Twitter's Demise

 Twitter is on the outs. Well, not Twitter, X. Elon Musk bought Twitter on April 14, 2022 for $44 billion. I don’t know what you think, but that’s a lot of money to pay for an app just to burn to the ground in my opinion. To be fair, he may have started off with good intentions, but the multiple bad decisions he kept making has led to twitter falling in popularity and usage.

After the transition of ownership, the platform lost over half of their top 100  advertisers. The platform has also fallen to being the fourteenth most popular platform in recent years. Considering they were one of the Big Four at their founding and enjoyed a high level of success for a long time, this is certainly a fall from grace.

Due to pressure from his board, Elon Musk promised to name a new CEO to operate the company. In May of 2023, Musk named Linda Jaccari his predecessor, but not before releasing information of how the content promotion algorithm of X’s platform worked. Why would he do this? He still owns the company, so why on earth would he want to give away industry secrets? 

I have a few theories for his antics, and none of them are particularly nice. For one, he appears to be at least a little bit crazy. And not the fun kind of crazy, more of the destructive “I’m crazy smart but apparently lack common sense” kind. Another theory, which I think is probably correct, is that most of what he does is a series of ridiculous publicity stunts. All of his blunders with Twitter/ X make a lot more sense when you remember he named his own son the same kind of thing you see under barcodes.

I’m curious to see what happens to Twitter in the coming years. Do you think it will remain a top social media platform, or has it run its course?