X Marks the Spot Where a Great Company Died

 

by Pa Rock

Former Tweeter

I joined Twitter in June of 2009 and was active on the site, sometimes very active, for more than thirteen years.  During the time that I was with Twitter I posted thousands upon thousands of tweets, cultivated a respectable following, re-connected with many old friends that I hadn't heard from in years, made new friends, and generally had a very good time discussing a wide assortment of issues with people across the country and the globe.  

One of the more productive ways that I used my association with Twitter was to promote this blog.  I set an arbitrary floor of fifty visitors to the blog per day, and as soon as soon as I finished typing the daily entry each morning, I would post a tweet about it with a link on Twitter.  Sometimes I would have fifty readers almost immediately, but on days when things were slow and the hits weren't happening, I would simply go back on Twitter again and re-plug the daily blog post until I reached my goal of fifty.  I always managed to get there.

Things began to change at Twitter last year and I had the sense that the company was on the verge of a drastic and unhealthy change.  The world's richest human (at that time), Elon Musk, announced in April of 2022 that he had been buying up shares of Twitter and was now the company's largest stockholder with over 9% of the company's shares firmly in his possession.  Musk announced his intent to buy the company.   The proposed purchase of Twitter by Musk sputtered and stalled several times over the next few months, with it looking as though Musk might be trying to exit the purchase agreement of $44 billion for one on the world's most popular social media companies, but threats of court action and lots of noise from both the buyer and the sellers somehow managed to keep the deal together, and Elon Musk became the official owner of Twitter on October 27, 2022.

Not being a fan of world domination by the filthy rich, I quit using the platform that day.  It was a costly decision for my ego because my blog readership plummeted and never recovered.  My new "floor" is ten readers per day, and sometimes even getting there is a struggle.  Twenty readers is a really good day.  But still I type.

My sense was that the self-absorbed and petulant billionaire would eventually destroy the character of his new vanity property, and sadly that destructive process quickly started to happen - almost at warp speed.  Musk began to imprint his own personality on the company.  On November 4th, just eight days after his purchase of Twitter, Musk began mass layoffs at the company by cutting roughly half of its 7,500 employees, a number that many said made it impossible to supervise the content that was being posted on the site.

Less than a week after that he announced that the company would begin selling it's blue check verification system that it had been using free-of-charge to identify actual celebrities and other noteworthy individuals as being who they claimed to be.  From now on anyone could "purchase" a blue check for just eight dollars a month.   Not surprisingly, Twitter was then immediately swamped with people who were happy to pay eight dollars in order to pose as celebrities.  Plenty of fake accounts ensued, and Twitter had to quickly regroup and add another layer of verification to its process.

But all of that hullabaloo wasn't enough for the new Sultan of Twitter.  He had said that he would create a board to look at reinstating some of the better known accounts that had been closed over inappropriate content by the previous management at Twitter.  But in mid-November Musk had another thought on the matter and dropped a surprise (and quick) poll on Twitter asking if the account of Donald Trump should be reinstated, and the poll, by a small majority, said that it should.  So Trump was invited back, and the flood gates were officially open.  

Over the ensuing months other controversial characters have been allowed back on the site.   Just this past week Elon Musk welcomed conspiracy theorist Alex Jones - the crank who said repeatedly that the massacre of little children at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, never happened and was a hoax concocted by the US government.  (A jury in Connecticut disagreed, and in October of this year ordered Jones to pay $965 million to families of eight of the dead children.)

But Elon didn't have any personal issues with Alex Jones, who had been barred from Twitter five years earlier, and he is now back on X where he can spread his swill ad nauseam and with wild abandon. 

In July of this year Elon Musk renamed Twitter, and the company is now officially known as "X."    (The Twitter bluebird was probably happy to be set free of the sprawling mess that his once happy nest had become!)

But the biggest blow to the company came in mid-November of this year when Elon Musk inexplicably endorsed an anti-semitic post on X, a completely unnecessary act of hubris that immediately began driving advertisers from X and quickly got into Musk's pocket.   Disney, Apple, IBM, and Lionsgate all stopped advertising on X, which should have at least given Musk pause to consider his rash act.   Instead, however,   the aggressive billionaire was infuriated to the point that he publicly said the advertisers who had pulled out of his company could "go f---" themselves.  Later Musk suggested that advertisers were trying to "blackmail" him and that they would wind up killing X.   Musk also openly recommended that the Disney board fire Bob Iger, the company's CEO, but it seems unlikely that the Disney board will be overly attentive to personnel recommendations from Elon Musk.

In all practical reality, Twitter is gone and its replacement, X, appears to be circling the drain.  That's truly a shame, and Elon Musk owns the whole damned mess!

And it couldn't have landed on a nicer guy!