What are you going for? The Latin expression “where are you going?” It perfectly reflects the state of stupefaction caused by the drift of Twitter, a social network that, without reaching the popularity of others, has been for years the great agora of global discussion in all orders. The arrival of Elon Musk as master of the platform of trills, with his impulsive decisions, has transformed it into an unrecognizable place and with an increasingly uncertain future.
The penultimate grotesque of one of the richest men in the world has been to replace the Twitter logo on the main page of the platform in web browsers for a few days with the portrait of the Dogecoin cryptocurrency dog, which triggered its price last week past, but on Friday, the logo of the bird returned to its place and the dog disappeared, which caused his fall again. Musk has a history of altering the price of the crypto asset.
A series of tweets from Musk about Dogecoin in 2019 and the announcement that Tesla would accept payments with the cryptocurrency skyrocketed its value. His final resignation sank her. An investor in the cryptoactive sued him. For this reason, now there are those who consider that the last maneuver of the owner of Twitter with the logo has been a move to raise the price and ingratiate himself with the litigants in the face of legal action.
But Twitter's problems go beyond the seemingly thoughtless actions of its owner. Since he bought the social network for $44 billion in October 2022, the company has lost more than half its value and is now worth about $20 billion, the millionaire said in an email sent to employees of the company. company a few days ago.
The email explained the basics of a new stock compensation program. The message explained that the company was in a precarious financial situation and that its survival required radical changes including spending cuts and massive layoffs, when it has already lost more than three-quarters of the workers it had in October, when it took over the company. company.
Musk defined his new Twitter as "a reverse startup" that needs to be reformed quickly. That workers' compensation program means that employees will receive shares in X Corporation, the holding company he used to acquire the social network. According to the billionaire, Twitter could one day be worth $250 billion. Nothing seems to indicate right now that this is in the process of happening.
The millionaire told employees that they could sell their shares every six months, in the same way that happens at SpaceX, his space rocket company. According to Musk, this type of arrangement will allow workers to have "liquid shares, but without the chaos of listing and legal burdens of a public company." The New York Times sent a request for comment on this information to the company's communication department, and received the poop emoji in response. Copy.
The confusion surrounds everything that concerns the company. Last week, at the company's headquarters, the ws of the social network's name were covered on the exterior signs, with which you could read "Titter", which in theory means nothing, although it could be a new occurrence. Musk's questionable sense of humor (in English, "tit" is boob).
In the midst of the daily noise that the social network itself generates, the fact that a real estate company has denounced it because it has stopped paying the rent for its offices in Oakland (California) and has similar lawsuits for non-payment of its headquarters in Boston, San Francisco and London. The late payments may be Musk's strategy to drive down the price, but the signal he is sending is that his company is in serious financial trouble.
The Wall Street Journal recently calculated the total volume of lawsuits against Twitter. It's 14 million dollars. The sum may seem high, but it is a company bought for 44,000 million a few months ago. Seen from that perspective, perhaps everything is one more maneuver by Elon Musk.
The colossal reduction in employees is also having operational consequences in the social network. In recent months there have been service outages, failures in the links to images and videos or lack of updating of the tweets that are shown to each user. In the first few weeks, Musk laid off half of his staff, around 3,700 workers, and another 4,500 subcontractors. The effects of this cut can be seen in several things and one of them, very important, is the supervision of content, which is now more pending than ever what its algorithms decide. Now there is only a quarter left
Many of the big brand advertisers have disappeared from Twitter, while ads for low-quality products or miraculous features have proliferated.
Meanwhile, users continue to report that accounts they follow disappear, or variations in seniority dates and number of followers or that updates do not load. Twitter works worse since the arrival of Elon Musk and the most immediate perspective is not one of improvement.
The company's financial difficulties, coupled with Musk's erratic and disconcerting decisions, which could hardly be related to making mature decisions by an adult, have only raised doubts about the survival of the platform that, Despite everything, although limping, it is still standing. The problems multiply, but the blue bird network is still alive.
