*All dates in this article are local times
A full 100 days have passed since Musk officially took over Twitter - on October 27 last year, before the trial of Twitter's lawsuit over the acquisition, Musk completed the deal and officially took over.
In these 100 days, the executive team headed by former CEO Parag Agrawal has ceased to exist, and Twitter has gone from a public company with more than 7,000 employees to an unlisted company with only 2,300 employees.
One office disappeared and the Belgium office was disbanded; One office was closed, and the Twitter office at Seattle's Century Building was evicted for unpaid rent.
As a social platform, Twitter has made few product improvements in the past 100 days, and the biggest move is the paid subscription service "Twitter Blue", which has experienced twists and turns after launch, suspension, and adjustment in a short period of time.
During the most chaotic days, the fake Nintendo account was certified blue V, and Mario, who gave the middle finger, laughed in a picture posted by the account.
It's unclear how much cash flow Musk sees for paid subscriptions, but the damage from the chaos is already visible: More than 500 advertisers may have fled, and data from ad research shows that Twitter's ad revenue plummeted 71 percent in December.
While Musk vigorously "changed" Twitter, he also left wounds, and now these wounds are inflamed. To make matters worse, the sharks in the sea are already on the move.
In the first few days of February, when Twitter's news was still "possible to launch $1,000/month gold V certification", another social product, Damus, became popular on the recommendation of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.
Damus was developed on a decentralized network protocol, to which Dorsey donated 14 bitcoins (worth about $245,000 at the time).
Twitter seems to suddenly stop being sexy, and "decentralization" has attracted attention, which is an area that Dorsey has focused on in recent years, and he has been involved in several similar projects.
Last year, within weeks of Musk taking over Twitter, another decentralized social product, Mastodon, saw an eight-fold surge in users, from 300,000 in October to 2.6 million in November.
"Who's next on Twitter" became a trending topic, as if Twitter was dead. Such a question would not have been necessary when Twitter was in full swing 10 years ago.
Looking back at the 100-day node of Twitter's "surname Ma", it is full of chaos and tears, and there are also opportunities. Opportunities belong to a small number of employees, as well as to emerging social platforms that are eyeing outside.
As for whether the opportunity belongs to Musk, now there is a big question mark.
A
What happened after Musk took over Twitter? Recently, An in-depth report co-produced by New York magazine and The Verge interviewed several employees.
Turning back 100 days, on October 27, a Halloween party was being held at the cafeteria at Twitter's San Francisco headquarters.
This party has been planned for a long time, but many people are absent-minded. Musk's acquisition seems to have finally come to fruition, and he has already walked around with a sink the day before, and rumors of 75% layoffs are all over the place.
Some people were sobbing in the bathroom, and some people speculated whether the one dressed as a scarecrow would be Musk.
Engineer Alicia (not her real name) was passing by the product owner when she heard him say: "The deal is done." Hours later, Twitter's executive team announced its resignation. The general counsel was also fired, the party continued, and he was sent out of the building.
Alicia had only had a meeting with Musk before, and she was supposed to explain the technical details to Musk. But Musk looked sleepy, and when he spoke, he asked about cost, followed by the idea of making a video. When interrupting her, Musk spoke in a dismissive tone: "I wrote C programs in the 90s, and I understand how computers work. ”
This makes her feel that Musk doesn't seem to be very clear about the structure of social media companies, and is not very interested in the people and processes in them.
Alicia's experience and what happened at the Halloween party is the prelude to the chaos that follows.
Employees were ready to be laid off, but even executives didn't know what was going to happen next. The CMO promised a plenary meeting on October 28, but then changed his tune and employees scraped and posted information through unofficial channels such as Slack.
Musk brought in a group of cronies, including venture capitalists, celebrity lawyers, and heads of "boring" companies. For employees, they are more aptly called "thugs".
The "thugs" came out, bringing more depression and chaos.
On October 28, the "thugs" first asked the engineers to print the code for Musk to check, then said not to print and destroy the printed ones, and the final code check was not carried out.
