Elon Musk CEO of Twitter: Positive & Negatives?
Less than a week after laying off thousands of Twitter employees, new owner Elon Musk is firing staffers who disagree with him sometimes publicly. On Monday, Musk tweeted that he fired an engineer at the company who had publicly disagreed with him about the Twitter app.
Musk had tweeted an apology for the app being “super slow” in some countries, to which engineer Eric Frohnhoefer replied, saying, “I have spent 6yrs working on Twitter for Android and can say this is wrong.”
I have spent ~6yrs working on Twitter for Android and can say this is wrong. https://t.co/sh30ZxpD0N
— Eric Frohnhoefer @ ? (@EricFrohnhoefer) November 13, 2022
Musk then challenged Frohnhoefer, saying, “Twitter is super slow on Android. What have you done to fix that?” Frohnhoefer replied with a detailed thread about changes he had made to improve the app and suggested deleting some features to speed up loading time.
How to be the ultimate professional and still utterly destroy someone, a masterclass by @EricFrohnhoefer pic.twitter.com/mgUHJ0xLbH
— Dan Kim (@dankim) November 14, 2022
The exchange was met with incredulity from Twitter users that a CEO and staffer would argue publicly about a product feature. Shortly after, Musk tweeted, “He’s fired.” Frohnhoefer responded with a salute emoji, later tweeting a photograph of a locked laptop screen. Frohnhoefer didn’t immediately respond to a request from CBS MoneyWatch for comment.
Before the first round of layoffs, employees were reminding each other to keep their heads down and out of the way of Musk.
If they got laid off, they’d get severance. But if they pushed back against Elon? They’d get fired. No severance.
Very normal work environment. pic.twitter.com/o9dQAHJCPn
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) November 14, 2022
Frohnhoefer appears to be the first of several outspoken employees to get the ax. On Tuesday, tech publication Platformer reported that 20 engineers who had criticized Musk in internal Slack channels had been fired via email. “We regret to inform you that your employment is terminated effective immediately. Your recent behavior has violated company policy,” now-former workers were told via email, according to screenshots posted on Twitter.
— Nick Morgan (parody) (@skilldrick) November 15, 2022
On Tuesday, Musk deleted the tweet in which he fires Frohnhoefer, but it remains unclear if that revokes his termination. He also tweeted a mocking reply to reports of the fired engineers.
“I would like to apologize for firing these geniuses. Their immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere,” Musk said.
Twitter’s media relations team, which has been disbanded, according to multiple media reports, did not respond to a request for comment.
Since Musk took ownership of Twitter, he has launched, then paused, a plan to open its blue-check verification system to anyone paying $8 a month, which led to a free-for-all of impersonators on the platform. Several large advertisers have fled the platform over concerns about moderation and hate speech. After Tuesday’s firings, some users wondered how long a company could keep running after eviscerating its staff.
— femb?t (@__femb0t) November 3, 2022
Many are worried that Elon Musk is becoming too powerful, with access to so many people who trust him deeply.
Elon Musk has a lot of influence in the tech industry, and he also manages to be at the forefront of another important industry: space exploration. He’s been involved in both electric cars and electric car racing since 2013 when he founded Tesla Motors (a company that makes high-end luxury vehicles). In addition to his work on improving transportation technology for consumers around the world, Elon Musk is also interested in space exploration he wants humans on Mars someday!
Many worrying trends have developed on Twitter, but one of the most concerning is the spread of QAnon-related conspiracy theories among users. QAnon is a conspiracy theory that has developed on Twitter and other social media platforms. The theory posits that President Trump is secretly working with powerful people to expose corruption in the government, including Hillary Clinton and former members of his administration. Some users have linked QAnon to the idea that there was an active shooter at Comet Ping Pong restaurant in Washington D.C., which led to an armed man entering the building and being shot by police officers while they were still inside eating lunch at a pizzeria next door
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Just the name alone, when you say the words “Twitter”, instills a feeling of wanting to know more about it. So what is the concept behind this intricate machine of an idea? That’s up to you, whether or not you want to invest your time into expanding upon it or feed into it by following others who are also invested in this form of media. The choice is totally up to you and no one else because you can only be as successful as most people that have used Twitter before you.
It is hard to tell what’s going on here. Elon Musk is a visionary and Silicon Valley said he was a visionary so there must be something that has influenced all of us to hold such an opinion, but the one thing that bothers me is that he doesn’t seem to know how to communicate this message to people and make them understand what it is he wants. Perhaps it’s his use of Twitter that causes all the confusion. He has 6,85 million followers and he replies to many tweets. His personality is quite different from other CEOs who have a Twitter account to many of the tweets that are being posted.
Most of them are positive but some of them are negative which isn’t surprising. He should put more effort into explaining the vision that he has for technology in the coming years and decades. While only the fifth most popular social networking site, Twitter has gained a significant amount of momentum. For Tesla to have a social media site, he felt it was important to have a strong presence on Twitter.