Analysis: Elon Musk’s Twitter faces its ‘Titanic’ moment as executives and advertisers flee while trolls run rampant
New York
CNN Business
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The world is watching the world’s richest man single-handedly destroy one of the world’s most important and powerful media platforms, just weeks after acquiring it for $44 billion. And of course, the world is watching the dramatic spectacle unfold – where else? – Twitter.
It’s hard to summarize succinctly the sheer chaos that has consumed Twitter over the past 12 hours as Elon Musk continues to wreak havoc on the Silicon Valley company. “Honestly, it feels like the beginning of the end,” a recently fired Twitter employee said Thursday night, describing the company as “Titanic” with “people looking for lifeboat”.
Some of those employees appear to be top executives. Miner contact On Thursday night, Trust and Safety head Yoel Roth resigned. Bloomberg report that its advertising director Robin Wheeler is on his way out. And earlier in the day, We learned that Twitter’s chief information security officer, Lea Kissner, as well as chief security officer Damien Kieran have resigned.
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To make matters worse, the departure of Kissner and Kieran after a senior member of Twitter’s legal team warning in an internal corporate message that Musk’s sole priority is to “recover the losses he incurred as a result of his failure to escape his binding obligation to buy Twitter.” The employee added that Musk is not concerned about potential liability before the Federal Trade Commission, which appears to have raised eyebrows with the federal agency. A spokesperson for the agency said it was “following recent developments on Twitter with keen interest.”
The spokesperson added: “No CEO or company is above the law and companies are subject to our consent decrees.” “Our revised consent order gives us new tools to ensure compliance, and we are ready to use them.”
But Musk also has a number of other concerns.
The loss of senior executives, especially Roth and Wheeler, will make it extremely difficult to lure already skeptical advertisers back to the social networking site. And with Musk effectively verifying on Twitter, giving way to an explosion of trolls and others create fake accountIt’s hard to see why advertisers would put their money (and trust) in Twitter.
And given Twitter’s heavy reliance on ad revenue, this development signals particularly worrisome news for the already jeopardized company.
That’s why Musk probably floated the possibility that Twitter might collapse. In his first all-employee email, where he abruptly announced a mandatory return to office, Musk warned that the “economic picture ahead is dire” and said “without significant subscription revenue, Twitter will most likely not survive the coming recession.” In my first meeting with a Twitter employee, Bloomberg reports Musk said that there is a risk of bankruptcy if the company does not start generating more cash soon.
Maybe Twitter will find a way forward. But the road ahead looks pretty arduous. As nonprofit watchdog Accountable Tech said on Thursday night: “This hellish scene is only going to get worse. Lots of hate speech and harassment. More deception and impersonation. More privacy and security risks for all of us. Again we would ask advertisers to jump on board, but at this point, no CMO in their mind needs that advice.”
