Doubts about Elon Musk’s Twitter strategy after the ultimatum

Elon Musk’s poll, asking whether he should step down as CEO of Twitter, appeared hours after he was photographed at the World Cup final in Qatar on Sunday (18).

This photo tells us two things: firstly, the billionaire was next to Jared Kushner — the son-in-law of former President Donald Trump, who Musk tried, and failed, to bring back to the social network he now owns.

The Twitter CEO knows that a bombastic tweet from Trump would likely generate controversy, but it would also be like hitting the jackpot for the platform — attracting a huge audience.

Trump knows this too, of course, and has his own interests — more specifically, his own social network, Truth Social, to which he has remained loyal until now.

That is, the card that would be Musk’s trump card seems out of the deck.

The second question about the photo? The same proves that Musk was geographically on the outskirts of Saudi Arabia — home to Twitter’s biggest investors. Did he show up there, and did they — as well as the millions of people who use Twitter every day — ask serious questions about his leadership over the past two months?

And then there’s the question of the poll itself. How we interpret the result — 57% of the 17.5 million votes cast were in favor of Musk stepping down as CEO of Twitter — will depend on what we think he wanted to achieve with it.

The poll could have backfired spectacularly — if Musk was trying to massage his ego — or it could have been a huge success in terms of getting him out of the predicament he’s been trapped in since the Twitter buyout was, in essence, forced on him. be completed.

We must not forget that the owner of Tesla spent months trying not to go ahead with the purchase of the platform.

As I write this, Musk’s Twitter feed is eerily silent.

This won’t be the case for long, no doubt. He has a history of listening to polls. After all, he put to a vote whether or not to buy Twitter in the first place, when this whole circus started.

In the past, he has also asked Twitter users to help him decide whether to sell valuable Tesla stock.

It’s an unorthodox way of doing big business, to say the least. But with Elon Musk, we’ve come to expect the unexpected.

the next CEO

So if he does what the people have decided and steps down, who will take over as CEO?

He has been a one-man band since his arrival at the social networking company. There is no regular mention of a deputy, or anyone he worked closely with. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg had Sheryl Sandberg; Amazon’s Jeff Bezos had Andy Jassy (now CEO). Musk doesn’t have an obvious right-hand man on Twitter.

Even top officials he initially saw as allies, like former head of trust and integrity Yoel Roth, have left the company and criticized Musk’s leadership.

But before you update the resume, consider for a moment the CEO of Twitter job description. You have the most demanding boss in the world; you inherit a demoralized workforce—half newly laid off, and the rest under the guidance of working long hours. The finances are dire, according to Musk: he says Twitter is operating at a loss of $4 million a day.

And it still has the legacy of chaotic decision-making that has defined the past few months on Twitter. Musk’s approach to moderation was decidedly personal. The “digital town square” he claimed he wanted to create quickly began to look more like you’d walked into his house and were trying not to knock over the decorations.

Policies came and went seemingly on a whim.

Any future boss also faces the challenge of trying to keep Twitter’s roughly 300 million users safe by posting in real time, including content that could be abusive, offensive, and sometimes illegal.

Add to all this Musk’s own unpredictability — and the ongoing risk that his next tweet could do untold damage to reputation and/or regulatory control. After all, he was banned from tweeting about Tesla after causing the stock price to crash by saying it was overvalued.

So again, you could say it doesn’t get any worse.

A new CEO less interested in relentless revolution can calm investors and improve employee morale. Currently, one of every two tweets on my timeline is from someone threatening to leave Twitter or complaining about the network. A self-obsessed social network isn’t living up to its potential.

Space enthusiast Elon Musk thought Twitter needed some rocket fuel — and it certainly provided it.

But maybe now he’s learning the hard way that social media, and the people who power it, aren’t machines. Perhaps the future of this troubled company is not in the stars, but with its feet firmly on the ground. If he allows it.

This text was originally published here.