Elon Musk's 10 biggest fails since the Twitter takeover
From lawsuits to poop emojis, the Tesla owner loves courting controversy
Forced into an acquisition he didn't want to make, Elon Musk has spent his first year running Twitter as his own personal fiefdom. Here's a look at the 10 moves that led us to a world without the blue bird.
Elon Musk is a name guaranteed to raise eyebrows - and blood pressure. The world's richest person (at the time of writing) has been hailed as a genius - and also been accused of racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia. But is he the next Einstein, or just a less political Donald Trump?
1. It starts with X
First we have to look back to 1999, the time of the dot-com era and really naff tracksuits. This was when Musk first created X.com, merging it with fellow Palo Alto firm Confinity.
The brand name was a problem. Confinity had done extensive market testing to come up with the name of its online payment app, 'PayPal'. Musk appears to have chosen X because he loved his '[email protected]' email address. Despite that, Musk - after ousting CEO Bill Harris and installing himself in his place - insisted: X was the way forwards.
The name tested horribly. People thought it was a porn site, and focus groups routinely gave feedback saying they wouldn't trust "X.com". That didn't matter to Musk.
It came to a head when he left to go on honeymoon with his new wife, Justine. On the plane he learned that his co-founders, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, had submitted letters of no confidence, and the board had taken their side. Musk was out, and Thiel was in.
To add insult to injury, Paypal kept the X.com website. Musk wouldn't reclaim it until 2017.
Elon's love of the letter continues today; he named his son, born in 2020, X Æ A-Xii (that's "Ex Ae Eye Ae Twelve"). But three years later, "X" would turn out to be no more popular as a brand name than it was at the turn of the millennium.
Elon Musk's 10 biggest fails since the Twitter takeover
From lawsuits to poop emojis, the Tesla owner loves courting controversy
2. Sued into the acquisition
Musk began publicly discussing the possibility of buying Twitter in early 2022. His tweets sent the company's stock price yo-yoing, causing one shareholder to sue for stock manipulation.
In April, Musk, the physical embodiment of a meme, offered to buy the company at $54.20 a share (thought to be a reference to cannabis culture, where 420 is used as slang for consumption), or $44 billion. He secured funding from banks and his own reserves, and registered three holding companies under the name - what else? - X Holdings.
So far, so standard, at least for any Elon business deal. But then it took a turn. Musk, who was banned from disparaging Twitter until the transaction completed, began openly tweeting about his goals for the company. They included open-sourcing the ranking algorithm, authenticating all users as real humans and turning the San Francisco HQ into a homeless shelter. He was also publicly critical of Twitter's management.
In May, Musk took the first step in a long-running saga - putting the deal "on hold" while he investigated the number of spam and bot accounts on the platform. This carried on for months, with no evidence to contradict Twitter's claims that about 5% of accounts were bots.
In July, Musk said he would pull out of the deal, citing spam accounts as a reason. Days later, Twitter threatened to sue the billionaire into concluding the transaction. By that point its shares were worth $37, about two-thirds of what Musk had committed to paying.
Increasingly desperate, Musk made several attempts to dismiss the lawsuit, and also offered to buy Twitter at new reduced prices of $31 billion and $39.6 billion. Both were rejected, and he finally agreed to hand over the cash - again - in October.
Elon Musk's 10 biggest fails since the Twitter takeover
From lawsuits to poop emojis, the Tesla owner loves courting controversy
3. Immediately fired most of Twitter's staff
Twitter was barely solvent when Musk took over, with income about equal to costs, so nobody could blame him for taking some difficult steps. But he took it to extremes.
The Washington Post suggested Musk planned to fire 75% of Twitter's staff. Ross Gerber, a shareholder in both Twitter and Tesla, countered the claim, saying that the figure was more like 50%.
Very reassuring.
The cuts didn't take long to start. First, Musk weeded out upper management; then, he started on the operational staff, telling them to accept a "hardcore culture" or leave.
If you can think of a team that might be important for legal or compliance reasons, it was probably affected.
