Musk should heed the vote

Disapproval from Twitter users reflects his short, chaotic stint as CEO.

By the Editorial Board of the New York Daily News

December 26, 2022 at 12:00AM
Elon Musk in 2020. (John Raoux, Associated Press/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Elon Musk asked Twitter users whether he should stay CEO. When a clear majority said go, he pondered which votes should count, before saying he'll quit as CEO "as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!" Sure thing, Elon.

We hope Musk's chaotic and disastrous run atop Twitter not only punctures the myth of the former eBay and current Tesla CEO as a genius, but that it takes many other would-be masters of the universe down a peg or three.

When Musk took Twitter private, he predicted he could turn the oft-criticized but actually pretty well-run social media platform into a profitable machine that was also far more open to a broader range of speech, including lies and hate speech. Musk, siding with right-wing critics of supposedly far-left Twitter leadership, insisted that a new era of openness would create a fairer and more lively community in which hardly any type of expression was actively suppressed.

Every single promise he made has crashed violently against the rocks of reality. There was going to be some regulation of the spread of misinformation — until Musk himself smirkingly spread vile falsehoods. Reinstatements of controversial accounts were to be based on standards determined by a new panel of experts — until they weren't, and Donald Trump got welcomed back.

The old system for verifying users' identity was to be replaced by a new one — until that one quickly proved to be a joke of a mockery of a sham. Censorship was going to be consigned to the past — until Musk decided to suspend accounts that dared report on an account that used publicly available data tracking his private jet.

Then Musk tried banning links to other social media sites. The man who called himself a free-speech absolutist was going full authoritarian.

Most hilariously of all, the supposed captain of industry has failed to manage the corporate basics. Musk's firings have been impetuous and arbitrary. His contempt for advertisers has been self-destructive. His schemes to raise revenue have been harebrained. Unplug him.

about the writer

about the writer

the Editorial Board of the New York Daily News