The Mismanagement of X

Everyone involved in X has botched it. Linda Yaccarino, Elon Musk, and wider society.

Unlike her previous boss Linda Yaccarino had a low profile during her tenure as the CEO of Twitter, now X. I think her time at Musk’s social media platform an abject failure. It was an impossible job to be sure, still the way she let Musk get away with all the strange choices, both business and political, without seeming to ever really try to get him to back down is disappointing. With her leaving we should expect Musk to be more erratic and more involved in the day to day running of X again. That is his modus operandi, to centralise power in himself and in his limitless arrogance assume that he always knows best. The Linda Yaccarino story is a clear indication that letting business and market forces manage something as important as a global social media platform does not work. The lesson Twitter/X keeps trying to teach us and the lesson we continue to fail heeding is that no individual should be allowed to have such wide-ranging influence over a social media platform.

The general public’s perception of what social media is and the power it can confer is out of step with reality and it results in letting Musk make bonkers decisions for a platform used by hundreds of millions of people every week. It is crazy that he can just decide to let his chatbot Grok spout conspiracy theories about genocide in South Africa and praise Hitler. The scale of mismanagement is immense, and while Twitter is on the surface a harmless app for jokes and hot takes, it is important to realise that it is a major component of a lot of people’s media diets. And unlike journalists social media barons don’t have well established ethical guidelines, nor a sense of obligation to society.

In theory the market is supposed to discipline wayward business leaders, but letting a company with a core social function be private means that the financial markets are impotent in trying to force changes. Similarly, the fact that Musk is not in it for the money but for the boost to his ego makes it so it does not much matter that revenues are down, customers and users are unhappy. There is only one stakeholder worth mentioning for X and that is Elon Musk himself.

Now that Yaccarino has resigned it is clear that professional managers will not stand in the way of the owner’s bad ideas either. What is left as a potential check on social media barons? The law. Parliaments have neglected their duty to regulate social media so far, but that can and must change. The fact that things have gone so far as X’s owner having made a Nazi salute in public and his company’s chatbot was praising Hitler is unbearably embarrassing. Things cannot go on like this.

If you liked this post you can read a previous post about Elon Musk's new party here or the rest of my writings here. I also have a section for longer reads I call essays here, I particularly recommend my essay on Silicon Valley and AI called 'No Acoustic Guitars in Silicon Valley'. It'd mean a lot to me if you recommended the blog to a friend or coworker. Come back next Monday for a new post!

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I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.

Written by Karl Johansson

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Cover photo by Ricky Esquivel from Pexels, edited by Karl Johansson