Externally, the changes are small, but significant. One of his first actions was to order a change to the website’s home page. If you visit Twitter.com without signing in to an account, you will no longer be sent to a login page. Instead, you’ll be taken to the Explore tab, the site’s algorithmically curated selection of the best tweets and most popular trends. It’s a shift in focus, in other words, from encouraging users to sign up or log in, to embracing visitors who just want to see what’s going on and then pledge. This shift in focus is not unprecedented. Twitter has deflected the question many times in the past, sometimes arguing that its goal as a company is simply to maximize the number of people who read tweets, other times arguing that it should maximize account holders, and other times focusing on Enabled Users monetizers – those who see ads. No, the point of change is not what happened, but when it happened: immediately. No focus groups, no A/B testing, no memos passed back and forth between senior executives arguing the pros and cons of each option. Musk commands and change occurs. The message, to those on and off Twitter, was clear: meet the new boss, not at all the same as the old boss. In the days since, Musk has torn through the social network’s headquarters like a hurricane. Backed by a brain trust of close friends, including venture capitalists Jason Calacanis and Sriram Krishnan, PayPal co-founder David Sacks, and Alex Spiro, his personal attorney, and a select group of Tesla engineers, he set out to reshape the company . Along with the symbolic change to the home page came real changes to the executive team. Musk fired Twitter’s CEO and CFO, as well as its head of legal and policy, Vijaya Gadde — the most powerful woman at Twitter and the person most identified with the decision to ban Donald Trump from the site. Despite early reports that executives were in line for multimillion-dollar golden parachutes, Musk instead appears to have decided he hasn’t seen enough courtrooms in the past six months, firing them “for cause” — that is, claiming gross incapacity – and denial of their payments. The payouts will almost certainly come eventually, after Musk plays out a mini-version of the same courtroom drama that forced him to buy the company in the first place. According to a Financial Times report, his argument is that had it not been for his offer, the company’s share value would have collapsed. Others note that the fact that executives fought so hard to get Musk to complete the purchase suggests they did their job very well, securing a multibillion-dollar payout for shareholders who would have been wiped out if they had let him go. But again, the message is being sent: no one is safe. And the rest of the office knows it. On the first day, a mission instructed coders (software engineers) to print out their last 30 days of work and bring them to a code review, where one of Tesla’s engineers would assess their skills. Shortly after, a second dispatch went out, telling people to shred these prints. But the code reviews moved forward, albeit digitally, and on Monday the layoffs of the rank and file began. In practice, code reviews appear to be little more than a blunt ranking of quantity, like rating a construction crew by the number of bricks they’ve laid. They can’t get much more complicated than that, because Musk’s goal is to lay off a quarter of the company’s workforce — and do it fast. Although the twit boss denied he was explicitly trying to shed staff before an expensive round of bonus cash was due on November 1, the time pressure is nonetheless there. Even those who pass the code reviews may find their jobs under threat: a project to overhaul the company’s Twitter Blue subscription service and charge a monthly fee for verification was instituted with just a week’s notice. It’s unclear whether the project is truly urgent or just a useful way to encourage those who don’t want to work all hours and weekends for a capricious new manager to voluntarily resign. At least the Twitter staff can take solace in the fact that Musk’s reported intention to lay off 75% of the workforce has yet to materialize. If Musk sounds like the boss from hell, you wouldn’t be the first to think so, and the Twitter staff isn’t the first to know. In internal Tesla emails leaked last year, he laid out his management style clearly for subordinates: “If an email is sent from me with clear instructions, only three actions are allowed by managers. 1) Email me back to explain why what I said was wrong. Sometimes, I’m just wrong! 2) Ask for further clarification if what I said was ambiguous. 3) Follow the instructions. “If none of the above is done, this manager will be asked to resign immediately.” In the spring, he again threatened immediate job losses as part of a back-to-the-office order at Tesla. Workers were expected to be in the office for at least 40 hours a week, he said, “or leave Tesla.” Showing he has a soft spot, Musk allowed remote work to continue — as optional extra hours beyond the 40-hour minimum. “If you don’t show up, we’ll assume you’ve resigned.” Over the summer, workers at one of his other companies had had enough. “SpaceX must quickly and explicitly disassociate itself from Elon’s personal brand,” they wrote, in a letter to senior executives who called Musk a “distraction and embarrassment.” Instead, the letter writers were fired. But Musk didn’t buy Twitter to cut jobs, or simply to expand his fiefdom, which already spans earth (Tesla), space (SpaceX) and the underworld (The Boring Company), into cyberspace. In fact, he’s been clear about his motives as far back as April, when he first made a bid to own the company. “Freedom of speech is the foundation of a functioning democracy,” he said, “and Twitter is the digital town square where issues vital to the future of humanity are discussed.” Not everyone thinks Musk is the right person to oversee it. “Many studies have shown that social media is a major cause of misinformation and disinformation, especially when it comes to spreading damaging election lies that erode trust in our democratic institutions,” says Lindsey Melki of the non-partisan anti-corruption group Accountable . US. “To the credit of Twitter’s previous leadership, they tried to contain the problem to some extent. But now Musk is ready to open the floodgates of election disinformation, truly making it the Wild West of Big Lie propaganda and a safe harbor for would-be insurgents.” Even Musk seemed to be having second thoughts. Within days of marching on Twitter’s headquarters, his earlier rant about removing content moderation, restoring banned accounts and emphasizing “free speech” was dropped. Updating his resume from “chief twit” to “Twitter complaint hotline operator” was an acknowledgment, however understated, that it’s no fun claiming sole authority to decide the outcome of moderation decisions on a platform with more than 200 million people. In the first weekend after buying the company, he announced that he would create a “content coordination board with widely divergent views” and that no major decisions would be made until after its meeting. Like Mark Zuckerberg before him, who created Facebook’s “council of bishops” to formalize decision-making about content moderation — and assign blame for mistakes — Musk seeks power but not responsibility. Illustration: Mark Long/The Guardian Unlike Zuckerberg, Musk has strong commercial reasons for wanting to avoid being held responsible for the decisions his company makes. Twitter may be his current love, but Tesla is the source of his wealth and the car company sells vehicles all over the world – including in China, where Twitter is banned and where the government revealed on Tuesday that it had 2,000 accounts on the social network with the aim of influencing the US midterm elections. Promoting free speech in the US is simply defending the constitution. promoting it in China is a subversive act. So why does he do it? Because Musk is, at heart, a poster boy. He can’t stop posting online. He believes, quite frankly, that Twitter is socially important and that without his strong hand guiding it, it will waste its influence and have nowhere to post. The thing is, it’s not clear that he’s wrong. Twitter’s problems predate Musk. It’s hard to remember now, but in the early days of the 2010s, Twitter and Facebook were talking in the same breath. As a social network, it wasn’t the biggest, but it wasn’t the smallest either – and unlike Facebook, it had cracked mobile from day one, with an offering perfectly suited to growing smartphone penetration around the world. It is not difficult to imagine a parallel world where things had gone differently. Perhaps if Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram had failed and Twitter had embraced the more personal side of social media left open by that absence and won over new users as a result, the two companies…
