Musk is repeatedly described as a man obsessed with Twitter in all the wrong ways, who is failing both at protecting his new investment and his previous ones, according to interviews with a half-dozen former Twitter employees and people in Musk’s orbit, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution or because they were not authorized to speak publicly about company matters.
“It really feels destabilizing for the whole Twitter community,” she said, adding that the reputation of a CEO does affect businesses and their stock prices — and could even prompt consumers to choose another vehicle.
Musk, who is South African and migrated to North America as a teenager, first forged his image as a tech wizard by founding the company that became PayPal. He funneled much of his around $165 million in gains from the sale of PayPal into two ventures: Tesla and SpaceX. SpaceX went on to become the most successful private spaceflight company in history, pioneering reusable rockets and launching astronauts to the International Space Station.
Musk has been focused almost solely on Twitter since he bought it, planning to reinvent the company as an engineering-driven operation. He immediately ousted Twitter’s previous executives and embarked on a campaign of harsh layoffs that cut the company in half. Many of Musk’s supporters, who had followed his rise at Tesla, gave him the benefit of the doubt that he had a plan to transform Twitter.
Musk appears to be struggling to grasp Twitter’s business, the people said, and he demands a stance from his employees that stifles discussion of problems. “He doesn’t see from the zoom-out view at all,” one of the people close to Musk and his team said, describing him as “uncovering and solving and programming all night.”
He has been holed up in a 10th-floor conference area with a staging room for visitors — where they often remain for more than an hour before being called in. They are instructed not to speak until Musk does. And when they do finally meet with him, he’s sometimes watching YouTube videos.
Days later, Musk announced deputy general counsel Jim Baker had been “exited” from the company, as the CEO cited what he called his “possible role in suppression of information important to the public dialogue.” Former employees said it would have been normal for an attorney to review documents for release.
That same day, Alan Rosa, Twitter’s chief information security officer in charge of access matters, was fired from the company as well. Employees that week found Weiss’s name searchable in Slack, the company’s internal messaging service. But her access was overseen by a chaperone, new Twitter Trust and Safety chief Ella Irwin.
Irwin’s name appeared in a watermark on the Twitter Files. When Twitter suspended more than half a dozen journalists last week over alleged violations of its rules on doxing — the sharing of private information — the suspensions were labeled in internal systems “direction of Ella.”
“These guys did amazing damage,” one former employee said of Musk’s circle at Twitter, which included employees of his other companies and friends who lacked expertise on Twitter. “They are basically bullying their way to getting ‘super god’ access to these things. All they’re doing is they’re witch hunting for Elon, so they can find people talking [about him] so they can fire them.”
At Tesla, employees often find out about deadlines and major product changes through tweeted edicts. But they have also grown used to the CEO’s shoot-from-the-hip attitude, his reliance on his gut instincts rather than the research and development arms typical of multibillion-dollar corporations.
“As bank savings account interest rates, which are guaranteed, start to approach stock market returns, which are *not* guaranteed, people will increasingly move their money out of stocks into cash, thus causing stocks to drop,” he said in a tweet Tuesday.
“I felt for a while he was given a pass,” said Karl Brauer, executive analyst at the website iSeeCars. “‘Oh, it’s Elon. He’s Midas: If he’s touching it, it’s going to be successful.’ Now a certain number of people have stopped giving him a pass on things that probably should have been looked at a little more critically or acknowledged as potential downside.”
That day, Twitter announced a new policy: It was banning the promotion of outside social media sites on its platform, including Facebook, Instagram and Trump-backed Truth Social. Users would no longer be able to promote outside links to those sites and others including Mastodon, Tribel, Post and Nostr. Twitter said cross-posting of content would be allowed, but it would no longer permit “free promotion.”
This content was originally published here.