Those included: the legal department; Trust & Safety; communications (totally gone - the PR address auto-responds to journalists' emails with a poo emoji); human rights; accessibility experience; machine learning ethics, transparency and accountability (META); public policy; content curation; and the entire Brussels office.
Some executives quit, rather than waiting to be fired.
In total, Musk slashed the workforce from more than 7,000 employees to about 2,000, losing valuable talent in the process. He would come to regret it.
Twitter was heavily criticised worldwide for how it handled the sudden dismissals. One former employee called the situation "carnage." The firings came so thick and fast that many didn't know they had lost their jobs until they lost access to corporate systems. WhatsApp became the main medium of communication, with some managers forced to text their teams to find out which of them still had jobs.
Elon Musk's 10 biggest fails since the Twitter takeover
From lawsuits to poop emojis, the Tesla owner loves courting controversy
4. The fired employees then sued
In the first of several lawsuits, two former staffers Elon Musk had fired sued him in December 2022 for unfairly targeting women in his mass redundancy programme.
They alleged that, although women made up less than half of Twitter staff, they represented 57% of those fired - and even more in technical departments like engineering.
At around the same time, other former employees were bringing legal action against Twitter/Musk for forcing out disabled employees, and for firing staff without the required notice period.
In January this year, 180 staff from Twitter UK joined forces to sue the company for violating their severance terms, which are more robust than those in the USA.
Ironically, the EU told Musk to hire more moderators in March.
Elon Musk's 10 biggest fails since the Twitter takeover
From lawsuits to poop emojis, the Tesla owner loves courting controversy
5. Lacking staff, Twitter began to fail
In the absence of core staff members, Twitter slowly started to break down.
It began around the edges. Security frayed: two-factor login codes failed to arrive, and support for hacked accounts was slow or non-existent. The automated copyright system system went down, allowing users to upload huge chunks of copyrighted content that stayed online for hours before being removed. Some users reported being unable to download archives of their own data.
Panicking, Musk went to the employees he'd just fired and asked some of them to come back. They were not receptive.
The issues became more serious. Core parts of the platform, like the "For you" and "Following" feeds, disappeared for thousands of users days after Musk fired another 200 staff in late February. A month later, parts of the company's source code leaked online.
In a panic (again), Musk emailed all staff asking them to pause development of new features to focus on site stability.
And then it began to hit the company's bottom line. Advertisers got spooked when their ads began appearing alongside negative content like hate speech (which grew massively immediately after the takeover), and out-of-date ads were shown in users' timelines. They began withdrawing from the platform en masse, leading - combined with our next two points - to the next twist in our saga.
Elon Musk's 10 biggest fails since the Twitter takeover
From lawsuits to poop emojis, the Tesla owner loves courting controversy
6. Turned 'verified' status into a badge of shame
Prior to the Musk era, some Twitter users boasted a blue tick next to their name. It showed they were verified as the real people or organisations they claimed to be: celebrities, governments, NGOs and so on. If you were interacting with a blue tick, you knew who you were talking to.
A subscription service also existed, called Twitter Blue. Costing about $5 a month, it allowed people to edit their tweets and gave a few other perks for power users.
Under Musk's leadership, in an attempt to raise cash, Twitter combined the two. Anyone who wanted to keep verified status would need to pay for it, and the cost quadrupled to $20. No, wait, $8, after Musk very publicly had to reverse course.
You can see where this is going. Suddenly, anyone with a spare $8 could claim to be the Pope, Donald Trump, JK Rowling, Valve, PepsiCo (whose fake tweets praised rival Coca-Cola), government agencies or - of course - Elon Musk.
Probably the most damaging effect was a tweet purportedly from drug manufacturer Eli Lilly, claiming it would be producing insulin for free. The company's value fell by $15 billion. Eli Lilly, understandably, pulled its advertising.
Twitter began removing legacy blue ticks - i.e., from people who had them before it was a subscription service - in April. Rather than being controversial, former verified users began thanking Twitter, because they were embarrassed for being confused for "the type of person who'd pay $8 a month to feel special."
The blue tick has now become so reviled that Twitter recently introduced the ability for paying users to hide them.
Wait, we're not done - there's one more twist.
