This Sunday (27th) officially marks one month since the richest man in the world took charge of Twitter.
Since then, Elon Musk has initiated mass layoffs and given employees a cryptic ultimatum, reinstated the accounts of controversial figures including former President Donald Trump, and launched — then kicked — a plan to charge for Twitter’s iconic blue checkmarks.
After spending months embroiled in an unsuccessful legal battle to get out of his initial bid to buy the social network, Musk made his first entrance into the company’s offices on Oct. 26, carrying a sink. 🇧🇷
In a video of the incident shared on Twitter, he wrote: “Walking into Twitter HQ – let it sink in!”
Since then, the billionaire has apparently left no stone unturned during his first month as “Boss Twit”.
Here’s a look at the variety of ways Musk (who is still, concurrently, CEO of his other companies Tesla and SpaceX) has already made his mark on one of the world’s most influential social media platforms.
Musk cleans up the C-suite, then cuts roughly half of Twitter’s staff
Almost immediately after Musk completed his drama-plagued $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, he fired former CEO Parag Agrawal and other executives. He then became the platform’s CEO and sole director, according to a securities filing.
The dramatic leadership change, however, was just the first taste of the major personnel overhaul to come. Musk began sweeping layoffs across the company, reducing his headcount by around 50% in the space of a few days.
Between November 3rd and 4th, a number of Twitter employees began posting on the platform that they had been blocked from their company email accounts as the job cuts began to unfold in a very dramatic and public way.
The layoffs have impacted departments including artificial intelligence, ethics, marketing and communications, research, public policy and more.
As workers said goodbye to their colleagues online (many sharing blue hearts and greeting emojis to signal they’ve lost their jobs on Twitter), Musk has remained largely silent, at least on the job cuts.
In another dramatic move by the new boss, Musk publicly fired a software engineer who had survived the initial round of cuts but who then took Musk out on Twitter.
Musk gives remaining employees ultimatum: Do “extremely hardcore” work or leave
In a late-night internal email following the massive staff cuts, Musk urged the remaining Twitter employees to commit to “extremely hardcore” work or else leave the company with severance pay.
“For the future, to build an innovative Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore,” Musk wrote in the November 16 memo.
“That will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”
In the memo, Musk goes on to outline how Twitter will be “much more engineering-driven” and then gives the team an ultimatum. “If you’re sure you want to be a part of the new Twitter, click yes on the link below,” directing the team to what appears to be an online form.
Musk said that any employee who did not do so by 7 pm the following day, Thursday, would receive a three-month severance pay.
Advertisers flee, and Musk condemns “massive declines in revenue”
In the shadow of the mass exodus of workers, a departure of advertisers was also brewing.
Since the Musk acquisition, a handful of brands – from General Mills to the North Face and the Volkswagen Group – have confirmed a pause in advertising on the social network, as civil society organizations have raised new concerns about the company’s direction under the auspices of Musk. Musk.
About a week after taking over the company, Musk said he had seen a “reduced drop in revenue”.
“Twitter has seen a massive drop in revenue due to activist groups putting pressure on advertisers, although nothing has changed with content moderation and we’ve done everything we can to appease activists,” he said in a Nov. 4 tweet.
“Extremely confusing! They are trying to destroy free speech in America.”
An ongoing saga about blue checkmarks begins
Another aspect of Twitter that Musk quickly took down is one of the platform’s most familiar features to its users: the blue verified checkmarks that have long been used to confirm the authenticity of government officials, journalists and other public figures.
“Twitter’s current lords and peasants system for who has and doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit, tweeted Musk Nov. 1. “Power to the people! Blue stamp for $8/month”.
On November 5, Twitter released an updated version of its iOS app that allowed users to pay a monthly subscription fee to receive a blue badge mark on their profiles.
The update, as described in Apple’s App Store at the time, stated that users would now have to pay $7.99 a month for the company’s blue badge subscription to receive a verification mark on the platform, “just like celebrities, companies and politicians you already follow”.
Within days of launching the subscription service, Twitter was flooded with a wave of celebrity and corporate impersonators who quickly threw themselves into the new system to present themselves as prominent brands and figures. Chaos ensued.
In one viral example, a fake account, which featured a newly acquired blue seal brand purported to be pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, tweeted that a critical diabetes drug would now be free.
In the wake of the chaos, Musk finally announced that he would delay rolling out the subscription service until the end of the month. “Verification seal relaunch for Nov 29th to make sure it’s rock solid,” tweeted Musk on Nov 15th.
On the 24th, Musk gave a slightly different target date for the relaunch, December 2nd, and offered more details about the upcoming service, including a variety of checkmark colors to denote the type of verified account.
Twitter Restores Some Previously Banned Accounts, Including Donald Trump’s
On November 19, Musk restored former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account, nearly two years after it was permanently banned following the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.
The move comes shortly after Twitter restored the accounts of several other controversial, previously banned or suspended users, including conservative Canadian podcaster Jordan Peterson, right-wing satire website Babylon Bee, comedian Kathy Griffin and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Before restoring Trump’s Twitter account, Musk posted a poll asking users of the platform whether Trump should be reinstated – where a slim majority (51.8%) voted in favor.
“People spoke. Trump will be reinstated,” tweeted Musk. “Vox Populi, Vox Dei” (Latin for “the voice of the people is the voice of God”).
Trump previously said he would remain on his own platform, Truth Social, rather than returning to Twitter, and has yet to tweet since his account came back online. But a change in his approach could have big political implications, as Trump has said he will seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
Musk now grants “amnesty” to most previously banned accounts
After conducting yet another Twitter poll, Musk said on Nov. 24 that he will begin restoring most previously banned Twitter accounts starting next week.
It would mark his most far-reaching move yet to undo the social media platform’s policy of permanently suspending users who have repeatedly violated its rules.
The Thanksgiving announcement came after a majority of respondents voted in favor of its poll on offering “general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided they have not violated the law or engaged in flagrant spam.” Once again, Musk tweeted that “the people have spoken”.
His recent decisions to reinstate previously banned accounts, based on the results of his searches on the platform, are notably at odds with how Musk previously said he would handle such choices.
Just a day after his acquisition of Twitter, Musk said the social media company “will be forming a content moderation board with very diverse points of view”.
“No major content or account reinstatement decisions will happen before the board meets,” Musk added. It’s not immediately clear whether that board was ever created, convened, or involved in the decision-making behind bringing back Trump and previously banned accounts.
Source: CNN Brasil
A journalist with over 7 years of experience in the news industry, currently working at World Stock Market as an author for the Entertainment section and also contributing to the Economics or finance section on a part-time basis. Has a passion for Entertainment and fashion topics, and has put in a lot of research and effort to provide accurate information to readers.
