By Lauren Wiles
From firing most of his staff to boosting his own posts; this is the story of a man, seven times richer than the royal family, who killed a revered social media giant in less than a year.
There has been a lot of news coming out in the last couple of hours of talks of Elon Musk stepping down as CEO of Twitter by the end of this year as soon as he could find ‘someone as foolish enough to take the job’, in his own words.
So let’s take a look back on his, not so best, moments from his Twitter terrorism infamy.
His tyrannical grip on the social media platform started in October 2022 when he closed the deal on his $44 billion Twitter acquisition and immediately fired the CEO Parag Agrawal which he replaced as his first big screw you to the Twitterverse.
His stock market value for Tesla sank overnight causing him to lose around $30 billion of his wealth.
A few weeks later, Musk made some unnecessary U-turns on changes he made to the system such as making the blue-check mark have a paywall behind it that everyone could use, making the verification system practically useless.
And firing most of his staff to the point everyone thought Twitter was going to implode on itself.
For Twitter to have freedom of speech he so desperately wanted, he reinstated accounts of white supremacy and anti-trans rights activists, boosted their tweets and gave platforms to conspiracy theorists that shout that society has become ‘too woke’. To the point where Musk was allegedly called ‘Hitler of the month’ by Twitter employees in a document which was titled ‘The Twitter Files’.
And yes, unfortunately, he reinstated Donald Trump’s Twitter account. Couldn’t have one moment of peace could we?
Fast forward to the present day, there have been reports of Musk throwing his toys out of his Tesla pram when he threatened to fire Twitter engineers, again, after his tweets during the Super Bowl had less engagement than the US President, Joe Biden’s.
With all that said, it will hopefully be over when someone else replaces him. However he decimated the company he’s leaving behind. A bittersweet victory. He got what he wanted in the end, a platform to boost his ever-growing ego.
This is what happens when you give an immature man-child lots of money.