Crash and burn: How Elon Musk destroyed Twitter

About six months ago, Elon Musk bought your favourite neighbourhood bar. Then he fired veteran bouncers and bartenders, tried to stiff the landlord and at least one vendor, and demanded that regulars pay a cover charge. He’s frequently struggled to serve his customers, yet he’s penalised them for mentioning the competition. He’s tamped down the revelry in general, really — a lot of conversation at his watering hole has been drowned out by Musk’s own never-ending stage act, which consists mainly of him yelling dad jokes at customers through a bullhorn.

Pour one out for Twitter, then. I’d been open to Musk’s purchase of the social network, but half a year in, it’s been an unmitigated disaster. Musk moved fast and broke nearly everything — the speed and totality with which he’s ruined the site has been almost impressive. By Musk’s own reckoning, the company is now worth less than half of what he paid for it. It has lost many large advertisers, most of its employees and, with them, much of its functionality.

More than that, Twitter under Musk appears to have lost the thing that made it impossible to quit: Its centrality. The site was once the most consequential place online, not just a disseminator of breaking news and commentary, but something like an arbiter. At its cultural peak, from about 2015 to perhaps 2020, what people talked about on Twitter seemed to set the agenda for discussions elsewhere. Even last year, it still mattered: After years of mismanagement and glacial innovation, Twitter, on the eve of Musk’s reign, was still the one place to visit when anything big happened anywhere.

Whatever Twitter is now, it is no longer that venue. Cultural relevance is difficult to quantify, but you know it when you feel it. And now, when something’s going down, Twitter rarely feels like the place where everyone is gathering to watch.

I noticed this when Donald Trump was arraigned. Trump, the most powerful tweeter the world has ever known, a man whose every typo could send Twitter into paroxysms of easy dunks, appeared in court and Twitter was, as Vox’s Shirin Ghaffary put it, “a snoozefest.”

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There could be many reasons for the snooze, including that people care less about Trump than they used to — or that even after Musk reinstated Trump’s suspended Twitter account, the former president has stuck to using the platform he founded, Truth Social, for his ad hoc missives.

But I’d bet much of the problem stems from changes Musk has made to Twitter’s news feed.

These days it’s often difficult to know what’s happening on Twitter. Musk’s self-serving changes to the site’s ranking algorithm have significantly reduced its usability: Where Twitter was once pleasantly varied, serving up ordinary people’s tweets pretty evenly with those of celebrities and politicians, now it seems to highlight the same few users all the time. (I love your tweets, Matt Yglesias, but I wish you weren’t always at the top of my feed!)