A look back at Elon Musk’s tumultuous Twitter ownership
After taking over the tech giant in October, Elon Musk has promised to resign after a public poll created by him in December voted in favour to remove him. Musk promised that after he vacates his position, he will take on the role of running software and servers within the company, signalling his intention to at least stay on in some capacity within Twitter.
Musk’s tenure as CEO was at the very least controversial. When purchasing the company, half of its staff were laid off after a drop in revenue with Musk saying that the company was losing $4m every day.
In November, Musk rolled out Twitter Blue, a service which users can pay to become verified. This caused outrage among celebrities and prominent individuals as random users could buy Twitter blue and pretend to be celebrities and multinational companies.
In mid-November, Musk set up a public poll, asking if former US President Donald Trump should be unbanned, the poll voted in the affirmative and he was unbanned a day later. His ban originated from his unwillingness to not accept the 2020 election result.
In early December, Musk released the Twitter Files which made public thousands of internal documents that showed Twitter employees’ attempts at moderating an article published by the New York Post which broke the Hunter Biden laptop story.
In mid-December, Musk implements a new rule prohibiting the release of someone's real-time location. This led to the banning of numerous journalists from CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post being banned, with Musk claiming they had doxed him. The bans occurred as they were covering the story of an account called ‘ElonJet’ which tracked Musk’s private jet in real-time. Musk previously committed not to ban the account as a sign of his desire to maintain freedom of speech, however, the account was suspended on December 15th.
Early this year, a rival to Twitter, Mastodon was gaining popularity as users fled Twitter in response to the decisions being made by Musk. Founder and CEO of Mastodon, Eugen Rochko told the Financial Times that he has offers from Silicon Valley firms looking to invest but has turned them down saying “Mastodon will not turn into everything you hate about Twitter.”
Questions are now turning to who Musk will pick to replace him, it’s expected it will be someone who shares similar values or a similar bank account.