After you get past the first five words of that, all the rest is actually not very good news at all. Musk had promised from the beginning that he wouldn’t be the long-term CEO of the company, back before he got sucked into his own hellsite and developed a serious tweet habit. Musk has also made repeated mutterings about how he needs to find someone capable of “saving” the company, which, in Elon Musk’s eyes, means someone who will abide by the Musk wisdom of letting pandemic hoax promoters and sedition-supporting white supremacist groups run wild on the site while somehow bringing in enough money to both make Twitter profitable on its own terms and pay back the enormous debt load Musk saddled the company with when he purchased it.
That’s not going to happen. He can appoint the Pizzagate guy or Kim Dotnet or Cat Turdius the Second, and none of them are going to be able to convince their Parler-lite fanbase to cough up the kind of money it takes to keep one of the biggest social media companies on the planet running and stable. When it comes to big-name corporate types, however, Musk himself has tweeted that “no one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive.” Elon’s proven himself to be an impulsive, moody, and generally incompetent hellboss who fires those who disagree with him or warn him of legal dangers. There’s nobody who can keep Twitter alive as long as Elon Musk is its primary owner.
Then there’s the other half of Musk’s statement, in which he vows that he’ll be stepping down to a new status as only the owner, and the guy in charge of all the software, and the guy in charge of all the hardware the software runs on. That’s … what he’s doing right now. He’s ordering the software teams to do X, and ordering the server teams to slash Y, and that’s precisely why everything is going to hell in a slightly bigger, more flammable handbasket than it was two months back.
In order to turn Twitter back around, a new CEO would have to stop the vindictive acts toward Musk-critical journalists and would have to re-reposition the site as something advertisers might again want to be associated with. If Musk were willing to let his company do that, he’d be doing it right now.
So no, this isn’t going to have any impact. It also suggests to Tesla’s board and shareholders that their supposed chief officer is going to continue to ignore the car and battery company to play in his social media sandbox. Musk says he’ll step down from one full-time position at Twitter but will instead take on two other full-time Twitter positions.
While running Tesla. Oh, and SpaceX.
If Musk is making this announcement in order to stabilize a crash in Tesla’s own stock price—a crash in part due to Wall Street analysis of Musk’s Twitter reign as something with the potential to do very deep damage to Tesla’s brand—it ain’t helping so far. Meanwhile, Tesla’s now told employees to expect more layoffs next quarter. On Tuesday, 100 former Twitter employees filed arbitration claims against the company for discrimination and refusing to pay severance.
If you’re placing bets on any of this, and you really shouldn’t because it’s a bad habit and your family is disappointed in you, the odds that Elon Musk is going to both own Twitter and run Tesla six months from now continue to get lower and lower. It’s becoming a real crisis, inside Tesla, because Musk’s exposure as a pandemic conspiracy theorist and loyal backer of seditionists and white supremacists is a near-perfect example of what electric car owners do not want to be associated with when deciding on their next ride. Twitter itself is going to continue to hemorrhage engineers as workers bail from a job that requires them to work long hours to implement features that Musk is likely to rip right back out again after their quick failure.
And no, nobody he hires is going to be able to make a site that attacks journalists and backs up white supremacists into a money-making, advertiser-loved venture. Dat ship is sunk. Whatever Musk’s new plan will be, this one is good and dead.
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