We May Be Watching Twitter Implode in Real Time
You know things are going badly at a company when theories swirl that its new owner is purposefully trying to run it into the ground.
Deliberate or not, Elon Musk's half-baked product launches and the gutting of Twitter Inc.'s workforce has led to chaos that could prove ruinous. In the last 24 hours, he has touted potential bankruptcy and watched key executives quit. Impersonators of politicians and brands who bought blue badges for $8 have been going viral before Twitter can suspend them. Nintendo's Mario flipped off Twitter users for nearly two hours before its “verified” copycat account was taken down.
On Friday morning, Twitter appeared to have changed tack and suspended the $8 blue badge initiative. Maybe it was all too chaotic. Or maybe the departure of senior compliance staff has made it much harder to certify new products with the Federal Trade Commission. An in-house lawyer at Twitter warned engineers on Thursday that they needed to sort out FTC compliance themselves or face legal action, according to a memo reported in The Verge.
The lawyer added that Musk's personal attorney, who currently runs Twitter's legal department, had said Musk was taking risks because he “puts rockets into space [and is] not afraid of the FTC.”
How much upside is there to all that risk-taking? Not much.
Remember that if all of Twitter's 400,000 originally verified users paid Musk's $8 subscription fee, that would amount to about $40 million in revenue a year. That's a fraction of the $1.2 billion Twitter made in second-quarter sales, about 90% of which came from advertising. But Musk, inexplicably, has said he wants half the company's future revenue to come from Twitter Blue, currently going down as one of the most confusing and ill-fated
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