He has now eliminated close to three-quarters of the staff. And yet from the moment that he stepped into that job, that seems to be exactly what he decided to do. And while it clearly needed to evolve, there was sort of no pressing need to blow it up and start over. It made about $5 billion last year, has hundreds of millions of active users. And the Twitter that he inherited, while it had its challenges, was not a company in crisis. I had not paid a lot of attention to what Musk was doing at Tesla and SpaceX, but as you note, he was having a lot of success with those companies. Are you surprised by what kind of leader he's turned out to be as the owner of Twitter?ĬASEY NEWTON: You know, I really am. He's making decisions that are driving away Twitter users. Twitter is losing money and advertisers under his leadership. Twitter is showing a different side of him - indecisive, making decisions then retracting them.
SpaceX and Tesla have been considered such big success stories, and credit has gone to Elon Musk. We recorded our interview yesterday.Ĭasey Newton, welcome back to FRESH AIR. From 2013 until 2020, when Newton started Platformer, he reported on tech for The Verge. He also co-hosts the tech podcast "Hard Fork" with New York Times tech journalist Kevin Roose. Newton is an independent tech journalist who covers the intersection of technology and democracy for his newsletter, Platformer, which is hosted by Substack. My guest, Casey Newton, says Musk has been remaking Twitter in his own image. Some of the responders may have been bots. Musk offered to reinstate Trump on Twitter after polling Twitter users about whether to do it. The number of content moderators has been slashed. But those ideas were met with widespread opposition. He's floated ideas for subscription services and for charging a fee to verify that your account is really yours. He's fired executives, cut the number of full-time employees in half, and then realized maybe he'd gone too far and tried to hire back some people he just terminated. Musk has made and then withdrawn decisions including trying to retract his offer to buy Twitter. Ever since Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, bought Twitter for $44 billion in late April, Twitter has been in chaos.
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