Read previen up case studies on how not to handle your first 30 days in charge (when I analyzed former British Prime Minister Liz Truss’ record-breakingly bad tenure) and how to deal with a billionaire (when I reviewed 40 pages of Musk’s personal texts released to the Delaware courts), so analyzing a combination of the two (Musk’s first 30 days at Twitter) seems appropriate.
Watch the video
What’s happening?
Twitter has never been so interesting — ironic now the newly-privatized company is none of our business. But the cult of Musk is strong, and because everyone is watching there’s a lot of information about what’s happening, making Twitter a fascinating case study on corporate change.
If you listen to the media reports, Twitter is doomed. In his first 30 days since buying the company, Musk has:
Fired the former CEO and most of the executive team
Shed 5,000 staff and 4,400 consultants — 80% of the workforce
Sent a midnight ultimatum to the entire company to be “ultra hardcore”
Launched a witch hunt against anyone that disagrees with him
Annoyed everyone by launching Twitter blue
Immediately canceled Twitter blue when it didn’t work
Lost half of the top 100 advertisers
Enraged of a handful of celebrities none of us were following
Burnt $4m a day on operations
Inspired reactionary consultants to fill my LinkedIn feed with terrible advice
Given Musk fanboys everywhere new dinner-party anecdotes
Declared war on Apple
Had lunch with Tim Cook and de-escalated the war (technically on day 32)
Watching the daily news commentary and the hot takes in my social feeds (“OMG, Elon is such a jerk, he’s gonna run that place into the ground”), I have been waiting for the peanut gallery to glom onto the fact that Musk appears to be doing a fairly good job of culture change at Twitter.
No matter what you think of him personally, you can’t deny that he’s actually run companies before, including companies you’ve heard of like SpaceX and Tesla.
Most of the commentary on the imminent demise of Twitter is based on a false assumption that Musk needs to keep everyone happy: Musk has fired too many people. The platform will struggle to moderate hate speech, keep the Apple App Store happy, or fend off regulators. Under the weight of a deluge of far-right filth, corporate sponsors will flee and the place will collapse in on itself like a dying star.
Of course, that argument implies that Musk just wants to run Twitter a little bit better than it used to be run. That all the same goals, values, and culture will still prevail, albeit with a few minor alterations like Twitter Blue and a dash of long-form content.
Musk has been abundantly clear that that’s not the plan. He’s not engaged in incremental change, but massive disruption. You know this is true because he’d been tweeting about what he was going to do long before he “let that sink in” on day one.
The old Twitter was a human-heavy platform where exposure to opinions was safeguarded by a legion of moderators. This allowed the company to pander to liberal corporate media teams. Twitter 1.0 wasn’t a tech company, it was a Mechanical Turk, and it was struggling financially long before Musk showed up — after all, isn’t that why the board sold it, because the way they tried to run it wasn’t working and they were out of ideas or ability or both?
Musk is going somewhere else entirely with it.
The context
Before we dive in, let’s establish that I’m going to be broadly complimentary of Musk, who despite his faults has demonstrated a knack for business. Yes, he has a cult, and yes sometimes he’s unsavory, but I’d argue it’s not the same deluded cult that gave us Sam Bankman-Fried. (And yes, SBF did show up in Musk’s personal texts in the summer to pitch blockchain Twitter when he should have been hiring a compliance team instead.)
Let’s also acknowledge the Twitter situation is definitely political. Musk has stated he wants to bring the bird “back to center.” Don’t believe it leaned left? Just ask the million leftists that fled to Mastadon in the week after Musk too, a decentralized social network whose userbase tripled after Musk took over Twitter, or the 2 million Trumpists who joined Truth Social earlier this year after Trump’s Twitter was deactivated. They think it did. Extremists from both sides aside, the root of the political fight appears to be how free free speech should really be: the old regime believed we should be protected. The new regime hasve stated they don’t want us to be.
Financially, Musk is faced with massive issues. How do you transform a culture and a company while you’re bleeding cash and the press is gunning for you? Analysts say that $25m of the $44m pricetag was funded with debt, giving Musk a $1b annual interest payment — more than the platform’s profits last year. Advertisers, the lifeblood of the platform, are definitely spending less.
At its core, the Musk revolution at Twitter is about changing the organization from a left-wing media empire with a heavy headcount to a centrist technology platform that gets out of its own way. Musk has said he aims to replace moderation with open standards and code transparency, thus increasing free speech while reducing costs, while also moving forward with new features that expand the user and revenue base. This should increase profitability while lessening Twitter’s reliance on advertisers, a group that can also impede free speech.
Twitter 2.0 isIt’s not an insignificant tech challengeproblem, and time will tell whether or not he will be successful. My personal take is that it can’t be harder than blasting humans into space — an engineering challenge that was previously reserved for superpower governments. But can he change the culture?
