A co-founder of Twitter has said that he believes Elon Musk “doesn’t seem like” the right person to own the social media site.
The Tesla owner completed his takeover of Twitter in October, firing numerous top executives at the company in the process.
Since the takeover, the site has faced numerous problems and controversies. The CEO immediately fired half of its workforce, with users soon advised to archive their Twitter history after speculation the platform could collapse.
Access to the verified blue tick via Twitter Blue also sparked an influx in parody and fake accounts posing as businesses. Other upcoming changes to Twitter suggested by the SpaceX boss include plans to introduce 4,000-character tweets next month.
Now, Biz Stone – one of a quartet of people who set up the site in the mid-2000s – has said that he believes the positive work he and his colleagues undertook is being undone under Musk’s tenureship.
He told The Guardianthat running the site is “not really a win-win situation … it’s always tough”, owing to the fact that “50 per cent of the people are gonna be happy, 50 per cent of people are gonna be upset with you.”
He added: “You have to be OK with stuff that you just don’t like or don’t agree with being on there. Otherwise, you should just go buy a magazine or a newspaper or something where it’s OK to have a specific leaning.”
Asked whether he thought Musk was the right owner for the site, he responded: “It doesn’t seem like it right now, but I could be wrong.”
Of the company’s future, he added: “I don’t know that Twitter as a company is going to succeed for ever but the idea of Twitter I think will be around.
“It would only matter that Twitter the idea continued. And that’s happened. That seems to be happening already. Mastodon seems to be winning the open-source, decentralised version of Twitter. People seem to be going there.”
In December, it was reported that Elon Musk was no longer the world’s richest man, emerging soon after that he lost over half of his fortune over the last 13 months, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
This week, he said he is planning to launch an advert-free subscription tier on the social media platform. The announcement comes shortly after the news that 500 advertisers reportedly quit Twitter over the past three months.
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