When the news broke that Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter was complete, I joked that if I left the network now, would there be a digital forwarding order to other social networks? Of course I posted that on Twitter, where else? The reactions to this were mixed, but as expected, the waves were high: from Musk’s downfall of the West to criticism not to demonize him, everything was there. And it quickly became clear to me: Twitter and Musk obviously go well together. Both have adopted excitement as their business principle.
Malte Kirchner has been an editor at heise online since 2022. In addition to the technology itself, he is concerned with the question of how it is changing society. He pays special attention to news from Apple. He also does development and podcasting.
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You can think what you want of Musk’s actions: as a stimulus figure, as the enfant terrible of the Internet, he enriches the world of technology in 2022 like no other. It is not without reason that he is often compared to another alluring figure of the past decades: Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. The much-vaunted disruption is inevitably linked to making oneself unpopular. And Musk, like Jobs in his day, is a master at it.
Musk is no snitch
But more than that, Elon Musk is not just a rascal, as the North German says: The crazy thing about his person is that he always delivers. The e-car is having a hard time catching on because of the hesitant actions of the manufacturers of combustion vehicles? Musk opens his own factory with Tesla and shows the others how it’s done. Satellite internet is complicated, slow and expensive? Musk simply launches his own Starlink satellites into space and does not cooperate with established satellite operators. And he also broke through the inertia of NASA, which apparently had lost its ambition after the successful moon landing and the space shuttle program, by founding SpaceX. Suddenly people on the screen were excited again when astronauts fly into space. It goes well with this to simply buy a multi-billion dollar network because you are dissatisfied with some developments.
Against resistance – and sometimes against all reason
What Steve Jobs and Elon Musk have in common is the will to change things against all resistance and sometimes seemingly against all reason. Where people and organizations are more concerned with themselves than with the matter at hand, where fussiness takes precedence over simplicity, people like him come into play. Steve Jobs was also ruthless: against competitors, against the established – and if necessary against his own employees. The success with Apple spoke for him. Incidentally, he too was initially a ridiculed, often underestimated talent.
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Twitter is made for someone like Musk. The company has been reeling for many years in search of the right monetization strategy. The network, frozen in its success, cannot even introduce an edit button.
Musk can provide answers to Twitter’s questions
Many of the 330 million users love the imperfection that surrounds this communication platform. For a long time, the network was unable to find the right answer to questions such as how to deal with hate speech. Musk’s push to make the algorithm public sounds easier than it is. But it would be a step in the right direction to address one of the biggest societal problems of our time: the unpredictable influence of social networks, which are apparently served more sovereignly by harmful forces than by the good. And the company has not yet found any answers to questions such as lower entry hurdles in order to become more attractive to more users, or to the question of a long-term business model.
And what if the mockers and critics are right after all? When Musk crashes the place? Well, then, looking back, we’ll just look at the other side of Twitter, which is that the network has always taken itself far too seriously. Incidentally, this is also a trait Twitter shares with Elon Musk.
(mki)
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