“I love it when people complain about Twitter… on Twitter. » If Elon Musk, in a tweet with hilarious emojis published Thursday, November 10, seems to want to laugh, the company, which he took control on October 27, is indeed plunged into gigantic chaos.
In barely two weeks, the company has already experienced a massive layoff plan which affected around half of the employees, the resignations of most of its executives and department managers, the catastrophic launch of new functionalities and the leak of the most of its advertisers. But it’s Thursday that the storm peaked, during Mr. Musk’s first discussion with all of the remaining employees: arriving a quarter of an hour late and with bad news, the new boss of the social network announced that he “it is not impossible that [Twitter] go bankrupt”. Barely two weeks after having paid more than 44 billion dollars (42.6 billion euros) to take the lead.
The economic situation of the company is indeed very uncertain. Twenty-four hours earlier, Mr. Musk hosted another online meeting with chief security officer Yoel Roth and vice president of sales Robin Wheeler, to which all major advertisers were invited. Almost all major US companies have today cut their advertising purchases on the platform, sometimes very publicly, believing that the billionaire’s plans to limit moderation on the social network pose an image risk. for them if their products were displayed alongside violent or extremist messages. But Twitter is, much more than Meta or Google, very dependent on these “big accounts”, having never succeeded in developing a significant advertising offer for smaller companies.
After having threatened these advertisers of the “naming and humiliating them” publicly, implying that it was a concerted and political attack, Mr. Musk finally played the appeasement and detailed how he thought the new services he was putting in place would make advertising more attractive on Twitter. But less than twenty-four hours later, there was not much left of this attempt to convince: Yoel Roth, yet perceived as one of the few executives of the company very favorable to Mr. Musk, announced his resignation; and above all, the platform was experiencing a wave of creation of fake accounts of large companies.
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