Elon Musk Fails to Revive a Dead Business
Ever since its birth, Twitter has been a controversial battleground. However, with Elon Musk’s acquisition of over half of the company’s stock for a whopping $44 billion, the company has been entirely rebranded. Musk wanted to maintain Twitter’s popularity while forgetting its past. According to Musk, X is not just rebranded Twitter, it’s the perfect website, and the only one necessary for one’s internet needs.
A mix of political agendas, aggressively obsequious marketing, and cancel culture have completely changed the website’s habitat, which has been exceedingly ridiculed by bystanders and public figures alike.
Musk wished to separate his new website from its history and associations. In a CNBC interview, Musk said he wanted to make X an “everything website,” one without the 140-character limit per post that bore the original website’s quippy name.
Early in Elon’s acquisition, in November 2022, he removed the previously foundational blue chechmark from verified accounts. In order to get the coveted blue checkmark which signified corporate legitimacy, users only had to subscribe to a premium program. Before this, Twitter moderators would go through a thorough procedure to ensure that certain user accounts were legitimate. He hoped to regain his lofty investment by charging people $7.99 a month at the initial deployment of the program. Not only would this bring a flood of impersonators and misinformation, but it failed to generate even 0.05% of Elon’s initial payment back in the first 3 months of its release. Ad revenue remained the primary form of revenue for X.
The blue checkmark achieved the opposite of its goal. Verified users were given countless privileges, and chaos ensued in the worst way possible. By giving people more importance if they paid him, Elon embodied a modern day Marie Antoinette, and the proletariat were too indifferent to pay for a slice of the cake and too lazy to search for another option. Nevertheless, a new site, called Threads [maybe more about threads later], came about in response to the opportunity to capitalize on X’s downfall.
In February of 2023, Elon announced that he would share part of X’s revenue with influencers and creators on the site based on engagement. Unfortunately, this would not work to his benefit. His goal was to financially motivate people to spend more time on the site, which may have worked to an extent, but it had an unexpected side effect. The posts on X with more controversial or overtly offensive statements generally gained more engagement. Accordingly, hate speech and misinformation became commonplace. With the influx of radical political discourse, X was filled to the brim with people farming for engagement and shallow, uncivilized discussion.
This was compounded by Elon putting a blind eye to harrassment on the site. There is such a thing as ‘too much’ free speech, and in the case of X, a milieu of hate and misinformation became prioritized over protecting its users. In the comments of many X posts, even verified and popular ones, scammers and illicit/explicit content would become increasingly more common.
Many criticisms of Musk’s website are satirical, or making fun of his account itself. He is very active on the site and is very adamant about its success. This naive optimism has garnered him a reputation for focusing more on his celebrity status than the state of X.