A case study in culture change
Musk has moved quickly to turn the culture from a people-based culture where feelings and inclusion are the north star, to a results culture that only values what you did last week and to hell with your feelings. It’s the same culture he’s used — and continues to use — successfully at Tesla and SpaceX.
Neither culture is wrong, per se. They both have a place. The question is which culture best fits the mission of the company. Twitter has a new mission now, so it follows a new culture is needed.
STOP HERE
1. Start at the top
Jack Dorsey picks Musk for the board and Agrawal as CEO because he sees them as being aligned with his vision. He endorses both Musk and Agrawal on multiple occasions. Agrawal is known as being smart, flexible, technical and hardworking.
Dorsey is focused on WHAT needs to be done, but overlooks the massive cultural gap—HOW the strategy is delivered. Musk and Agrawal are aligned on WHAT, but polar opposites on HOW.
In their first substantive text conversation Agrawal and Musk both share their cultural preference.
Agrawal’s main concern is with the culture and the wellbeing of the staff by trying to set up a q&a. He even recognizes that the culture is broken and is not willing to rock the boat even if he disagrees, showing that he values lack of conflict over change.
Musk’s first and only ask is to see code. He goes along with the staff calls, but he’s most excited to talk code and ideas. He’s still engaged at this point.
In the same conversation Musk continues to drive his agenda of focusing on the code rather than the people.
Agrawal is amenable, and they bond over being engineers. They both see the same root issues with the Twitter product and enjoy talking code and features with each other.
Musk and Agrawal have a textbook culture clash two days later. Agrawal, keen to keep the peace inside and outside the company, explains to Musk how the staff are distracted. Agrawal can’t work unless there’s harmony. He’s also disclosing internal culture.
This is likely a massive red flag to Musk, who as a task-oriented leader already thinks Twitter is 300% overstaffed. Now he knows Agrawal can’t force change: he can’t have tough conversations, he has no power, and he won’t have the stomach to rock the boat. How would this guy fire 4,000 people? Let alone everything else Musk wants to do?
Musk responds with an appeal to task—what did you get done? Before cutting the conversation completely.
On his first day in charge Musk fires Agrawal, as well as the CFO who lied to him about the amount of bots on the platform and the legal counsel who Musk saw as an activist first and a lawyer second.
This is a direct opposite to Agrawal’s style, who preached
“I want you to #LoveWhereYouWork and also low how we work together for the greatest possible impact. Our purpose has never been more important. Our people and our culture are unlike anything in the world. There is no limit to what we can do together. Let’s show the world Twitter’s full potential.”
2. Be Really Clear
Anyone working at Tesla or SpaceX will be well aware of Musk’s style. Two weeks ago hu urged Twitter staff to be “hard core”. He sent a similar ultimatum to Tesla employees a decade ago, urging them to be “ultra hard-core”, as well as en email to Tesla employees in 2018 urging them to cancel big meetings, not attend meetings where they don’nt say anything, communicate directly without jargon, and ignore the chain of command in favor of logic.
Musk sent a midnight email to all the staff at Twitter urging them to be
extremely hardcore
work long hours at high intensity
write great code
1,200 staff did not opt in, choosing to resign
Of course, many in the media are people-first culture (like Agrawal), so headlines tend to focus on the mayhem, the risk, and the brutalitity of it all
This is actually the second step in a two-step dance to “reset” the organization
First, fire the low performers and the roles that aren’t needed (previously done)
Second, set really clear expectations about what is acceptable, and let people vote with their feet (in or out). Culturally misaligned people cannot be managed out, they have to be told what the expectation is, and they have to choose to leave.
The last step is to start hiring again - excellent people that fit the culture, which is what you’d expect to see next. (This has its own challenges.)
3. Build around the leader
Firing people with different opinions to you is bad, right? Surely it leads to group think and lack of innovation?
At face value, it looks like a toxic witch hunt
But it’s a no-brainer for any good manager to remove them.
Angry, toxic people who are willing to call out their boss in public and sow internal discord are clearly disaffected.
They drag other employees down, affect morale, and scupper change.
They may be right, but there’s a better way to be part of the solution, not just throw rocks.
We’ve seen this before. In June a number of SpaceX employees wrote an open letter and started a petition to remove Musk from his Twitter account. They saw Musk as too right-wing and an “embarrassment.”
Of course SpaceX’s president, Gwynne Shotwell, immediately fired the staff, because it’s not hard to choose between the billionaire founder (who is also an excellent engineer and fundraiser) and a regular employee who doesn’t appear to understand how politics work.
Although brutal, Musk sends a clear message that you could get away with that kind of thing at old Twitter. But not at Twitter 2.0
Email to Twitter
Of course, he’s done this before. Email to Tesla. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/18/elon-musks-productivity-rules-according-to-tesla-email.html
Firing people inside the company https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/technology/elon-musk-twitter-fired-criticism.html
SpaceX letter: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/technology/spacex-employees-musk-tweets.html
Firing the ringleader: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/17/technology/spacex-employees-fired-musk-letter.html
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