Attriibution to Debbie Rowe – Own Work

No it is not a spelling mistake. I just put together the words Musk and mess. Elon Musk is supposedly worth $181 billion making him the richest person in the world. Looking at the mess he has made with Twitter, I wondered how he got this rich. I googled him on Wikipedia and saw that he was born into a wealthy family. Obviously, that was it. Just like little Donnie Trump. However, going further, I saw that made his riches, mostly on his own initiative.

Musk did well at the Universities he attended, including Queens, in Kingston, the University of Pennsylvania (didn’t Donnie go there?), and at the Wharton School. Not going to go into it here but he founded a number of companies and has been extremely profitable, as evidenced by his $181 billion. Very much unlike Trump and his string of bankruptcies.

So what happened with Twitter? He is so close to running it to the ground. I guess he believed his press and thought he could mold it into his own image instead of taking advantage of the environment of the industry. Twitter revenues was primarily based on advertising revenues. The advertisers were there because that is where a lot of their consumers were. Musk came in saying he wanted revenues to be driven by consumers rather than by advertisers. He also said that Twitter would not be a hellscape. Ok.

Musk had an ugly flirtation, with Twitter, during the acquisition process. He was going to buy it Then he backed out. He got sued by Twitter and eventually bought it for $44 Billion. Not a good start. On his first day, he came into the facility, carrying a sink. His message was “I am going to clean things up” Now that image is being associated with “I am going to put Twitter down the drain”

In his first couple of days, he fired the board and over half of all Twitter employees. Basically, he fired them before he had an understanding of what these employees did. Safe to say, this kind of had an influence on employee morale.

The very first weekend, the number of racist and pro White Nationalist tweets, exploded. Advertisers already were concerned about Musk’s direction for Twitter. They started leaving in droves. Musk’s plan to increase consumer revenue was to charge consumers $20/month to verify they were who they were. This verification confirmation would be by way of a blue checkmark before the person’s name. Major backlash. Musk then reduced this to $8/month. The backlash fdid not abate. Many users changed their names to Elon Musk, led by Actress Valerie Bertinelli. Musk has since backed off and put this concept on hold.

Things got worse. He tweeted a disinformation link on the beating of Paul Pelosi. He hads to take down that tweet after major uproar, but not before the tweet got 24,000 likes. More advertisers fled. He has done a number of tweets (do you Zuckerberg making FaceBook posts?) and a number being heavy handed, for exa,ple in response to the use of his name, by users.

So maybe he learned by now? Nope. Last week he wanted his remaining staff to sign a contract to agree to work long hard hours to achieve company success. More employees left. He ended the work at home policy. More employees left. Some employees publicly dissented on social media. Musk fired them. It got so bad that the crawler on the exterior of the facility building was insulting Musk.

Then, this weekend, maybe the killing blow. Musk held a vote as to whether Donnie should be allowed back on Twitter. The Twitter Trumpkins came through with the end result being 52% to 48% in favour of Trump being allowed back on. So, Musk, listening to the “Voice of the People”, reinstated Trump. Of course, this is going to drive more consumers and advertisers off Twitter. Too add insult to injury, Donnie says that he probably won’t go back to Twitter because Twitter has so many problems. Trust me on this one, Donnie will eventually go back. Thing is, there might be nothing to go back to.