That night, the "thugs" told managers to rank their employees in a big ranking, but did not specify the criteria. So, managers rank in their own way: seniority, contribution, title... They started getting calls from "thugs" late at night, asking who was on their team the best.
Next, a new notice came: large meetings within the company were prohibited. Musk clearly doesn't want anyone to know ahead of time that he's being laid off. At the same time, team leaders participate in debriefing meetings, and Musk has brought in dozens of engineers from Tesla and Boring to help with operations, evaluations and layoffs.
On November 3, the layoffs finally came, employees received emails, and at 9 a.m. the next morning, everyone received a message telling them if they were still part of Twitter. Hundreds of employees gathered on Slack's "Social Water" channel to post tributes and blue heart emojis, while others posted Thanos' memes.
It turns out that Thanos describes Musk's layoffs appropriately. On November 4, half of the employees were laid off, and the number of more than 3,000 people was laid off. While Musk said that the laid-off employees would immediately lose access to Twitter, some immediately lost access, while others stayed in Twitter's key systems for months.
Alicia stayed, but survivor guilt developed in her heart and began to quietly encourage her employees to prepare a plan to leave.
B
Even within Twitter, there are people who understand Musk's callous layoffs.
Product manager Esther Crawford wrote on Slack: "In order to survive, whoever owns the company must lay off a lot of people. ”
Buying Twitter for $44 billion, Musk urgently needs to "reduce costs and increase efficiency", and large-scale layoffs are undoubtedly the quickest means.
The next question is: how to make money?
There are always people who can seize opportunities in the chaos of the system, and inside Twitter, Crawford is a representative figure. Prior to the acquisition, Crawford focused on making creators monetize via Twitter, as well as products that allowed users to display NFTs on their profiles. After Musk arrived, she began to seek higher positions.
On Musk's first day with Twitter headquarters employees, Crawford introduced himself to him and recommended various ways Twitter could improve.
Her efforts worked: Crawford's new task was to re-exit Twitter's subscription product, Twitter Blue. The two people who had been in charge of subscriptions were ousted, and Crawford became one of the company's most important product leaders. Musk wants the company to wean itself off advertising.
In early November, she tweeted a photo of herself wearing an eye patch in her office sleeping bag: "When your team is in a hurry around the clock, sometimes you have to sleep where you work. ”
The subsequent remarks in the layoffs further alienated Crawford, but the Blue V plan went ahead.
The launch of the entire Blue V plan was chaotic, and at first Musk proposed to charge $20 a month, which caused strong dissatisfaction from the outside world. Famed author Stephen King tweeted that he would rather quit the platform. Subsequently, Musk set the price at $8 per month.
Twitter's Trust & Safety team has written a 7-page document outlining the dangers of paid verification: How to prevent people from impersonating politicians and brands? But Musk rejected any suggestion to delay the plan.
The paid Blue V service was announced on November 5, and almost at the same time, fake authentication accounts flooded the platform. The fake Nintendo account that obtained the blue V posted a picture of Mario with his middle finger and hung on the platform for more than a day. An account posing as a drug manufacturer tweeted that insulin is now free.
A few days later, Musk suspended the plan. The head of the Trust and Safety team, Joel Ross, resigned in anger, and warnings from his team were ignored. At a plenary meeting, Musk promised that the plan would not be rolled out again until the imposter was addressed.
Even if the Blue V program goes well, the cash brought in will not be enough to replace advertising. In 2021, Twitter advertising revenue was $4.5 billion, accounting for 89% of total revenue. To reach that level, 50 million users would need to activate the service, and Twitter's last announcement of just 250 million daily active users.
Moreover, it did not go well, and the chaos seriously hurt Twitter's advertising business.
In early November, GM, Ford, Pfizer, Audi, Oreo manufacturer Mondelez, Haagen-Dazs manufacturer General Mills, and United Airlines explicitly stopped advertising on Twitter. Many other advertisers are on the sidelines.
