Twitter’s Inevitable Collapse Has Begun

And Elon Musk might just be the nail in its coffin…

What does the Ottoman Empire and MySpace have in common? How about the Achaemenian Empire and Yahoo, or the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Alta-Vista? Seemingly nothing, but if you ignore for a second the fact that half of these are — or, more fittingly, were — tech companies while the other half were political units, you’ll start to see where I’m going with this. Tech companies, just like empires, have a historically proven bell-curve tendency, starting at inception, culminating in “golden age” and ending in an inevitable collapse. Twitter is a tech company. Therefore, we can safely assume its fall from public grace will inevitably happen at some point.

Of course, while the prospect of collapse is there since inception, the moment that happens, is rarely defined or predestined. Had we not had WWI, the Austro-Hungarian Empire might still — as ludicrous as that may sound in the modern age — be around. Had the Berlin Wall not fell, we might still have the USSR on our modern maps. The bottom line is, that every collapse has a key moment in history. While not always obvious, it’s often recognisable enough that those who understand history can with some certainty almost predict the future.

I won’t be arrogant enough to claim I know what awaits Twitter in the following years, but Elon Musk purchasing the platform, feels like a cataclysmic enough event to initiate its downfall.

There’s a lot more to it than just a change of ownership

Companies have been bought and sold before. A company changing hands does not have to mean it’s for the worse, and I am pretty sure had it not been Elon Musk who got his grubby hands all over the blue birdie, the news would have been just another article, quickly forgotten by next week’s latest juicy tech released. But, unfortunately for those who found themselves fired after the takeover with just three months’ worth of severance, Elon didn’t just buy a company, he bought a social playground, perhaps attempting to play God with by firing the leadership, dissolving the board, and for all intents and purposes declaring autocracy — the very same thing most of the planet hates Putin for.

Running a social media company is a lot tougher than building rockets, not that Musk ever built one.

What Musk didn’t seem to have realised when spending $44 billion on a company that he claims loses $4 million daily, that first of all, it is a terrible business decision — though that’s no surprise to anyone looking at all of his other “profitable” companies, but more importantly, he bought a platform with around 400 million monthly active users.

If that same number of users were about a platform like Discogs, Netflix or Unsplash, I’d call those numbers irrelevant, or at least not a threat to Twitter’s future under Musk. However, because it’s Twitter, and because it’s a social media site, where people interact with each other, this makes the purchase a much bigger responsibility than the tech magnate might realise.

Losses or no losses, Twitter is still a popular space for people to express themselves. Owning a platform like that can give great power to someone smart enough to harness it, but can also be the sole cause for its demise.

It’s disappointing to see when tech magnates, in their arrogance, forget that the tools they own, were lifted into the stratosphere by ordinary people, and those same people can also bring them down and crash them, no matter their efforts to salvage it.

Seeing the exodus of advertisers after Musk’s latest announcements to me was entirely unsurprising. For someone who claimed to buy Twitter to enable free speech again, he only managed to create an even bigger divide, more hate-speech and a lot of anger against himself. What’s worse is that it’s not just the 50% of staff he let go — who in hindsight might actually be better off eventually, but lawmakers and governments. When countries like the UK and Ireland come out in public and declare they for one don’t give a flying fuck who Elon thinks he is, laws are still laws and protocols are meant to be kept; you know you pissed off just enough people that it matters.

But that’s still not all. You see, so far, there have been three camps. Musk worshippers, Musk skeptics (borderline misanthropes) and a group that largely ignored him. The Twitter purchase managed to change that, and not for the better. Suddenly, those who were skeptics, are now full-blown haters, and those who mostly ignored him — like me — have most definitely turned into skeptics. If you’re wondering why, let me put it like this.

Twitter was never great, and I don’t think it ever had the potential to be, but the unhinged cesspool that it’s shaping to become under Musk, is undoubtedly bad, and a threat to individual mental wellbeing and socio-political stability.

You see, an owner of a freshly bought company walking around with a sink, as funny as that may seem, is a tell-tale sign of someone who should be nowhere near any kind of leadership position. It’s not funny. It’s highly concerning. And the world thought Adam Neumann of weWork was bad. Oh, how wrong we all were.

The colossal problem with Musk’s takeover of Twitter is not the purchase of the company. As stated, that was just a bad business decision fuelled by sheer arrogance. Business and stupidity are not mutually exclusive. If the 2008 crash hasn’t proved that already, I don’t know what will.

The issue is, his personality being manifested in the platform. Be that Musk or anyone else, a leader’s personality should stay pretty far away from shaping the product and its users. Sure, some of it will bleed through, that’s almost inevitable. Look at Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and even Jony Ive. While Jobs wasn’t that far off from Musk, he was a visionary who kept his personality flaws mostly inside the company walls. In Musk’s case, however, being as Tweet-happy as he is, the entire world knows plenty about his personality.

Let me put it this way, having Aspergers is not an excuse for 90% of his tweets, but it does also raise the question, whether people clinically suffering from lack of empathy, should be in leadership positions that involve people, or a social media platform — aka 400 million people! I’m by no means the right person to answer that, but it’s a valid question nevertheless and food for thought.

What does Twitter’s collapse look like?

One can only speculate and come up with educated guesses at this point, but suppose the 50% who got fired (or anyone else for that matter), decided to form another company and build a Muskless Twitter. What then? Technically, the new Twitter wouldn’t even have to have a selling-point apart from it not being owned by Elon Musk. You’d be surprised just how quickly people would change platforms, especially if you could just transfer your account over, and maybe even some of your past tweets.

Chirper. It’s Twitter, just Muskless.

What I noticed this morning, and made my heart break a little, was that the entire accessibility department of Twitter was let go. Makes you wonder whether Elon Musk understands what disabilities are, what percentage of the world is affected by them, and that he himself is part of the 15%. In fairness, he is not the only one who made this move, WorkDay also laid off its accessibility experts — another company I know I won’t ever want to work for in the future.

But summa-summarum, a Twitter that’s not accessible is going to lose a fair bit of users. Accessibility becoming a prominent concern for many companies in the US and the EU, I can see even more partners and advertisers pulling out of Twitter.

I also question the actual value of Twitter presence. It’s not zero, but it’s also nothing to write home about.

For instance, being a blogger, I can’t say I see much paying traffic coming from Twitter. Sure, there are a few clicks, and perhaps over the course of the last year I made an extra 20 bucks through readers who landed on my articles from Twitter, but that frankly doesn’t even cover the effort I made to post about those articles. I am confident, I’m not the only one asking myself, with all this turmoil around the platform, whether Twitter actually does anything for them. And guess what? Some will draw the conclusion that it doesn’t, and will either leave, stop posting and most definitely will not be subscribing to paid features.

The truly sad part is that the other 50% of people who still work at the tech giant (not that giant any more) will have to put up with a toxic work-culture. It’s now common knowledge what goes on in Musks’ companies, so no need to go into details. Many will likely leave, and Musk will still blame them, perhaps call them weak and unfit for the platform he wants to rule with an iron fist. Many of those who will choose to stay, will do so fearing the current economic climate could land them with no job at all, though so far, the tech sector has been fairly shielded, but that’s not necessarily a guarantee for the future.

I imagine Twitter will become the next Yahoo. Still there, somewhere on life-support, a mostly forgotten has-been.

Is it inevitable? I think it is. Will Musk be its nail in the coffin? Probably…

Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, LEGO fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer! Read my Hello story here! Subscribe and/or become a member for more stories about LEGO, tech, coding and accessibility! For my less regular readers, I also write about random bits and writing.