Twitter has always been a weird place, but things have gotten more feral the last couple of weeks thanks to the service’s off-putting new owner, Elon Musk. A role model in the worst way, his trolling and despotic workplace practices have set the tone for a grass-roots insurrection inside the internet’s so-called town square.
Let’s start with the users defiling the site with parodies of Musk and prominent corporations. It’s an obvious effort to monkey-wrench Musk’s efforts to juice revenues to pay for the company’s debt-laden $44 billion acquisition, and the vandalism seems to have left its mark. Risk-averse advertisers, who previously provided almost all of Twitter’s income, have been fleeing, for some reason not attracted back by Musk’s promise to “thermonuclear name & shame” them for leaving.
There’s a growing fear that the company might go bankrupt, as Musk himself suggested last week. Or that Musk has already laid off so many employees (half of the staff have been let go so far) that one day someone will delete an obscure line of code that was keeping the whole app running. Mild-mannered users I follow have given their own votes of no-confidence by pre-emptively saying goodbye, in the fond sort of way you might expect if an unstoppable asteroid were days from impact.