In the following days, Musk "amnesty" banned accounts, unbanning a number of accounts, including Trump, "Kanye", the former was banned after the 2021 Capitol riot, and the latter was banned for repeated anti-Semitic speech.
On the other hand, Musk, who talks about "freedom", has also suppressed accounts he does not like, including "ElonJet", an account that has been tracking Musk's aircraft, and the accounts of several journalists who discussed the news on Twitter.
In short, from the perspective of a social platform, the chaos continues, the tone is changing, and advertisers continue to flee. They have good reason to do so: Will drastic layoffs create platform security issues? Will Musk's approach make hate speech on the platform get out of hand?
By the end of November, the media reported that Twitter's top 100 advertisers had run halfway. Since then, Twitter has added hundreds of thousands of dollars in free ads and introduced incentives in the hope of luring advertisers back, but with little success.
In a series of tweets, Musk blamed the company's "significant drop in advertising revenue" on "radical groups putting pressure on advertisers." This is the fault of many people, only not his.
C
The ongoing chaos caused Twitter to "go down" from time to time at first.
One kind of "downtime" comes from internal employee revolt.
On November 10, with 20 minutes' notice, Musk summoned employees and spoke directly. He hinted at more layoffs and repealed the "telecommuting" policy.
Alicia felt fed up, and on Twitter and Slack urged her colleagues not to voluntarily resign: "Let them fire you." Five days later, she was fired for violating company policy.
Two weeks after the first round of layoffs, on November 16, Musk issued an ultimatum to the remaining 2,900 employees: he is building Twitter 2.0, employees must be "very hardcore", "work hard and long hours", and now "only outstanding performance can be considered passed."
He asked employees to take a stand through an online Google form, ticking a promise to become "hardcore" employees and start following the new standards.
But this time, fear turned into anger. Hundreds of employees refuse to sign the form, which is effectively a resignation.
Musk suddenly put himself in an awkward position. He and his "thugs" had to persuade some of the staff to stay, and also met with several senior engineering groups to listen to their opinions. Even so, there are many people who choose to leave.
A once-loyal engineer said: "Go to Elon Musk." ”
Four days later, Musk appeared at Twitter headquarters. Wearing a T-shirt that reads "I love Twitter," he took the stage under the protection of two bodyguards to try to articulate his vision for the company.
Surprisingly, Musk then attacked the employees as well. Journalist Matt Tabby gained access to internal Twitter files, and posted so-called "Twitter files." Twitter's intent seems to be to show that Twitter is complicit with the "deep government" and is subject to the conspiracies of Democrats. "Twitter is both a social media company and a crime scene." Musk once said on Twitter.
Taby released the names and emails of regular former employees who corresponded with government officials, suggesting Twitter suppressed New York Post reports about Biden's son's laptop cable.
Some Twitter employees rushed to contact a Twitter operations analyst mentioned in the tweet and asked her to set her social accounts to private to avoid online violence.
Soon after, Musk also made a personal attack on Ross, the former head of the trust and safety team who had resigned after Blue V, suggesting he had pedophilia. Ross had to flee home and go into hiding. (This isn't the first time Musk has hinted at pedophiles, having been prosecuted in 2018 for a similar attack on a Thai cave rescue hero.) ）
The aftershocks of the layoffs continue, and more than 500 employees are now filing legal proceedings over compensation for the layoffs. The newly laid off employees are receiving severance agreements requiring them to sign off their right to sue Twitter or not comment negatively about Twitter or Musk for life.
In this situation, it has become an open secret that employees who remain on "hardcore" Twitter are actively looking for new job opportunities.
In addition to the deterioration of internal relations, another "downtime" of Twitter is really downtime.
On Christmas Eve last year, Twitter abruptly shut down a data center in Sacramento and announced that it would drastically scale back its Atlanta-based data center. Large streams of traffic were redirected to the rest of the data centers, threatening the stability of the platform.
