Elon Musk Is Crafting A Narrative For The Death Of Twitter

Elon Musk has said and done a lot of weird and outrageous things during his tenure as the owner of Twitter (now X), but we may have just seen the weirdest and most outrageous. In doing so, he’s crafting a narrative blaming someone else besides himself for the seemingly pending death of Twitter.

During an interview a the New York Times DealBook summit, the main headline was that when asked about major advertisers leaving the platform in the wake of his apparent agreement with an anti-Semitic posting on the site (which he says was not his “intention”), he had about as hostile a response as you could imagine. Language warning.

“I don’t want them to advertise,” Musk said. “If someone is going to blackmail me with advertising or money go f*** yourself. Go. F***. Yourself,” he said. “Is that clear? Hey Bob [Iger, CEO of Disney], if you’re in the audience, that’s how I feel.”

Musk has long characterized advertiser leaving the platform because of hate speech, users’ or his own, as “blackmail” to end free speech, rather than acknowledging that the decision makers of company can…also use their own freedom of speech not to advertise on a specific platform.

But the profanity-laden part, which will no doubt subtract even more advertisers from the site, was not even the most interesting bit of the conversation. Rather, it was this, when pressed further on the topic:

“What the advertising boycott is going to do is it’s going to kill the company. The whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company and we will document it in great detail. Let’s see how Earth responds.”

By “Earth” Elon clarified, he meant the users and the public. This is Musk setting the stage for Twitter’s failure, but by blaming large corporations who “hate free speech” as the ones at fault rather than anything he’s done himself during his tumultuous tenure as its owner.

And Twitter is failing. Musk himself said in March 2023 that it’s now worth $20 billion, less than half of what he paid for it. Outside estimates in May were more like $15 billion. Twitter lost 60% of its revenue over the summer according to NYT reporter Ryan Mac, and that was before A) Musk posted his response to an anti-Semitic comment that had even more major advertisers flee, huge corporations like Apple, Comcast, Disney, IB and Warner Bros. And then, of course, before yesterday’s comments explicitly telling advertisers (very explicitly) he doesn’t want or need them.

But he does, of course. Twitter’s attempt to turn itself mainly into a subscription model with Twitter Blue (now X Premium) has gone nowhere, despite new features and new cheaper and more expensive tiers. One new perk has been access to Grok, an xAI product that users what you might call Elon Musk’s sense of humor to spit out responses to inquiries. It is unlikely to move any needles.

It’s hard to see a way out of this. Once upon a time Musk actually met with advertisers to try to get them to return, but short of new site ownership, it’s hard to see a reason nearly any of them would bother returning at this point. Advertisers may be everything to Twitter, but they mean very little to these corporations in the long run as Twitter has always been a fractional part of their marketing spending, even before this.

In a normal situation, you might see the value of a company drop and Musk sell it off to someone else for a loss on what he paid for it. But this is not a normal situation, as Musk’s comments and overall behavior lately seem to indicate. It would be unwise to think he might not just take the whole thing down out of spite, and attempt to tell the world that it was the giant megacorps that did this. The only ones who will believe him are his beloved Blue Checks, but they will not even exist anymore.

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