So, Elon Musk might be stepping down as Twitter CEO. I mean, let’s be clear. As the sole owner of Twitter, it could mean nothing at all. It could be a publicity stunt. And almost certainly any CEO chosen by Elon Musk – and they WOULD be chosen by Elon Musk, exclusively – would be absolutely beholden to Elon Musk. Further, mistakes that “Twitter” made going forward could be blamed on the non-Musk CEO, offering at least partial cover for his painfully stupid decisions.
In other words, even if the poll calls for Musk’s resignation, it won’t necessarily change much about Twitter.
Although it is likely to make things worse. For instance, the presumed new CEO would have to guess what Musk might want to do, and since the consequences of guessing wrong are so great – the CEO would get publicly humiliated and/or fired – there could be a lot of institutional paralysis. We have seen this happen at Musk’s other businesses. It’s happening at Tesla right now because Musk (an admitted micromanager) isn’t there to make all the decisions. So, they people avoid making decisions.
When Musk cautioned about the poll that people should be careful what they wish for, yeah, he’s right. What DOES NOT HAPPEN is Twitter returning to “normal.” Musk still owns it. Any CEO would work at the pleasure of Musk. And the institutional culture could get even more jacked up.
That said, I’m on the edge about whether Musk would actually step down if he loses the poll (which seems likely as of the time I’m writing this, with only 44% of voters supporting Musk.) Oh, I’m sure if he did step down, he’ll do his best to save face. He’d blame the “woke mind virus” for poisoning people against his Aryan pureness or somesuch.
The truth would remain that his tenure as Twitter CEO was a complete disaster by the only metric that counts, which is money. Under Musk, Twitter has assumed massive, crippling debt while ad revenues have dropped. His attempts to create other revenue streams, like the Twitter Blue fiasco, have only made things worse. And his personal fortune has been slashed as investors and markets rethink his competence and mental fitness. Regardless of the uptick in people using Twitter, I don’t think they’re users – it’s like saying a crowd watching a church burn down is there out of love of Jesus – Twitter’s finances are a mess because of Elon Musk, and he’s destroyed much of his personal worth.
I think it is an open question if Musk would be able to accept such a failure at this point of his life. I think he has been surrounded by sycophants for so long, parasitic yes-men kowtowing to his least whim like it is a divine utterance that the possibility of an embarrassing failure could be more than he can bear. Even if it changes nothing in how Twitter is run, with Musk pulling the strings of a puppet CEO from behind, it will remain that he ran Twitter into the ground. Twitter went from a borderline profitable company with vast influence to a laughingstock in, like, two months.
Or have his powers of self-deception grown so vast that he will believe the figment of the imagination that his failure wasn’t due to his incompetence but that secret cabal of cucks infected by the woke mind virus? Because if you’re an investor, that’s worse, right? If he convinces himself that his utter failure was due to external forces, to the libs or bots or the ghost of the Queen of England, that’s him embracing a conspiracy theory so profound that it ruins giant, powerful companies.
Anyway, I’m having fun.