Elon’s Twitter
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 15 May 2023
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A little more than a year ago, Elon Musk made a hostile takeover bid to buy Twitter. Today on “Post Reports,” we look back at a chaotic year for the platform and ask what we can learn from Musk’s handling of the company as he appoints a new CEO.
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Twitter has been dramatically transformed under Musk, and few — even among some in the billionaire’s corner — say the changes have been for the better. In recent weeks, government agencies, news organizations and powerful social media influencers have questioned the usefulness of the platform, with some major players publicly abandoning their accounts or telling users that they can’t rely on it for urgent information.
Advertisers have fled in droves over Musk’s policy changes and erratic behavior on the site, causing advertising revenue to recently drop by as much as 75 percent, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive internal information. Rounds of layoffs have left Twitter operating with a skeleton staff of 1,500 — an 80 percent reduction — and the platform is so riddled with bugs and glitches that the site goes down for hours at a time. Meanwhile, the company’s valuation has cratered, Musk has said, to less than half the $44 billion he paid when he bought the company roughly six months ago.
Along with culture changes, Musk has reinvented the platform in ways that have confused users, who once knew Twitter as a widely admired news aggregator.
As Musk appoints a new CEO and steps down, we look back at how he’s managed the company, the changes he’s made to the platform and how his reputation has shifted because of all this.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So there's literally paper on a lot of these windows. |
| 0:06.0 | Yeah, I know. I'm looking for the main, like let's see if we can see into the main lobby. |
| 0:11.0 | I'm in San Francisco with Fez Zadiki, standing outside of Twitter's headquarters. |
| 0:17.0 | It's a stocky Art Deco building downtown that takes up a whole city block. |
| 0:23.0 | SF's famed cable cars run by it on Market Street and passers-by wander into the fancy |
| 0:28.0 | food court on the bottom floor. |
| 0:31.0 | It's a weekday around lunchtime and besides the people getting food to go, Twitter |
| 0:36.0 | headquarters feels like a ghost town. |
| 0:39.0 | A lot of those identifying signs that this is a multinational, highly influential tech company. |
| 0:46.0 | A lot of those are gone. Now that lobby is basically non-descripts you might as well be walking |
| 0:54.0 | into a storage facility. |
| 0:58.0 | I wanted to come here with Fez because he's been covering Elon Musk for years. |
| 1:04.0 | And I've been trying to wrap my head around what's been happening inside of Twitter. |
| 1:08.0 | It's been a little over a year since Elon reached a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion. |
| 1:15.0 | I mean, it was another six months or so of legal battles before he actually took over the company. |
| 1:21.0 | But for the past six months, he's been in charge. |
| 1:25.0 | He talked about this recently in an interview with the BBC. |
| 1:30.0 | So, how do you think it's gone? |
| 1:33.0 | Well, it's not been boring. |
| 1:37.0 | It's been quite a roller coaster. |
| 1:39.0 | Not even Elon can deny that the past year at Twitter has been chaotic. |
| 1:44.0 | And like a lot of people, I can't help but be fascinated by this spectacle and the man behind it. |
... |
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