Elon Musk is just fundamentally bad at business. He’s crashing Twitter because he doesn’t understand the business model and he’s too stupid to listen to the people who actually want to help him. The idea that Twitter’s business model could suddenly be turned on its head from advertiser-generated profits to the paid-subscriber model is completely asinine and not based in reality. Musk has alienated billion-dollar companies for no reason other than his own belief in his “genius.” The Eli Lilly sh-t encapsulated this perfectly – someone paid $8 to impersonate one of the largest pharma companies in the world, and one tweet sent Eli Lilly’s stock into freefall. Now Eli Lilly is removing itself from Twitter, which includes millions in advertising.

Inside the real Eli Lilly, the fake [tweet] sparked a panic, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. Company officials scrambled to contact Twitter representatives and demanded they kill the viral spoof, worried it could undermine their brand’s reputation or push false claims about people’s medicine. Twitter, its staffing cut in half, didn’t react for hours.

The aftermath of that $8 spoof offers a potentially costly lesson for Musk, who has long treated Twitter as a playground for bawdy jokes and trolls but now must find a way to operate as a business following his $44 billion takeover.

By Friday morning, Eli Lilly executives had ordered a halt to all Twitter ad campaigns — a potentially serious blow, given that the $330 billion company controls the kind of massive advertising budget that Musk says the company needs to avoid bankruptcy. They also paused their Twitter publishing plan for all corporate accounts around the world.

“For $8, they’re potentially losing out on millions of dollars in ad revenue,” said Amy O’Connor, a former senior communications official at Eli Lilly who now works at a trade association. “What’s the benefit to a company … of staying on Twitter? It’s not worth the risk when patient trust and health are on the line.”

Musk did not respond, but the account was suspended late Thursday night. The next morning, Musk tweeted that the launch of Twitter’s new $8 verification regime was “overall proceeding well.” Musk did not respond to requests for comment for this article. Twitter’s communications team also did not respond; many of its employees were fired in the massive layoff that Musk imposed on Nov. 4.

[From WaPo]

While Eli Lilly has zero moral high ground here (they’re the ones price-gouging on insulin), this is a microcosm of what’s happening on Twitter’s business more broadly. Musk is bankrupting a company and dismantling Twitter just for sh-ts and giggles. He hasn’t even owned Twitter for three full weeks and there is good reason to believe that Twitter, as a platform, will simply stop working at some point very soon. As in, the site will become a technical catastrophe (as well as a moral failing).

As a Twitter engineer working on a number of those microservices, I'm predicting a massive outage in the next few days if 80% are turned down https://t.co/0d1sBlMGH2

— Sheon Han (@sheonhan) November 14, 2022

can’t believe my stupid ass has imposter syndrome while elon musk is confidently marching around twitter HQ and chewing on wires until something breaks

— soul nate (@MNateShyamalan) November 14, 2022

Let's speak it plainly: We are watching a wealthy man haphazardly strip-mine an app built and popularized by people of color and activists and relied on in the Global South as the last public social app that can still deliver news and information in 2G.https://t.co/Mu4tKHAoSE pic.twitter.com/trtj0fVVG0

— Ryan Broderick (@broderick) November 14, 2022

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