Twitter Inc. no longer exists. Yes, you read that right. After making lots of changes at the company right from the day he took over in October last year, Elon Musk has now dissolved Twitter's parent company, Twitter Inc., merging it with his newly-created X Corp., which reflects his vision for an "everything app."
While Twitter will hopefully continue to exist, its parent company is no longer Twitter Inc., which has been merged with X Corp.
Earlier,?Elon Musk had promised?to turn Twitter into a do-it-all app like China's WeChat that goes beyond social media functionality, allowing users to order food, book cabs, and pretty much do everything else an app can do in 2023.
Yesterday, Twitter CEO Elon Musk all but confirmed the merger through his tweet "X."
But it?shouldn't be seen as a surprise move by Elon Musk, given that the billionaire had mentioned it earlier. A few weeks before acquiring Twitter for $44 billion,?Elon Musk had tweeted in October last year that buying Twitter was an accelerant to creating X, the everything app, adding that Twitter probably accelerates X by 3 to 5 years, but I could be wrong.
Now that Twitter Inc. is merged and no longer exists as an independent firm, let's look back at not one but multiple problems that Twitter has been facing ever since Elon Musk took over about five months ago, amid a long list of promises that he made but remain unfulfilled.
Also Read:?List?Of?Companies?Co-Founded/Headed By Elon?Musk
Soon after Musk's $44 billion takeover of Twitter, several brands, both big and small, confirmed a?pause in advertising on the social networking platform. This came after civil society organisations reportedly raised new concerns over the direction of the company under its new CEO, Elon Musk.
The move led to a massive drop in revenue for Twitter, regarding which Musk tweeted that Ą°Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation?and we did everything we could to appease the activists. Extremely messed up! TheyĄ¯re trying to destroy free speech in America."
In just one month since Musk's takeover, Twitter has already lost 50 of its top 100 advertisers. These companies reportedly have paid Twitter over $255 million since 2020.
Mass layoffs
Right from the day he took over Twitter, Elon Musk was quick to begin layoffs that have since then not stopped, even in recent weeks. After firing former CEO Parag Agrawal and many other top executives, Musk laid off about 50% of Twitter's (then) workforce, i.e., about 3700 layoffs. And he did not stop at that. Up until now, about 70% of Twitter's workforce has been laid off in several rounds of job cuts by Musk.
Various media reports have claimed that?Twitter's outages have increased since Musk took over, with at least six of them occurring this year alone. A recent outage that happened in early March was among the biggest ones?at Twitter.?When Twitter users clicked on links, they saw an error message saying that their "current API plan does not include access to this endpoint." While most users struggled with Twitter and its sister service TweetDeck, it was unclear why Twitter has been experiencing a flurry of issues that cause disruptions in service.
Are you wondering what could have caused this? Remember when Twitter said that it was shutting down free access to the Twitter application programming interface (API), making it a premium feature? API essentially allows computer programmes to interact with each other and is also responsible for automated bots (the funny ones) on Twitter. This change also meant no third-party clients for Twitter.
According to?Platformer, it's this change that disrupted Twitter services last night.?The company has been working on a paid API for developers, but with only one site reliability engineer on site, all thanks to Elon Musk's drastic cuts.
It appears that the engineer made a "bad configuration change" on that day that ended up "[breaking] the Twitter API," an employee told?Platformer. The problem with such things is that even a "small API change [can have] massive ramifications," as?Musk?tweeted later.
Mass layoffs and the exodus of advertisers were firm enough signals of financial troubles at Twitter. In November 2022 itself, just a few weeks after taking over Twitter, Musk said that he did not rule out the company going bankrupt. And that's not all.??
As recently as this year in February,?Twitter CEO?Elon Musk?had tweeted to say that the past three months have been "extremely tough" as he "had to save?Twitter?from?bankruptcy" while also fulfilling his duties at?Tesla and SpaceX.?
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