The Impossible Task of ‘Fixing’ Twitter
Elon Musk has been trying for months to make Twitter a profitable company, but he’s had a lot of ups and downs along the way. He’s made fundamental changes to the platform (hello $8 check marks), fired thousands of employees, proposed an ad revenue sharing program for Twitter users, and even restructured the algorithm to get more impressions on his tweets.
In interviews, Musk has been clear that his mission is to “save Twitter,” even if he’s broken things at the company along the way. Yet the chaos he’s created has been informative, both because it’s provided a window into how social media companies actually work and forced people to reflect on whether the business model of a company like Twitter is sustainable in the long term.
In his first month on the job, Musk endorsed the release of the Twitter Files, a series of tweet threads by reporters he brought in to demonstrate how Twitter operated before he took over. Musk’s aim in releasing the Twitter Files was to portray the company as deliberately biased against conservative points of view and willing to unfairly restrict certain stories in the name of “public safety.” Undoing this was Musk’s entire reasoning for becoming “Chief Twit” in the first place, even if he did spend months initially trying to back out of the deal.
