job will be running a globally influential social media platform with over 250 million daily users. But with a very demanding and impulsive owner.

“One of the first things I said after the acquisition closed was, ‘We’re going to make a bunch of mistakes but then we’re going to try to recover from them quickly’ and that’s what we did,” Musk said, according to the All-In Podcast, released days after he announced he was stepping down. But for the Tesla CEO, perhaps the biggest mistake — with less chance of a full recovery — was buying Twitter in the first place.

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