Call it Chekhov’s Jet: a Twitter account placed on the mantelpiece in act one must surely go off in act five.
Seven days after buying the social network, Elon Musk tweeted that his commitment to free speech extended even “to not banning the account following my plane”. Six weeks later, his reversal of that policy set in motion a series of events that seems increasingly likely to end in his dramatic departure as chief executive of Twitter. How’s that for a satisfying narrative?
The curious case of @ElonJet
Like the old woman who swallowed a fly, each day of the last week has seen Musk’s attempts to wiggle out of trouble only land him deeper in it.
On Thursday, Musk banned the @ElonJet account, claiming to be spooked by a (now reportedly unrelated) altercation with a man who was stalking his ex-wife. Shortly after the account was blocked, a new set of rules were imposed banning the sharing of “real-time location” of individuals. On the face of it, the rule would block people livetweeting football matches or pop concerts, but don’t think about it too much: the rule was imposed to ban the account, not the other way round.
On Friday, Musk suspended the accounts of a number of journalists who had reported on his move. Defending his decision as enforcing a policy against those who shared “assassination coordinates”, he tried to turn a fight over free speech into a fight over whether or not “real-time doxxing” was allowed on the site. The journalists had not engaged in real-time doxxing, with most doing nothing more than linking to other versions of the ElonJet account, which now has mirrors on Instagram and Mastodon, but again: don’t worry too much. It is not a coincidence that the bans hit journalists who were critical of Musk.
On Saturday, Musk suspended the account of Taylor Lorenz, a reporter at the Washington Post who had sent him a request for comment on the site. At the time she was suspended, she had three tweets live on her profile: the request for comment, and a pair linking out to her accounts on other sites. According to Musk, the suspension was for “prior doxxing action”: breaking a rule that hadn’t existed when she broke it, with tweets that were no longer live on the site. Mornington Crescent! (For American readers, the preceding pop cultural reference can be replaced with “Calvinball” to aid transatlantic comprehension.)
On Sunday, Musk reinstated her account, before immediately banning her permanently, for breaking another newly created rule: a ban on any promotion of accounts on other social networks, a policy apparently instated in a hurry over the weekend in an attempt to stem the flow of users leaving the social network for sites not run at the whim of a vengeful billionaire.
And then on Monday, that rule was reversed again. Lorenz’s “permanent” ban was undone, the account promotion rule was stripped back, and the tweets announcing it, from Twitter’s official safety account, were deleted it. But even if the ban is overturned, a site-wide block on linking to Mastodon remains. There’s no longer any obvious rule that those links break, and other links, to social networks including Instagram and Facebook, work just fine. But, and you will forgive me if the refrain is getting old, the rules don’t matter: Twitter is the Elon Musk site now.
Has Elon Musk just had enough ?
There is a chance that it’s a state of affairs that even he is getting tired of. Late on Sunday night, in the wake of watching the World Cup final in Doha with Jared Kushner, Musk posted a Twitter poll offering to hand over control of Twitter. He insisted he didn’t have a successor in mind, but in November he had said, under oath in Delaware, that he was planning to wind down his time at the company and install a new chief executive: the poll, like so many of his, feels like an opportunity to rubber-stamp a decision he’s already made in his heart. And reading through his posts on the site, he does seem exhausted. Mixed among the self-aggrandising replies to his own fanboys and wide-eyed astonishment at hyper-partisan news stories are bitter tweets about how running Twitter is impossible, how the site is on the road to bankruptcy, and how no one would be able to save it.
Even if he abides by his promise – and since the poll closed, he’s been eagerly tweeting agreement at acolytes who have suggested “bot” activity, and suggesting only Twitter Blue subscribers should be able to vote on policy polls – there’s no hint he’s preparing to sell the site entirely: he’d be the big boss, but maybe one with less day-to-day oversight. The hopeful vision is that it ends up like SpaceX, where Gwynne Shotwell, the company’s COO, essentially runs a competent spaceflight company while gently managing upwards to ensure Musk’s flights of fancy don’t destroy what she’s worked to create. The fearful vision is it ends up more like Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid, the Sun, where a hands-off proprietor nonetheless picks a senior team who know that more important than any business goal is making sure the boss is satisfied.
The metaverse will continue until morale improves
When Meta laid off 11,000 staff earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg was keep to ensure we all knew where blame lay. The company, he said, had expanded too fast in the pandemic. It had made bets that the pivot to online socialisation that occurred when we were all forced to stay inside would continue even when we were allowed out of our homes, he said, and those bets hadn’t paid off. Apple shared some of the blame, he added, with the company’s privacy-focused tweaks to iOS limiting Facebook and Instagram’s ability to sell valuable adverts based on data gathered from tracking users across all the apps they use.
But one thing that was not to blame was the metaverse. The project he bet the company on – even to the extent of changing its name – may have been expensive enough to have eaten the equivalent of a $9m severance cheque for each of those 11,000 staff, but Zuckerberg was insistent: it was an investment in the future. “We’ve shifted more of our resources on to a smaller number of high-priority growth areas,” he said, “like our AI discovery engine, our ads and business platforms, and our long-term vision for the Metaverse.”
Now, with Twitter collapsing, economic downturns continuing and worsening around the world, and generative AI definitively taking over from the metaverse and cryptocurrencies as the Hot New Tech Thing, Meta is doubling down on the metaverse bet. From Andrew Bosworth, the head of the company’s “reality labs” division:
About 80% of Meta’s overall investments support the core business, with the other 20% going toward Reality Labs. It’s a level of investment we believe makes sense for a company committed to staying at the leading edge of one of the most competitive and innovative industries on earth.
VR is now at a very special moment – fundamental new pieces of the hardware and technology stack are hitting the market for the first time, and a community of developers and users is unlocking its potential in new ways, from scrappy software startups to top-tier game studios, creators, and artists … We think it’s only going to get better in 2023.
The next year will see some landmarks in VR, with both Sony’s PSVR2 coming out for home consoles and Meta’s Quest 3 expected for casual use. And for around $10bn a year, you’d hope so.
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