Elon Musk's 10 biggest fails since the Twitter takeover
From lawsuits to poop emojis, the Tesla owner loves courting controversy
Forced into an acquisition he didn't want to make, Elon Musk has spent his first year running Twitter as his own personal fiefdom. Here's a look at the 10 moves that led us to a world without the blue bird.
Elon Musk is a name guaranteed to raise eyebrows - and blood pressure. The world's richest person (at the time of writing) has been hailed as a genius - and also been accused of racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia. But is he the next Einstein, or just a less political Donald Trump?
1. It starts with X
First we have to look back to 1999, the time of the dot-com era and really naff tracksuits. This was when Musk first created X.com, merging it with fellow Palo Alto firm Confinity.
The brand name was a problem. Confinity had done extensive market testing to come up with the name of its online payment app, 'PayPal'. Musk appears to have chosen X because he loved his '[email protected]' email address. Despite that, Musk - after ousting CEO Bill Harris and installing himself in his place - insisted: X was the way forwards.
The name tested horribly. People thought it was a porn site, and focus groups routinely gave feedback saying they wouldn't trust "X.com". That didn't matter to Musk.
It came to a head when he left to go on honeymoon with his new wife, Justine. On the plane he learned that his co-founders, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, had submitted letters of no confidence, and the board had taken their side. Musk was out, and Thiel was in.
To add insult to injury, Paypal kept the X.com website. Musk wouldn't reclaim it until 2017.
Elon's love of the letter continues today; he named his son, born in 2020, X Æ A-Xii (that's "Ex Ae Eye Ae Twelve"). But three years later, "X" would turn out to be no more popular as a brand name than it was at the turn of the millennium.
Elon Musk's 10 biggest fails since the Twitter takeover
From lawsuits to poop emojis, the Tesla owner loves courting controversy
2. Sued into the acquisition
Musk began publicly discussing the possibility of buying Twitter in early 2022. His tweets sent the company's stock price yo-yoing, causing one shareholder to sue for stock manipulation.
In April, Musk, the physical embodiment of a meme, offered to buy the company at $54.20 a share (thought to be a reference to cannabis culture, where 420 is used as slang for consumption), or $44 billion. He secured funding from banks and his own reserves, and registered three holding companies under the name - what else? - X Holdings.
So far, so standard, at least for any Elon business deal. But then it took a turn. Musk, who was banned from disparaging Twitter until the transaction completed, began openly tweeting about his goals for the company. They included open-sourcing the ranking algorithm, authenticating all users as real humans and turning the San Francisco HQ into a homeless shelter. He was also publicly critical of Twitter's management.
In May, Musk took the first step in a long-running saga - putting the deal "on hold" while he investigated the number of spam and bot accounts on the platform. This carried on for months, with no evidence to contradict Twitter's claims that about 5% of accounts were bots.
In July, Musk said he would pull out of the deal, citing spam accounts as a reason. Days later, Twitter threatened to sue the billionaire into concluding the transaction. By that point its shares were worth $37, about two-thirds of what Musk had committed to paying.
Increasingly desperate, Musk made several attempts to dismiss the lawsuit, and also offered to buy Twitter at new reduced prices of $31 billion and $39.6 billion. Both were rejected, and he finally agreed to hand over the cash - again - in October.
Elon Musk's 10 biggest fails since the Twitter takeover
From lawsuits to poop emojis, the Tesla owner loves courting controversy
3. Immediately fired most of Twitter's staff
Twitter was barely solvent when Musk took over, with income about equal to costs, so nobody could blame him for taking some difficult steps. But he took it to extremes.
The Washington Post suggested Musk planned to fire 75% of Twitter's staff. Ross Gerber, a shareholder in both Twitter and Tesla, countered the claim, saying that the figure was more like 50%.
Very reassuring.
The cuts didn't take long to start. First, Musk weeded out upper management; then, he started on the operational staff, telling them to accept a "hardcore culture" or leave.
If you can think of a team that might be important for legal or compliance reasons, it was probably affected.
Those included: the legal department; Trust & Safety; communications (totally gone - the PR address auto-responds to journalists' emails with a poo emoji); human rights; accessibility experience; machine learning ethics, transparency and accountability (META); public policy; content curation; and the entire Brussels office.
Some executives quit, rather than waiting to be fired.
In total, Musk slashed the workforce from more than 7,000 employees to about 2,000, losing valuable talent in the process. He would come to regret it.
Twitter was heavily criticised worldwide for how it handled the sudden dismissals. One former employee called the situation "carnage." The firings came so thick and fast that many didn't know they had lost their jobs until they lost access to corporate systems. WhatsApp became the main medium of communication, with some managers forced to text their teams to find out which of them still had jobs.
Elon Musk's 10 biggest fails since the Twitter takeover
From lawsuits to poop emojis, the Tesla owner loves courting controversy
4. The fired employees then sued
In the first of several lawsuits, two former staffers Elon Musk had fired sued him in December 2022 for unfairly targeting women in his mass redundancy programme.
They alleged that, although women made up less than half of Twitter staff, they represented 57% of those fired - and even more in technical departments like engineering.
At around the same time, other former employees were bringing legal action against Twitter/Musk for forcing out disabled employees, and for firing staff without the required notice period.
In January this year, 180 staff from Twitter UK joined forces to sue the company for violating their severance terms, which are more robust than those in the USA.
Ironically, the EU told Musk to hire more moderators in March.
Elon Musk's 10 biggest fails since the Twitter takeover
From lawsuits to poop emojis, the Tesla owner loves courting controversy
5. Lacking staff, Twitter began to fail
In the absence of core staff members, Twitter slowly started to break down.
It began around the edges. Security frayed: two-factor login codes failed to arrive, and support for hacked accounts was slow or non-existent. The automated copyright system system went down, allowing users to upload huge chunks of copyrighted content that stayed online for hours before being removed. Some users reported being unable to download archives of their own data.
Panicking, Musk went to the employees he'd just fired and asked some of them to come back. They were not receptive.
The issues became more serious. Core parts of the platform, like the "For you" and "Following" feeds, disappeared for thousands of users days after Musk fired another 200 staff in late February. A month later, parts of the company's source code leaked online.
In a panic (again), Musk emailed all staff asking them to pause development of new features to focus on site stability.
And then it began to hit the company's bottom line. Advertisers got spooked when their ads began appearing alongside negative content like hate speech (which grew massively immediately after the takeover), and out-of-date ads were shown in users' timelines. They began withdrawing from the platform en masse, leading - combined with our next two points - to the next twist in our saga.
