Elon Musk (file image)By November 9, 2022, anxiety was growing among Twitter employees gathered at the company’s San Francisco headquarters. That morning, employees had been trying to politely explain to their new boss, Elon Musk, that the service they’d just launched was dangerous.
Twitter Blue, a subscription service that lets users buy the platform’s coveted verified badges, had been up and running only a few hours when Musk, who bought the company two weeks ago and would later rename it X, stepped out of a glass-walled conference room with a view of San Francisco City Hall to speak with his assistant. Employees knew that users rely on the verified checkmarks to verify that the information on the platform, like bus schedules, hurricane evacuation orders or a pop star’s musings, is indeed genuine.
The chatter died down when Mr. Musk re-entered the room. No one expected him to hang around for that long on launch day, but he snacked on snacks, once eating half a doughnut in one bite. He encouraged employees who raised concerns to be “adventurous.”
“We’re going to be in real time and shoot from the hip,” Musk said, his finger on a gun. Previously, Blue was a small part of the company’s business, and the company relied on advertising for 90% of its revenue. Blue offered premium features (such as editing tweets and customizing the Twitter app on your phone) to a few thousand dedicated users for a fee, but it didn’t catch on. For Musk, a Twitter fanatic who bought the company for $44 billion, the service represented an untapped business opportunity.
Musk’s attempt to save what he saw as a sinking ship was based on the idea that he could convince millions of people to pay for Twitter Blue, but the plan was doomed from the start by the haphazard planning and whims of Twitter’s owner, whose nearly two-year run for the company has left it in financial ruin and tarnished his reputation as a generational entrepreneur.
Since taking over as CEO, Musk has been in a state of constant self-doubt and self-doubt, making sudden changes in direction. The chaos of the acquisition was epitomized by his handling of Blue. He shut it down the day after the announcement following fierce criticism, only to make it available again a month later. Since then, the site’s checkmarks have become a confusing mix of paid, free and fake identifiers.
Musk’s plans for Blue focused on selling Twitter’s verified checkmark as part of a subscription.
On November 10, major advertisers began calling Twitter’s sales team, telling them they would pull their ads unless the company took action against the fake ads.
The threat stoked Musk’s fears that he could lose hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue in an instant. “Turn it off,” he told engineers in his San Francisco office. “Turn it off!”
Thousands of these AI-driven videos, known as deepfakes, have flooded the internet in recent months, featuring fake versions of Musk fooling would-be investors. Deloitte estimates that AI-driven deepfakes are expected to add billions of dollars to fraud losses each year. The videos cost just a few dollars to make and can be made in minutes, and are promoted on social media, including paid ads on Facebook, to increase their reach.
Published on 26 Aug 2024 03:30 PM IST
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