Confidence and vision are good things. In a CEO, they’re crucial. But there’s a fine line between framing reality in a way that brings your troops along with you, and failing to adequately address your actual situation. A couple of notable tech CEOs are sailing perilously close to that line.
First up is new Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, who on Monday tweeted an email she’d just sent out to the company’s employees. It started off as an unsurprisingly Elon Musk–ish mission statement about how Twitter was going to “drive civilization forward through the unfiltered exchange of information and open dialogue about the things that matter most to us.” Then it got weird.
“Twitter is on a mission to become the world’s most accurate real-time information source and a global town square for communication. That’s not an empty promise. That’s OUR reality,” Yaccarino wrote. “When you start by wrapping your arms around this powerful vision, literally everything is possible. You have to genuinely believe—and work hard for that belief.”
Even if that powerful vision is Yaccarino and Musk’s reality, is it, y’know, reality reality? It’s important to know where you want to end up, but right now Twitter faces serious problems with hate speech and disinformation and polarization and instability—all of which will seriously hinder any attempt to become “the world’s most accurate real-time information source”—and above all with revenue.
With advertisers being largely scared off by the aforementioned issues, Twitter is so strapped for cash that its Boulder office is being evicted over unpaid rent. It’s being sued in San Francisco and London (where, fun fact, the property in question is owned by King Charles III) over the same. According to a lawsuit launched last month by six former Twitter workers who say they haven’t been paid the severance they’re owed, Musk said Twitter would pay rent “over his dead body.”
Twitter’s ever-helpful owner also appears to have steered the company into a $250 million lawsuit filed yesterday by the U.S. National Music Publishers’ Association, over Twitter users uploading and sharing copyright-protected songs. Social media platforms normally just strike licensing deals with the labels, but the New York Times reported in March that Musk thought licensing would be too expensive, so talks stalled.
Before Yaccarino can make good on her promises of delivering “Twitter 2.0,” she really needs to save Twitter as it exists. Her cultish letter did not mention anything about doing that, and she has not tweeted since.
Then we have Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, who seems unable to end his platform’s user revolt.
The protest (which is mostly about Reddit threatening its ecosystem with hefty new data-access fees) was meant to be a two-day affair, with only a handful of subreddits threatening to “go dark” indefinitely. Then Huffman emailed his staff to say that although this was “the noisiest” protest the site had seen, there was no “significant revenue impact so far” and “like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well.”
This was like a red flag to the bull that is Reddit’s moderator community. Many major subreddits are now staying dark indefinitely, and some are mooting a switch to Discord or a fediverse-compatible Reddit rival like Lemmy. Moderators hold the real power at Reddit, owing to its decentralized nature, so they really can bring much of the site to a grinding halt. Huffman cofounded Reddit nearly two decades ago. How could he not know this would happen?
This feels extremely obvious to say, but effective leadership requires leveling with people, including yourself. Very few people can successfully weave reality-distortion fields—and those who can’t will court disaster by trying.
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David Meyer
Data Sheet’s daily news section was written and curated by Andrea Guzman.