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is a safe, accessible way to protect various online accounts, but it has some vulnerabilities. In particular, codes sent via SMS messaging can be hijacked. Despite that, SMS authentication is by far the most popular form of MFA.
In February, Twitter announced it would remove the SMS option from MFA for free users, in an attempt to raise security - but kept it for paying Twitter Blue members. Yes, Twitter Blue members are now paying for the privilege of lower security.
If users hadn't changed their authentication method by the end of March, Twitter just removed MFA from their account - "Christmas come early for fraudsters," according to one critic.
Elon Musk's 10 biggest fails since the Twitter takeover
From lawsuits to poop emojis, the Tesla owner loves courting controversy
7. Damaged Twitter's reach by removing free API access
Free and ready access to Twitter's data, through an API, was an important tool for researchers and academics studying social trends, disinformation and the human response to conflict and natural disasters. This data was the topic of hundreds of thousands of research papers and analyses, furthering our understanding of how people work and boosting Twitter into the public consciousness.
And so, of course, Elon Musk closed down free access a few months after taking over, charging academics to study the data.
It wasn't only researchers who were affected. Technologists who had taught themselves using the Twitter API lamented its loss, with some accusing Twitter of "actively trying to kill their own platform."
Bot makers, too, abandoned the site or switched to data scraping - which quickly caused its own problems, stressing Twitter's servers to the point that the company was forced to impose rate limits a few months later.
Elon Musk's 10 biggest fails since the Twitter takeover
From lawsuits to poop emojis, the Tesla owner loves courting controversy
8. Slashed company value by $30 billion
After soiling the Twitter brand with creaking infrastructure and obvious cash grabs, it's no surprise that the company wasn't worth what Musk (reluctantly) paid for it in October 2022. But the rate of decline was still impressive.
In June, financial services giant Fidelity re-valued Twitter at about $15 billion - just one-third of the $44 billion price paid last year.
That followed months of Musk scraping around to cut costs - taking, it's fair to say, some fairly extreme steps.
As well as job cuts, those included delaying rent payments on offices; refusing to pay a $200,000 bill for chartered flights; slashing staff perks like free meals; and even selling office supplies.
Karma bit when landlords around the world sued the company. At first this was 'only' over an unpaid $136,000 bill, but a separate lawsuit in January claimed Twitter owed $3.6 million in unpaid rent on its San Francisco HQ.
In London, the Crown Estate sued Twitter over rent payments for its local headquarters in Piccadilly Circus; and employees were evicted from a building in Singapore.
The company also considered reneging on severance pay agreements, though ultimately decided it wasn't worth the legal hassle.
Oh, and as if that wasn't enough, the 'X' rebrand - which we'll get to in a minute - is also set to wipe a few billion more off the company's value.
Elon Musk's 10 biggest fails since the Twitter takeover
From lawsuits to poop emojis, the Tesla owner loves courting controversy
9. Threatened to sue Microsoft for hiring staff he fired
Its usage might have plunged after its dramatic launch, but Meta's Threads app was seen as a viable alternative to Twitter for several weeks. And it got there, Musk claimed, by hiring staff he'd dismissed earlier in the year.
Never mind that Twitter fired its engineers without any sort of NDA or gardening leave, leaving them free to go to the first competitor that wanted them. That didn't stop Musk's lawyer, Alex Spiro, from calling Threads a "copycat" product, or Musk himself from referring to the new app's development as "cheating."
And let's not forget that Threads only achieved its launch popularity because of Twitter's bungled management earlier this year, leaving users and advertisers yearning for an alternative.
Instead of greeting his new competitor with grace, Musk adopted his favourite tactic and immediately threatened to sue Meta, although as far as we can tell that hasn't gone anywhere yet.
And if anyone was in any doubt as to Musk's love of lawsuits, he did the same thing in July, when independent researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate said hate speech on Twitter/X had risen since he took over.
For someone who claims to be a free speech absolutist, Musk has shown a distinct lack of tolerance for speech critical of him and the direction he has taken X - which, rather than treasure, increasingly seems to mark a spot where fewer users and advertisers wish to be.
