Elon needs professional help
Don't fire your comms team and roll out new products without a plan. That's it. That's the lesson.
This is getting sad. And hilarious. It’s hilari-sad.
A week ago, Elon Musk had announced plans to (1) Remove all legacy verification badges starting April 1, and (2) update the algorithmic recommendation system so only (paid) verified accounts could appear there starting April 15. The reason, he claimed, was that “this is the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over.”
This was obviously a bad idea, and everyone said so. I even took a swing at making a game out of it.
Musk backed off from that second idea within 24 hours, insisting that he “forgot to mention” that everyone you follow would still appear on the “For You” page.
Then April 1st came and went. Nothing changed. It turned out that it would take awhile — removing a user’s blue check is a “largely manual process.” The only account that lost its verification check was the New York Times, and that’s because Elon got specifically mad at them.
And then, just yesterday, the company reversed course, abandoning the plan to remove legacy verification entirely. Instead, Twitter merged the two categories of verified accounts so no one could tell who had bought “verification” and whose identity has actually been verified.
Instead of building a subscription product that people actually want, Twitter is now degrading its existing feature set in an attempt to protect the ~0.2% of the user base that pays for Twitter Blue (Tesla fanboys, crypto scammers, and raging misogynists, mostly) from ridicule.
This is what happens when a major company tries to brute-force its way back to startup vibes. A startup can pivot as many times as it wants. So long as the VCs remain happy, no one else will care, because no one else is paying attention. Twitter cannot behave like a startup, because Twitter has an existing product and revenue streams and a substantial user base. (It also has FTC consent decree and serious attention from EU regulators. The fines are coming, and they are going to be glorious.)
And this was all predictable from the minute he fired everyone who wasn’t a “hardcore engineer.” This is what happens when a centi-billionaire surrounds himself with David Sacks and Jason Calcanis and declares, “y’know what? We’ve got this.”
Back in November, I wrote a post discussing the disastrous early rollout of the new Twitter Blue (“Elon’s Twitter-Tilt”). My point back then was that Elon was rushing, making major unforced errors. His best hope was to slow the hell down, focus on the core product, and make a plan for how to fix the rollout.
Here’s a passage from that November post. Notice how little has improved in the intervening five months:
I’m not @verified on Twitter, and I don’t subscribe to Twitter Blue.
I tried to get verified a year or so ago. Application denied. (#bretbug might have made me Twitter-famous, but I guess even Twitter knows that Twitter-fame isn’t real-fame.)
I’ve considered subscribing to Twitter Blue. For $5/month, you can fix the stupid typos in your tweets. I tweet a lot, and my typos really bug me. Every time I notice a typo, I think to myself “for just 5 bucks, you could fix this, dummy.” That seems like a pretty reasonable deal, tbh.
Jason Calcanis (a member of Musk’s billionaire boys squad) tweeted yesterday that, with all the new features they’ll be adding to Twitter Blue, the new price of $8/month will eventually seem “way too cheap.”
I can imagine a situation where Calcanis is obviously correct. But what he isn’t accounting for is the disastrous job that he and his bros have done rolling this thing out. This is probably the worst product rollout since New Coke.
Consider this scenario: imagine Elon waits a month, insisting they’re conducting a thorough product review and developing a long-term strategy for growth, sustainability, and profitability. Then he announces that their first major initiative is to revamp and improve the existing Twitter Blue service. The price will go up from $5/month to $8/month. It will include an additional verification pathway, along with a couple other new features. He also describes how this is going to fit into their strategy to combat spammers and scammers.
I suspect that would’ve gone over pretty well. They would need to come up with a plan for how new-verified meshes with old-verified (as Jason Goldman suggested on Twitter, you can easily solve this by making the check marks different colors). They would need to set the right price point ($8/month, not $20/month). They would need the other features to be compelling. But it all sounds like the type of thing that Twitter-as-we-know-it might do if it was better-managed. Sure doesn’t sound like a platform-ending nightmare.
Compare that scenario to how Elon (And Calcanis, and David Sacks) actually framed their idea this week: (1) Leaked the proposal to scrap the old verification system and start charging power users $20/month for their previously-free verification badge. (2) bargained down to $8/month in a reply to Stephen King because “We need to pay the bills somehow!” (3) Insisted this was a grand populist move, describing the current setup as “Twitter’s lords and peasants system.” (4) Tweeting “you get what you pay for.” (5) Tweeting “To all complainers, please continue complaining, but it will cost $8.” (6) Retweeting David Sacks’s tweet “The entitled elite is not mad that they have to pay $8/month. They’re mad that anyone can pay $8/month.”
This is maybe the worst imaginable way to frame the new Twitter Blue. Musk is effectively saying “hey, I spent $44 billion to own this thing, and have to come up with an extra billion per year to cover the debt payments. We’re all going to have to chip in to make this work. Don’t be cheapskates, alright?” Then he’s describing the power-users who are the platform’s most valuable asset (for free) as elitist snobs who need to start paying to keep the privileges they’ve been given.
Once you’ve introduced the program as “these verified snobs have to start paying for our product,” reducing the price from $20/month to $8/month doesn’t make it seem like a deal.
The status quo is that Twitter is free, verification is limited-but-free, and verification is designed to manage some of the worst flaws of the site (impersonation, misinformation, etc). Elon is throwing half-baked ideas out there, just tweeting through it, all in a rush to generate new cashflow. It’s a series of compounding, unforced errors, and it’s only going to get worse.
It’s been five months. Elon isn’t “rushing” or “on tilt” anymore. He’s just making shit up as he goes. He has shown himself to be completely incapable of thinking even one step ahead. Every idea is failing, because every idea is half-baked. The guy fired most of the workforce, then started unveiling plans that required a large workforce that already understood how the product works. He replaces the entire Comms team with a poop emoji auto-responder and then complains about how the press doesn’t cover his company the way he’d like it to be covered. Instead of surrounding himself with actual professionals, he’s listening to the likes of David “uh, how do bank runs work?” Sacks and Catturd2. This is not the behavior of a serious person.
And this is particularly self-destructive because of the downstream impact it his on his other companies. Musk has no particular subject-matter expertise in rocketry or tunneling or brain-machine interfaces. What he has brought to those companies is (1) an ability to raise a lot of money from investors who he knows personally, and (2) his public image as real-life-Tony-Stark/the man who is uniquely positioned to invent the future.
After five months of watching Musk mess up the basic day-to-day operations at Twitter, who is going to trust him to install an experimental microchip in their brain or plan a Mars colony? The guy can’t work out the logistics of removing verification badges, who wants to put him in charge of their oxygen supply?
Elon-Twitter has been a case study in why employing professionals who take design, communication strategy, and implementation seriously are must-haves for a well-run company, not nice-to-haves. Twitter Blue could have been a viable product if the company had taken the time to introduce it right. It has become a laughingstock because of Elon’s ill-placed self-confidence that he can just make it all up as he goes.
The whole episode has been an object lesson in just how false the founder-myths of present-day Silicon Valley actually are. These are not special geniuses, bending the world in accordance with their reality-distortion fields. They’re just self-congratulatory rich guys, buying and breaking expensive toys and then blaming the media or the government.
Elon Musk keeps failing in the day-to-day management of Twitter.
He can’t do it on his own.
He needs professional help.
I feel a perennial case study for MBA’s coming
This could also be uncannily prescient advice for the time when the c-suite convinces themselves an AI is preferable to all kinds of expendable, costly and bothersome employees.