Network outages have occurred from time to time, with the worst occurring in January, when users in Australia and New Zealand were unable to access Twitter for more than 12 hours.
D
Apart from Crawford, who seized the opportunity, who else does the opportunity belong to in the Twitter chaos?
Although Musk has said that serving as CEO of Twitter is temporary, and also said that he will hand over the baton as soon as he finds a successor, he is still "fighting" on the front line of Twitter and is still finding a way for Twitter.
On January 27, Musk made an unannounced visit to Washington and, in addition to electric vehicles, "discussed how to ensure that Twitter is fair to both parties." As recently as early January, Musk said he would relax his policy on political advertising.
In 2019, then-Twitter CEO announced for the first time that candidates, elected officials and political parties were barred from advertising. Now that the 2024 presidential election in the United States has begun, and Trump has announced his candidacy, Musk seems to be re-incorporating the political team into the list of "advertisers" that need to be attracted.
Outside of advertising, the paid subscription model still seems to be his first choice. Twitter's Blue V certification service was relaunched in December last year, and on February 3, Musk tweeted that he would share advertising revenue with creators — provided that creators pass Blue V certification.
More paid services may be on the way. In late January, Musk said that ads on Twitter were too frequent and that steps would be taken to address the problem soon, amid speculation that a zero-ad subscription service might be launched.
In addition, on February 4, it was reported that Twitter was considering charging $1,000 per month to enterprise users who want to keep the Gold V certification badge.
However, on the stage of social products, Twitter has never been the only dance, and now Twitter is in turmoil, but also for competitors to opportunities.
As early as 2021, when Trump was banned by major social platforms, right-wing social platforms became popular several times. Parler even topped the download charts of Apple and Google for a time, and Trump's own Truth Social was a hit.
But right-wing social platforms are often blocked by Google and Apple because of hate speech and other issues.
What is more noteworthy is that since Musk took over Twitter, a number of "decentralized" social products have jumped out to ignite the Internet.
At the end of November last year, Mammoth Mastodon, founded in 2016, took its first bite of "dividends", soaring from 300,000 to 2.6 million active users in a matter of weeks, founder Eugene Rochko told Fortune magazine: "I don't know if Twitter is on the verge of death, but we definitely hope to grow to its size and replace it one day." ”
Rochko said Mastodon, who banned hate speech, banned advertising, refused to commercialize and relinquished physical control of the network, was the company's only full-time employee. The problems that make Musk anxious seem to be difficult to solve for decentralized social products.
In February, another decentralized social product Damus was born, and it appeared in the top 10 list of free social apps in the United States in less than two days after its launch on the Apple App Store, surpassing well-known social apps such as Signal, WeChat, and Line.
Ironically, Damus' sudden rise to popularity was inseparable from the recommendation of Twitter founder Dorsey, who himself donated 14 bitcoins (worth $240,000 at the time) to the Nostr protocol on which Damus was based. When Damus landed on Apple's App Store, Dorsey tweeted that it was "a milestone for the open protocol."
This is despite Musk's repeated praise of Twitter's data, such as saying at the end of November that the number of new Twitter user registrations was at an all-time high. But there are still doubts, in December last year, market research firm Insider Intelligence released a report that due to Musk's many changes to Twitter, the number of global monthly active users on Twitter is expected to decline by nearly 4% in 2023 and 5% in 2024, totaling more than 32 million.
Where will they go? Will the next big social app continue to be popular?
Musk is right about one thing: Despite the callious stigma and despite Twitter's occasional downtime, it does keep running with a minimum of personnel.
But that doesn't seem to be enough: advertising has taken a hit, new money-making models have been slow to be established, and even if Twitter is twice as light, how far can Musk pull the cart? Twitter, which has endless competitors, lacks innovation in function and gameplay, and is threatened in tone, what else can it attract users?
Twitter "surnamed Ma" has been 100 days, chaos, tears and opportunities coexist, but opportunities are not necessarily in Musk's hands.