Months after Elon Musk’s controversial takeover of Twitter, the social media platform’s co-founder says the tech billionaire might not be the right fit for the company. “Improvements in morale and content policies at the company have been rolled back” since the new owner joined the company.
Noting that Musk has literally undone the positive changes brought about in the last year, Biz Stone told The Guardian that running social media companies “isn’t really a win-win situation… it’s always difficult,” because “50% of the people are going to be happy, 50% of the people are going to be mad at you.”
He added: “It doesn’t seem like that at the moment, but I could be wrong.”
Since taking over Twitter, Musk has been criticized for his decisions, which include mass layoffs, harsh monitising strategies, reinstatement of previously banned accounts, etc.
Hinting in particular at how content policies have changed, Stone said: “We made a lot of improvements in those areas. And all of that is gone now.”
Stone, who co-founded Twitter in 2006 with Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass and Evan Williams, returned to the business in 2017 at the urging of then-CEO Dorsey to “drive the culture of the company, that energy, that sentiment.”
However, Stone is hopeful that the Twitter concept will survive despite its enormous financial struggle. “I don’t know if Twitter as a company is going to be successful forever, but I think the idea of Twitter will continue to be around,” Stone said, pointing to the success of alternative platforms like Mastodon.
“It would only matter that on Twitter the idea continued. And that has happened. That seems to be happening already. Mastodon seems to be gaining on the decentralized and open source version of Twitter. People seem to be going there.”
And he added: “I don’t know the future. I don’t know what’s going to happen and maybe things will be great in a year and [it] He had to go through this acid test. But, right now it’s not looking good, I’d say.”
He also cited that when they started Twitter, they never thought it would be so successful. “I tell young people: if you’re doing something to try to get rich, it probably won’t work. You should do something you really enjoy working on and then have a better chance of getting rich.”