Elon Musk's 10 biggest fails since the Twitter takeover
From lawsuits to poop emojis, the Tesla owner loves courting controversy
10. Threw away an established brand because he loved the 90's coolest letter
Elon Musk's love of the alphabet's 24th letter is well documented, but he's really taken it to x-tremes (sorry) since rebranding Twitter.
Every tech company aspires to be a verb. "Google it" is a shorthand for "search" even when you're not using the world's largest search engine. In a similar fashion, "tweet" became shorthand for "posting on Twitter."
"Tweeting" was distinctly different from "posting" on any other social media site. It was even acknowledged in the dictionary.
But now that Twitter is officially X, the site formerly known as Twitter, that's all done. Tweeting is dead. Done. Gone. Pushing up the daises. Tweets - sorry, Xs - are posted, not tweeted. Musk threw it away in his pursuit of a unified "everything app."
The rebrand controversy doesn't stop at the grammar rules of social media. Far from it.
Changing Twitter into X required a certain amount of pain, not least from various app stores. Apple's App Store rules require apps to have a proper name, not just a single character, so for a while X was simply blocked to iOS users. The rebrand also caused a security alert on Microsoft Edge, blocking users by default.
What's yours is mine
Next: the @x username. All the single character handles were snatched up in Twitter's early days, and easy to remember or popular ones have changed hands for large sums.
Or not, if your name is Elon Musk.
Gene X. Hwang, who had held the @x handle for 16 years, logged in one day to find himself with the catchy moniker of "@x12345678998765," after Elon and crew forcibly co-opted his original choice for themselves. Musk did the same with @e when he first took the site over last year - without any compensation for the previous users, in either case.
Running roughshod over anyone with a complaint is a trend for billionaires, and Musk is no exception to the rule: if anything, he is the rule.
To prove that, look at the physical part of the X rebrand.
Who needs "permissions"?
In late July, X decided to change its San Francisco HQ to reflect its new name. Workers arrived to take down the famous blue bird and replace it with a massive X on top of the building - but quickly ran into trouble when the police showed up. Apparently thinking that 'permits' and 'permissions' are something that happens to other people, it appears that X had neglected to tell the city about its plans. The contractors were only able to remove a few letters before being stopped.
The same applied to the new X sign on top of the building, which was only up for a single weekend before the company was forced to remove it. As well as lacking a permit to put it up, locals had complained about its size and brightness.
The building's owner - already angry at Musk over the $3.6 million unpaid rent - was forced to pay San Francisco nearly $4,500 in fees as a result.
What's mine is...yours?
As we said at the top, Musk's love of the letter X is well known. Too well known, as it turns out. His rivals beat him to the punch.
Microsoft has owned an X trademark since 2003, related to its Xbox game system. But what really hurts is Meta, which since 2019 has owned a federal trademark for a blue-and-white letter X used for software and social media.
It turns out that there are nearly 1,000 active trademarks covering the letter X in the US alone.
We'll close with the words of trademark attorney Josh Gerben. He's talking about trademarks, but frankly, you could apply it to any of the points on this (non-exhaustive) list:
"There's a 100% chance that Twitter is going to get sued over this by somebody."
Elon Musk's 10 biggest fails since the Twitter takeover
From lawsuits to poop emojis, the Tesla owner loves courting controversy
Honourable mentions
Elon has more than a few other gaffes under his belt that didn't make the list. Here are a few of our favourites:
- 2018: Paid $20 million to settle fraud charges and had to step down as chair of Tesla for three years, after a tweet claiming he would take the company private.
- 2018: Tried to insinuate himself into the rescue of a boys football team trapped in a cave in Thailand, and tweeted that a British caver involved in the operation was a "pedo guy."
- 2020: Publicly shared Covid misinformation during the pandemic
- 2022: Lifted the ban against sharing Covid misinformation on Twitter.
- 2022: Contracted Covid-19.
- May 2023: Earned a spot at the Museum of Failure in New York.
- June 2023: Tweeted that he was "up for a cage fight" against Mark Zuckerberg. Despite a flurry of online jabs, it never happened and has now been cancelled.
- July 2023: Definitely-a-grown-adult Musk challenged Zuckerberg to a penis-measuring contest.