Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

by Kate Conger

Musk and the goons stayed away from the Halloween festivities, celebrating with the Morgan Stanley bankers in the war room. They sipped Pappy Van Winkle bourbon procured by Michael Grimes, a small token after the deal’s closing fees had made Morgan Stanley millions of dollars. Although Musk was grinning over his glass, he wasn’t satisfied with his conquest. He itched to start another fire drill. Firing the executives was a fine start, but he was eager to put his fingerprints on the product. One of Musk’s gripes was that Twitter’s website required people to log in before they could peruse the timeline of fresh tweets. It seemed to be one of the problems that inhibited Twitter from attracting new users—no one really understood how the site worked before they started using it. Musk believed Twitter should entice people to try it, and so he demanded that its home page be transformed from a blank log-in screen into an “Explore” page that displayed a collection of trending topics and popular tweets. The move would surely increase traffic and interest, he thought. Musk tasked Davis with finding someone to execute the task, and the Boring Company leader ran full speed to deliver the results, no questions asked. The decision wasn’t informed by any research, user studies, or consultation with Twitter’s engineers or product specialists, but rather Musk’s gut. Had he asked people who worked on the product, he might have learned that the log-in page was a vital defense against spammers...

Good or bad on Musk?