No, Twitter didn’t just crumble into dust overnight. And Elon Musk, being Elon Musk, is probably feeling pretty good this morning. He’s cut costs by 75% (on paper, anyway), the app is still running, and usership is up. All thanks to his brilliant leadership! The future looks bright, at least in his head.
So Twitter isn’t going to go away today, or tomorrow. Then what is going to happen instead?
Well, remember all the chaos from a couple weeks ago? Not the firing chaos, the other chaos. Rampant impersonation, failures of moderation, lack of clarity about what features did what, lack of clarity about the business model, advertisers leaving, that particular chaos?
None of that ever went away. And now, with (we think) 3/4 of the employees gone, it’s going to get massively worse. There’s no one left to moderate, no one left to figure out a new business model, no one left to implement it, no one left to mollify advertisers and convince them to stay.
To deal with the worst of the content issues, Musk will doubtless turn to “community moderation.” But we already know what Musk’s idea of that is: his toadies will be the gatekeepers. By Christmas I expect all criticism of Musk will be verboten, and the only hate-speech enforcement you’ll see will be against the “woke.” By spring I expect the discourse on Twitter to be about as diverse as on Truth Social.
But let’s not linger on that aspect, as important as it is. Let’s think about Twitter the business instead. Musk has ambitious plans for a subscription model, but everyone who is not Musk thinks it’s a bullshit pipe dream: all he’s managed so far is to break the subscription model they already had. Musk has ambitious plan to make Twitter into a WeChat clone that does everything from facilitate banking services to serve video - but he’s fired most of his staff, and made it clear to the outside talent he would need to build such a thing that Twitter is a terrible, terrible place to work.
Musk has alienated many advertisers, has made no effort to win them back, and flat-out treats them with contempt. It’s hard to see advertiser revenues increasing, even when (per Elon) Twitter use is increasing, because most of those “new users” are shitposters testing the moderation boundaries, cryoptoscam accounts, and bots, not accounts advertisers are willing to pay for access to.
So there’s no reason to think revenue will increase. There’s good reason to think costs will be high. Musk is still on the hook for paying all those people he laid off for 3 months. Having slashed his staff without any plan or forethought at all, Musk will now need to turn to outsourcing just to keep the lights on (e.g. doing payroll as mentioned above) and anyone who has ever worked with outsourcing knows it’s generally more expensive per unit of completed work, not cheaper. Not having anyone around to keep the bots out means you’re paying more in server costs without an increase in the monetizable base (Musk never seems to mention that having more users is a cost to the business unless they monetize through ads or subs.) There are surely a bunch of lawsuits in the pipeline - e.g. from the people Musk falsely claimed to fire for cause, advertisers mad about impersonation, Tesla shareholders, the EU, the FTC (though technically that’s a consent decree), etc etc.
Twitter is going to bleed money, possibly forever. (It only made money in 2 years when it was run by a non-insane person, after all.) Being, at the moment, the richest man in the world, Musk can tank the losses, Charles Foster Kane style, unless Tesla collapses as well.
Twitter is going to become worse and worse on a technical level, because Musk has fired anyone who could make it better, scared away any new talent, and left it operating on a shoestring.
And Twitter is going to become a hellscape of Musk sycophancy and right-wing bile, because Musk has made it perfectly clear that’s what he wants out of a social network.
That’s what the future holds for Twitter. You can see why some people wish it had crumbled to dust overnight instead.
