3 Lessons From the Death of Twitter 2.0

How Elon Musk Forgot His Own Lessons

We all remember how Elon Musk was seen before the Twitter Saga. Despite some embarrassing PR moments, he was seen as a brilliant rising star. Even as he became the wealthiest person in the world, he was seen that he had not yet reached his potential. But it seemed that overnight, his brilliance came to an end, as his obsession with “consequence-free speech” led to a $44 billion dollar mistake. Now with billions in value gone, advertisers abandoning the platform, and executives and engineers fleeing the, we can go over the big question. Where did Musk go wrong?

Hustle Culture Shouldn’t Be Glorified

In startups and the tech sector, there’s a toxic work culture referred to as “the hustle”. If you’ve worked in the US, you’ve likely seen this. People brag about working 18-hour days and taking no time off. They talk gloatingly about sleeping under their desks, and that somehow is the secret to their success. Elon Musk at Twitter tried to codify Hustle Culture into law, saying that “employees need to become hardcore” and sign an agreement saying they’ll start to put in painful amounts of extra time and extra duties. Accordingly, Twitter employees resigned en masse, and Elon Musk was so fearful of sabotage from these employees that he shut down Twitter HQ. There’s no good evidence that shows that working long hours is good for mental health or productivity.

The employees who resigned likely have families and personal lives which they’d much rather do than work 18-hour days, and putting in the extra time does not increase their actual output. Instead, after approximately 4-5 hours of focused work, productivity drops off dramatically due to mental exhaustion and decision fatigue. Beyond routine jobs, which require sheer effort rather than creative problem-solving, trying to force oneself to work overtime consistently leads to poor results. Not only does the rate at which work goes down drop off dramatically, but the quality of work also goes down. Meaning, yes, the people that work 18-hour days might be able to brag about the number of reports, the number of lines of code, or whatever metric they use, but the quality of that work is likely low.

So the lesson here is to let yourself take a break. For managers, their job is to make sure their people are both productive and have a positive work-life balance. If an employee’s kid has a soccer game, let them go, they’ll be grateful and bring that positive energy back to work. Did the employee recently have a bad breakup? Let them walk through their personal life at work. Employees who feel good, perform well.

Managers Should Be Delegating, Not Demanding

Elon Musk has successfully started and run many well-known companies. His secret wasn’t that he knew exactly how PayPal worked, how to build an Electric Car, or how to create recyclable rockets. His secret was that he had other people do that for him. He hired qualified people and let them run with it. With Twitter, he immediately fired the entire board and decided to take his ideological stances to the extreme. By micromanaging things like budgets and projects, he ran ill-fated revenue streams, such as allowing paid open access to verification, leading to several business giants and celebrities, including Musk himself, to become publicly humiliated on Twitter by “Verified” accounts under their names. A tweet by a user declaring themselves to be pharmaceutical giant “Eli Lilly & Co” publicly announced free insulin for all, leading to a loss of millions for the company in market value on Wall Street.

Additionally, Elon Musk was firing programmers based on the number of lines of code that had been written, meaning that programmers writing routine code were kept, and problem solvers who wrote few but essential lines of code were overwhelmingly fired.

This can be chalked up to a simple problem. An unqualified person making decisions on things he knew nothing about. Taking advice from nobody and not delegating these tasks and decisions to other qualified personnel. As a manager, your job isn’t to know every single thing about every single part of your business. Quite the opposite, your job is to know the right people to ask about these decisions. Think about the overall business strategy rather than the details and work on the front lines.

For a good example, look to Volodymyr Zelinskyy, President of Ukraine. Before this war, he was not an expert on warfare and emergency situations, that is not his background. But he has an incredibly strong cabinet and team who know how to deal with these issues. So as a diplomat, as a public figure, he is doing his job by trusting his team, and letting them make the important decisions which matter most.

What People Around You Say, Matters

This goes up to the biggest question of all. How did Elon Musk, the successful entrepreneur that he is, make so many naïve mistakes? What happened, most likely, is that he has had people telling him for years now that he is a brilliant amazing genius. Even if he was humble once upon a time, it can be difficult to resist believing your own mythos, that you really are a brilliant amazing genius. Once you start believing that, you start thinking that you can make decisions better than everyone around you. Thus, we have Elon’s various PR disasters, and his crazy decisions at Twitter. He isn’t intentionally crashing the platform or doing some master plan we can’t imagine. He’s flailing because he thinks he can make amazing decisions all the time. And he’s just as confused as we are as to why they are not working, frequently blaming backstabs or activists instead of the actual problem, his own decisions.

So while you can’t control what the people around you say, do understand that it does matter, and you need to be careful not to let it get to your head. Understand that from Elon Musk to Napoleon Bonaparte to Customer Service, we are all humans trying our best. Sometimes we’re right, sometimes, we’re not. But what we’re never, is perfect.