Elon Musk dragged a sink to Twitter headquarters on Wednesday.
“Enter Twitter headquarters, let him in!” captioned the video, which he posted on Twitter.
He rebranded himself as “Chief Twit” on the social network.
Musk has been building corporations since the age of the web. It made Tesla, SpaceX and PayPal the leading companies they are today.
But the financially troubled social media company, which is expected to buy until Friday, wants something more to succeed, said Andy Wu, who teaches business strategy at Harvard Business School.
“Musk doesn’t delight in managing organizational replacement and there’s a culture embedded in Twitter that he’ll want to replace to achieve some of his goals,” Wu said.
The challenge has only grown since Musk first came forward to buy Twitter in the spring for $54. 20 consistent with participation, or about $44 billion. Technology inventories struggled with the overall market. He dealt with, and only replaced his brain after a costly, high-profile legal war approached the lawsuit. At one point, Twitter’s inventory lost a quarter of its value.
“Other investors and I are paying too much for Twitter right now,” Musk said on a call with Tesla investors last week.
He said Thursday that there are many hypotheses as to why he bought Twitter after all his doubts.
“It behooves civilization in the long run to have a virtual public square that is not unusual, where a wide diversity of ideals can be debated in a healthy way, without resorting to violence,” he wrote in an open letter to Twitter advertisers.
“That’s why I bought Twitter. Je didn’t because it would be easy. I didn’t do it to make more money,” he added, acknowledging that failing is a “very genuine possibility. “
It has laid out big plans for Twitter: It needs to scale it down while getting rid of fake accounts, its regulations on what users can say on the platform and turn it into a “full-fledged app. “
Experts say achieving even one of those goals would be quite complicated.
Throughout his motorsport career, Musk has pursued ambitious sci-fi visions. It accelerated the electric car industry and sent rockets into space.
“People think SpaceX is a crazy idea. It’s going to launch satellites. Who does this? The government is doing it. And he proved all his skeptics wrong. It launches satellites for a lot less money than the government,” said Erik Gordon, a professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. “He’s been there before and landed like a cat. “
Tesla has been on the verge of insolvency more than once, due to production and logistics problems that accumulated delays in the most serious ones. Musk poured millions of his own money into the company while burning money and struggling to make deliveries.
In 2018, he slept in the Tesla factory to troubleshoot the meeting line and supervise the paint shop.
Musk is a genius at persuading money markets to back his risky investments, said Tim Higgins, author of Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk and the Bet of the Century.
“Probably the biggest contribution he made to Tesla was his ability to sell his long-term vision to customers, but more importantly, to investors, to raise the billions and billions of dollars needed to keep Tesla afloat until it has become a viable business. “” he said.
Amid Tesla’s struggles, Musk tweeted that he plans to privatize Tesla at $420 based on constant percentage. The constant percentage value skyrocketed, prompting the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate whether Musk had misled investors.
In the end, Musk resigned from his role as chairman of Tesla’s board of directors and paid a $20 million fine to reach a settlement (Tesla paid another $20 million). He also agreed to have a Tesla lawyer review his tweets. The company remains publicly traded.
Musk’s fundraising magic worked with SpaceX, even when its rockets exploded repeatedly.
The Falcon, Dragon and Super Heavy rockets exploded spectacularly on the launch pad or in an attempt to land. Since then, SpaceX has effectively transported astronauts to the International Space Station on the partially reusable Falcon rocket.
In his tweets, Musk presented the stunning explosions as something new to the military-industrial spacecraft industry, applying the software industry’s iterative procedure to rockets.
“All I had to do was tweet something like, ‘Oh, everything is wonderful. I couldn’t be happier with all those disasters. It’s going to be great. And it raised a lot of money,” Higgins said. “He’s a genius at fundraising. “
Musk’s ability to raise cash was also highlighted in his legal war with Twitter. The lawsuit made public a cache of its non-public text messages, in which Silicon Valley heavyweights manage to invest in Twitter.
Tesla is fighting a racial harassment and discrimination lawsuit filed through a California company on behalf of 4,000 black Tesla employees.
Several have filed lawsuits alleging that Tesla encouraged a culture of sexual harassment at its Fremont factory and other facilities.
Additionally, during the early months of the pandemic, Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California, continued to operate despite closure orders from local fitness officials to prevent the spread of covid.
“There’s a sense in which Musk is like a business-era television broadcast and he doesn’t care about things, you know, like it’s 1952,” Gordon said. “It has huge areas with no worries. 30 years ago, top corporations didn’t care about sexual harassment or racial discrimination. “
On Twitter, Musk gladly trolls those who disagree with him or those who appear to be rivals.
His ego has been exposed to Twitter’s legal saga of his 110 million fans. After Twitter CEO Parag Arawal tweeted a detailed explanation of the company’s efforts to combat spam, Musk responded with a poop emoji.
Musk committed to Twitter’s regulations on what other people can post on the platform. He said Twitter was wrong to ban former President Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 attack on the U. S. Capitol. Racist, sexist and toxic in the US.
Musk tried to allay some of the fears in his letter to advertisers on Thursday.
“Twitter cannot be a hellscape loose for everyone, where everything can be said without consequences!” he said.
While many other people worry about the kind of social network Twitter will be under Musk, it’s never been a healthy business.
During Tesla’s earnings call last week, Musk said Twitter “languished for a long time but has potential. “
While Twitter is used through politicians and journalists, it has fewer American users than Facebook, TikTok or YouTube. It has struggled to attract advertising dollars and create installs that users will pay for. Internal corporate documents received through Reuters mean that now even tweets “use the platform less.
Musk plans to tackle Twitter on Friday. He said he was especially looking to reduce his ranks. Time reported that Twitter workers were circulating a petition, asking Musk to maintain the existing workforce and job benefits.
The firings would “harm Twitter’s ability to cater to the public conversation,” the petition says.
However, Higgins, the biographer, hopes that many painters will not paint for Musk.
“It can be infuriating and inspiring at about the same time. It just depends on what Elon Musk you have that day,” Higgins said. of other people there and many other people will probably leave. “
Moreover, it’s going to be difficult to create a social network that is, in fact, “warm and welcoming to everyone,” as Musk says he wants, and not the “free-hell landscape for all” he says he’s going to avoid.
It can be “a great experience,” according to Harvard’s Wu.
Social networks like Parler, Gab, and TruthSocial, which adopt a more passive technique for moderating content, have a small fraction of the main platform’s users. People have used them to spread hate speech, threats of violence, and a percentage of destructive misinformation that is banned elsewhere. .