Elon Musk ‘doesn’t look like’ the right person to own Twitter, says co-founder | Elon Musk

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The social media platform’s co-founder said Elon Musk “doesn’t seem like” the right person to own Twitter, adding that improvements to the company’s content and sentiment policies have been reversed under its new owner.

In an interview with The Guardian, Biz Stone said the positive changes he helped oversee in recent years had been resolved by the Tesla CEO.

Running a social media company is “not really a win-win situation… it’s always difficult,” Stone said, because “50% of people are going to be happy, 50% of people are going to be annoyed with you.”

“You have to be OK with the things you don’t like or don’t agree with,” Stone said, adding, “Otherwise, you just have to buy a magazine or a newspaper or something OK that has definite leanings.”

Asked if Musk was the right owner for Twitter, Stone said, “It doesn’t feel like it now, but I could be wrong.”

Musk has been criticized for temporarily banning journalists from entering the platform and bringing back previously banned accounts, such as those of former US President Donald Trump and self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate.

Stone, who co-founded Twitter in 2006 with Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, and Evan Williams, returned to work in 2017 at CEO Dorsey’s request to “channel the company culture, that energy, that feeling.” Stone said that improvements during his four-year tenure, particularly in morale and content oversight, have been lost under Musk’s leadership.

“We’ve made a lot of improvements in those areas. Now that’s all gone.”

Biz Stone, left, and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey in 2008. Photo: Zuma Press/Alamy

Musk backtracked on his pledge to establish a “content management board” that would oversee large content and account recalculation decisions, relying instead on more abusive methods such as user surveys hosted on his Twitter account. He also fired nearly half of Twitter’s workforce within days of buying the company for $44 billion ($35 billion) last year.

Stone added that employees should not be named as part of the release of the so-called Twitter Dossiers, a series of internal documents detailing decisions such as the suspension of Donald Trump.

“When that happens, people get a lot of harassment,” Stone said. “It’s really bad.” Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, was reportedly forced to leave his home when Musk posted tweets misrepresenting Roth’s 2016 academic thesis, “LGBT data.”

Stone said the Twitter concept will continue, regardless of the company’s current financial difficulties. “I don’t know that Twitter as a company is going to be successful forever, but the idea of ​​Twitter I think will be there,” Stone said, referring to the success of alternative platforms such as Mastodon.

“It would just be important for the idea to survive on Twitter. And that’s what happened. It looks like it’s already happening. It looks like Mastodon is winning the open-source, decentralized version of Twitter. It looks like people are going there.”

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He added, “I don’t know the future. I don’t know what’s going to happen and maybe in a year things will be great and [it] He had to go through this experience by fire. But at the moment it doesn’t look very good, I guess.”

Stone spoke to the Guardian where he confirmed that he is joining the board of directors of Chroma, a Swedish startup in which he is also an investor. Chroma creates an audio and visual experience for mobile users, describing itself as “a world of audio experiences in a pocket” where users can change what they see and hear.

Describing Chroma’s work as a “soundplay”, Stone added, “It’s a new way to interact with sound and play with sound”. Last year, Chroma teamed up with Venezuelan musician Arca to create Lux Aeterna, an app that creates an “ever-evolving, boundless audiovisual world.”

Stone said his investment philosophy is simple — “Do I like this guy” and “Do I think they can do this thing that I’m going to use myself?” “If both of those answers are yes,” he adds, “I’m usually in.”

Referring to Chroma CEO and Founder Andreas Pihstrom, he said, “I love working with Andreas. He’s a really talented designer.” Stone’s co-investors in Chroma include Evan Sharp, co-founder of digital board platform Pinterest, and Ben Silbermann, co-founder and CEO of Pinterest, where Pihstrom served as creative director.

Stone, who has also invested in messaging service Slack and Pinterest, added that he never thought of Twitter as successful when he co-founded it in San Francisco.

“I say to young people – if you’re doing something to try to get rich, it’s probably not going to work. You should be doing something that you really enjoy working on and then you actually have a higher chance of getting rich.”

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