To Kill a Twitterbird: 3 of Elon’s Biggest Failures

Image: The Verge

2022 wasn’t a great year. The world was still reeling from the COVID pandemic, Russia launched an invasion in Ukraine, and I had to go to Nashville.

Image: Associated Press

“LEARN SOME METAL, YOU HACK”

There was, however, one major news story that would provide endless comedy, providing you never liked Twitter in the first place. After what appeared to be a cheeky little impulse buy, Elon Musk closed a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion USD. However, ever since he arrived at his new office holding a kitchen sink, Elon has not shown the best of business prowess.

Image: Elon Musk

Pictured: Comedy, apparently.

1. The Killing Floor

Image: Getty

One of the supposed reasons for Elon’s purchase was to rid the platform of bots. This would of course, be a huge job requiring a large and highly-skilled team of employees. Elon of course did the sensible thing and fired 80% of them.

Image: Rocknrollmonkey

“This guy looks legit!” – Elon, probably

The most immediate effect was the inability to moderate disinformation and hate speech. Use of the N-word jumped by nearly 500% after Musk’s takeover and far-right influencers flooded the platform, including previously banned ones like Andrew Tate. Twitter, however, is a behemoth in the social media landscape, surely this wouldn’t be a major problem. Well…

2. Advertising Deficit

Image: diegopauel

At the time of writing this blog, Twitter has lost 50% of it’s top 100 advertisers since Musk’s takeover. Musk responded in typical fashion, accusing companies like Apple of ‘hating free speech’ after they removed advertising. Beyond the recent influx of Nazis, much of this can be attributed to Musk’s new ‘blue check’ system. Once a way of proving the authenticity of an account, now for sale on an $8 monthly subscription. Trolls immediately took advantage and started creating false accounts using brand names complete with verification marks.

Image: Jylerne

“$8 dollars please, Mr. Gates.”

This led to the stock price of pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly to plummet after making a verified copycat account and tweeting that insulin would now be free. While this is hilarious (and also deeply sad that such an announcement has now been proven to devastate pharmaceutical companies), the subsequent exodus of advertisers has resulted in a 50% reduction of value for the platform.

3. Brand Unawareness

Image: Vlad Savov

Yes, time to finally address the fact that Twitter is no longer. In July 2023, Musk announced that it would now be called ‘X’. This vaguely pornographic change means that after seven years of brand recognition, it would now have to constantly and awkwardly be referred as ‘X (formerly twitter)’.

Image: Original

“$69,420 well spent! LOL!”

Social media marketers now have to work out how to use the new platform, or even decide if it’s worth bothering with. As far as businesses are concerned, an obvious lesson is ‘don’t spend $44 billion on a product that has only had a net profit for two out of ten years’, but a bigger lesson may be the importance of protecting your product from the ego and impulses of your CEO. Elon’s management of this platform has been almost impressive in its incompetence, and only time will tell how much longer it has left to live.