The Muskification of Twitter

Will it work? Depends on what the hell he’s actually trying to do…

Musk is running the same plays at Twitter as he did at Tesla and SpaceX: Darwinian firing, Skinnerian performance assessments, Draconian working conditions, and basically micro-managing the shit out of the entire organization.

Based on his prior track record these techniques worked in the medium- to long-term. Twitter is only partly a tech and engineering company, though. Its backbone is hardware and software, but its essence is communications.

Most critics are focused on the unnecessary operational risks Elon is incurring by canning so much of the top IT talent, and alienating most of the rest. But the existential risk isn’t systems fail on the backend, it’s content on the front.

A server crash you can patch, a line of code you can rewrite. Copyright and FTC violations, however, are serious legal and compliance matters that need to be competently responded to and mitigated by teams of in-house experts.

Problem is Twitter’s content moderation, regulatory, legal, and marketing departments no longer exist. That doesn’t mean they can’t be reassembled; for now, though, the company is exposed in shocking, unprecedented, and unnecessary ways.