Elon Musk is known mostly for being an unaccountable liar, so his personal brand of chaos now blanketing the unfortunate staff at Twitter was easily predictable.
Nothing the man says can be believed, which is what historians in the past described as the “permanent improvisation” symptom of dictators doomed to fail.
As just one obvious example on Oct 28 at 8:18PM Elon Musk tweeted this:
No major content decisions or account reinstatement will happen before [content moderation council] convenes
And then three hours later he flip-flops and contradicts by unilaterally announcing a major content decision and account reinstatement plan.
Anyone suspended for minor & dubious reasons will be freed from Twitter jail
As another painfully obvious example of flip-flopping, Oct 28 at 11:16PM the CEO announces comedy can’t be touched.
Comedy is now legal on Twitter.
And then on Nov 6 at 11:53PM he angrily shuts down well known comedians with permanent bans for being unauthorized/unappreciated by him personally.
Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be permanently suspended.
He went on to add that there would be no warning to comedians having their speech censored.
Kathy Griffin, an obviously well-known comedian, was being personally and specifically targeted by the CEO’s back-breaking flip-flops.
…by 5 p.m. Hollywood time, Griffin was back on the platform speaking from the grave of her deceased mother’s account, @maggiegriffin. Griffin’s mom Maggie died in 2020, aged 99, but her daughter maintains the account. A one-word tweet read: “#FreeKathy”. By this morning at 7:30, Griffin’s dead mother was more loquacious: “Elon, this is Maggie contacting you from the spirit world to tell u… you’re a douchebag. This is not parody. This is the actual ghost of Kathy Griffin’s boxed wine loving mother saying I’m gonna get tipsy & throw my bingo cards at you.! NOT A PARODY. To the moon, a**hole.” Star Wars’ Mark Hamill retweeted “#FreeKathy” with a thumbs up.
Haha, to the moon, a**hole. She should have said Uranus.
In case it’s unclear what’s going on at this point, Tesla was a brand that said it was about safety yet we all know (ancient history now) that its CEO lied and lied and lied year after year in a mess of unsafe contradictions.
The company plummeted to the bottom of safety and quality rankings, dumping one of the worst engineered cars on the road.
Now the same CEO is saying Twitter will be about freedom and… we should expect it to plummet into being the least free platform of any.
Twitter’s product was content moderation. It’s what they offered as value.
This tragedy of permanent improvisation undermines the value of moderation completely, making it unsafe at any tweet.
Not unlike how Tesla is unsafe at any speed.
He said he would buy Twitter to bring forward his vision of absolute free speech, then he started censoring comedians (inconsistently). Of all the people in the world to target for censorship, going after comedians is the worst possible move — extreme opposite of protecting free speech. Fail.
He said he would buy Twitter to bring forward his vision of absolute free speech, then he started trying to charge for speech (before reversing). Joking his critics must pay him a tax to speak is not only NOT funny, again it’s the extreme opposite of protecting free speech. Fail.
He said he would improve integrity of the profiles on Twitter and then he removed almost all the teams who worked on it, and introduced instead a basic monthly charge for a “checkmark” with no integrity that directly undermined site-wide trust. Fail
He said he would bring profitability by focusing on productivity, then fired about half the company in such a rushed and incoherent way (as if American Psycho was an instruction guide) that thousands of managers spent copious time scrambling to find a way to days later attempt rehire the same people just fired or cover for them without knowing even where or how… FAIL.
The sheer money desperation driving all this cruel flip-flopping in chaos crisis — I mean the result of “spending” $44 billion that he doesn’t even have and then claiming he is desperate for money and everyone else will pay — is just more proof that Tesla’s “vision” is all just unintelligent seat-of-pants fraud and should be banned from roads.
Severe lack of engineering quality as well as high rates of crashes are symptomatic of this endemically bad leadership. We may as well expect Twitter to try and attempt an even worse impact on the world as the fraud of Tesla unravels.
The elephant in the room is thus whether Musk can continue to lead a company while already showing a penchant for unforced errors that directly cause widespread harms. Such a question is like asking whether the GOP or their man Putin can win another election. It depends on who is in position to hold the man accountable, really measure integrity on a basic humanitarian scale, let alone correct any of the wrongs being done by him.