In the latest Elon Musk-Twitter drama, the new owner set Thursday afternoon as the deadline for employees to either commit to the company or quit. Since purchasing the social media platform last month for $44 billion, the billionaire made waves with new rules, policies and increasing demands on his employees. Straight Arrow News contributor Jordan Reid didn’t foresee the tumult, which subsequently forced her into making a difficult decision.
You know that GIF of Michael Jackson eating popcorn? I feel like I’m that GIF come to life these days, just watching Elon Musk unleashing pure chaos over the hellscape that is the Twitterverse with his $8 check marks and layoffs and floor-sleeping martyrdom. Did you know he’s sleeping on the floor until, quote, “org is fixed.”
Sooo…get cozy, I guess.
Because really, I’m curious: Do you think Twitter is fixable at this point?
Truthfully, I didn’t think all that much would happen in the wake of Musk’s takeover. I thought Twitter would get more Right-wing, Donald Trump would show up doing his Jacob Marley routine and I’d go on doing what I’ve done all along: Ignoring the whole thing as much as humanly possible.
But damn. I didn’t anticipate this.
Quick recap: In the handful of days since Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion dollars, the new owner has displayed an alarmingly Trump-like predisposition for high-speed entropy. He’s retweeted a fringe site’s conspiracy theory about Nancy Pelosi’s husband – who was attacked with a hammer by someone looking for Pelosi. The head of Twitter retweeted a website that, in 2016, published a story saying that Hillary Clinton was dead. And what we’re watching is a body double.
But that’s not all! Musk has also fired one of the top executives responsible for removing Trump from the platform, along with a solid 50% of his company’s employees. Via email.
Most fascinating has been his decision to introduce the ability to purchase a blue “verified” check mark for the low, low price of $8 – an amount of money that somehow managed to piss off literally everyone, from those who felt that being pushed to pay for “free speech” isn’t exactly the point, as well as not being an option available to many, to those who felt that it would….well…do what it did.
Musk stated that the fee would act as a deterrent to bad actors, and, it didn’t do that. Countless “verified” fake accounts have been created over the past week, with the goal of everything from disinformation to trolling of Musk himself.
Of course, the only thing that ultimately matters – to Musk and his cohorts, anyway – is money, so if all this publicity results in an uptick for Twitter, they’ll “MacGyver” this whole story into a win. Except for the fact that advertisers from General Mills and Audi to Nintendo and CVS are putting their dollars elsewhere.
