Elon Musk won't fix Twitter (but he won't kill it, either)

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  • Twitter is a funny company. It owns what is probably the most influential social platform on the planet—a concentrated network of elite figures in media, politics, technology, and entertainment, all of whom look toward the site as a guide to what is important in their fields—and yet it grows slowly and can’t seem to post a consistent profit.1

  • It created the defining experience of social media platforms—“the Feed”—and yet everything else about the product (at-replies, retweets, hashtags, the mobile apps, the word “tweet”) was created by users and third parties, and only later (often begrudgingly) implemented by the platform’s developers.

  • Some of Miami’s most annoying venture capitalists seem to believe that Musk will fire purportedly cosseted employees, restore allegedly lost free-speech rights, and thereby (?) unlock the value of the supposedly underperforming company.

  • Some alarmed Twitter liberals are worried that Musk will loosen moderation, and unleash the forces of chaos, misinformation, trolling, the dreaded desinformatsiya, etc., on our fragile political system.

  • I want to propose a third possibility, which is that Musk will not implement any significant changes, and in fact will strive to keep Twitter the same level of bad, and in the same kinds of ways, as it always has been, because, to Musk, Twitter is not actually bad at all.

  • Why would Musk want to “fix” anything about Twitter? While the platform might seem like a “broken” “bad” “hellsite” to many people (all of whom spend a significant portion of their waking hours there), an unpleasant experience that does not do what we want it to do, the one person for whom it is definitively not broken, the one person for whom Twitter is patently obviously not poorly designed or run, is Elon Musk.

  • Elon Musk’s experience with Twitter is that he tweets, and then, whatever he said, whatever the context, he becomes richer. Why would he do anything to change that?

  • Elon Musk didn’t buy Twitter to transform it; he bought it to make sure it stays the same. In some sense that might be the worst outcome of all.

  • There’s a reason he doesn’t do the epic-bacon market-manipulation shtick on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok; Twitter is, in the Goldilocks sense, just right for Elon: large enough to be important but small enough to still feel intimate; elite enough to be influential but casual enough to be manipulable2

Footnotes

  1. But when has any social media company made money cleanly? Don’t all social media companies bank on the idea of selling ads to their network? Also, is there any company that is exclusively a social media company? Most of the existing ones seem to be an “also runs” an ad company or a services company ↩

  2. So speculative! How do you even reach such a conclusion? ↩

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