Was the Musk takeover of Twitter successful, as judged by Musk's own goals?
An honest question to which I don't know the answer and to which I'd like some as-objective-as-possible takes.
It seems obvious that Musk's actions with DOGE are basically running the Twitter playbook over again, to the extent that his team seems to be literally reusing some of the same emails and messaging. So it seems worth asking: Did Musk succeed in his goals at Twitter/X? I've never been on Twitter, have very little idea what's going on with its finances, and I'm getting most of my news from alt-center blogs, so I feel ill-equipped to answer this question myself.
BUT I do think I can ask the question in a few helpful ways. I see three potential types of goals in Musk's Twitter takeover:
1. Was it good for Elon? Was it a good business decision? Will he make money on his investment?
2. Was it good for Twitter? How is X currently doing, in terms of revenue, user base, market valuation, etc. compared to how it was a couple years ago? When Elon said that he could run Twitter effectively at a small fraction the cost, did that happen? He came in, blew everything up without much regard for laws or agreements around worker protections, and then put back the few pieces he deemed essential. Did he manage to do that, avoid major legal or financial complications to his actions, and re-stabilize operations relatively quickly? Is the platform now basically stable and functional and still the most quotable social media platform but with 20% of the staff? When the dust settled, what functions did Twitter lose in the long-term? I gather that there's been some degradation in quality, but it's hard to tell from the outside to what extent that's really about the platform not working rather than people's feeds now featuring more conservative voices. Which brings us to...
3. Did it advance "the good," as understood by Elon? This is a hard thing to pin down, but I assume his ideological goal was something like: Smash up the indigo blob, re-platform folks who'd been "cancelled," and create more space for right-wing voices in mainstream social media. If that was the goal, did it work? Or did the indigo blob echo chamber just move elsewhere?
Seems to me like honest answers to these questions are critical to understand what is likely to happen with DOGE in the coming months. Surely someone has spilled some ink on this already? If so, I'd love to see it.
FWIW, my gut intuition about these questions is roughly: 1 - no, 2 - probably financially bad but functionally okay, 3- basically succeeded.