Is Elon Musk Deliberately Trying to Kill Twitter?

Or is this all part of some cunning plan to improve the platform!

© Susie Kearley

Jessica Wildfire suggested a few months ago that perhaps Elon Musk is deliberately killing Twitter, to shut up all the poor people and take away their platform for the speedy dissemination of information.

I’m not convinced.

I watched a documentary about Musk and his Twitter antics a few nights ago. His approach to culling staff was badly implemented, but anyone who takes on a big company that’s losing money is going to make some drastic changes and make big cuts.

They’ll start with redundancies, then do some restructuring, make bold decisions. The implementation may have been poor, but the loss of some jobs was inevitable. Did so many need to go? Perhaps not, but I suspect Musk has a vision to turn the platform into something markedly different with a skeleton staff. We’ll see how that goes.

We know he has plans to enable creators to make money on the platform, but he hasn’t said any more on that since announcing it back in November!

It may all look somewhat precarious, but early indications show that some of his ideas are working. For example, lots of people have paid for Twitter Blue, at the crazy price of £11 in the UK! Astonishing. Even during a cost of living crisis it seems people are easily parted with their money when they want something.

Others did the opposite, quitting Twitter in favour of Mastodon, but it hasn’t affected Twitter’s core users or Musk’s strategy. It’s been busier than ever on there. Some of us feel our tweets are barely seen, but that was a thing before Musk took over.

Some people think he’s delusional, arrogant, not realistic: “Thinks he can cut 80% of the staff and still rework Twitter into a super app,” Joe Black remarked on Jessica’s story.

Perhaps his approach is optimistic. There are certainly lots of glitches at the moment. Some of the fired staff returned to Twitter. These might be teething problems, or they might be a sign of deeper issues. I wonder if it’s just a matter of time before the whole thing comes crashing down!