Elon Musk exceeds expectations of dooming Twitter

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New Twitter CEO Elon Musk officially bought Twitter on Oct. 27 for $44 billion dollars. It’s been an eventful couple of months for Twitter under Musk’s ownership.

The reign of new Twitter CEO Elon Musk has been a wild ride so far, but not for the best.

It all began on Apr. 14 when Musk tweeted that he made an offer to buy Twitter at $44 billion dollars. One thing led to another and on Oct. 27, Musk officially bought Twitter and became the new owner.

Musk immediately acknowledged his takeover of the platform by tweeting, “the bird is free” minutes after the deal was done. He would later fire top executives of the company, such as former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal because Musk didn’t like how they managed Twitter in the past.

The question is: can Musk be trusted to run a big social media platform like Twitter and is he mature enough to do so?

Sure, Musk is a successful businessman as he is the CEO of Tesla and currently has a net worth of $176.8 billion dollars, according to Forbes magazine. This doesn’t mean he’s fit to be the owner of Twitter.

So far, Musk has shown that he’s not fit for the company as its owner. It’s bothersome that someone as selfish and immature as him is in that position to lead a social media platform that reaches an audience of 329 million users.

Musk has had a shaky past with tweeting. For example, in 2018, he tweeted a series of tweets that were false and misleading about potentially making Tesla stock private, which created a significant market disruption by making the Tesla stock jump up over 6% because of the false tweets, according to a press release by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Another controversial tweet by Musk is when he shared his thoughts about COVID-19 when he tweeted in March 2020, saying “The coronavirus panic is dumb.”

Other moronic instances of him tweeting is when he mocks politicians, specifically Democrats. He once replied to a tweet by Sen. Bernie Sanders about taxing the rich, with Musk saying to Sanders, “I keep forgetting that you’re still alive.”

It’s not a good look that the new owner of Twitter has made tweets that were misleading, insulting politicians and questioning the COVID-19 pandemic.

Another red flag of Musk is when he launched a new profile verification on Nov. 9 called Twitter Blue, where you can pay $8 to have a verified account. Musk didn’t think it through enough because the ability to pay $8 to have a verified account was going to be abused. Anyone can have one if it’s just eight bucks.

This led to a crazy two days on the platform, with misinformation spreaded everywhere until Twitter Blue was put on pause on Nov. 11.

It’s good that Musk realized he needed to stop Twitter Blue, but the backlash from the past two days was significant.

For example, an impersonator account used Twitter Blue to say they were the official account of Eli Lilly and Company and tweeted, “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.” This fake tweet took a big hit to the company even though they weren’t the ones to tweet it as it caused their company’s stock to crash and ultimately lose over $15 billion dollars in two days since the tweet, according to Economic Times.

Musk continued his dictatorship of Twitter on Nov. 12 when he fired over 80% of contractor employees with no formal notice. Employees who had just been fired learned ironically about the news from Twitter and realized they were the ones that got laid off as soon as they saw that they had no access to company emails, according to Search Engine Journal.

What’s worse about Musk is he exemplified his immaturity through his arrogant and selfish tweets by mocking the use of pronouns and ridiculing the “death of Twitter.”

Let’s hope it’s just a rough start for the new owner of Twitter, but the future still doesn’t look promising under Musk.