I have been a massive fan of Twitter from the very beginning. I joined the platform on December 2006 after I failed to ink a deal with Jaiku (who remembers that?) a few weeks before Google acquired them. Huge loss on H3G. Those were times.
Over the years, my interest in Twitter started to fade. The signal/noise became too low for my taste. I have a look at the streams a couple of times every month.
Nevertheless, the Twitter saga is quite intriguing these days. Musk is buying it; Musk is not buying it; Musk is firing people; Musk is re-hiring people; Musk is selling Twitter furniture and other paraphernalia… You know the story.
Looking at what’s happening, I ended up thinking that we are assisting the birth of a dictatorship, and that’s quite amusing. A dictatorship that was not born from a coupe but from a massive amount of dollars. Fascinating.
Honest? I wouldn’t say I like Musk much. I am aware I am killing my option to work for him by saying that, but the point is that I would never want to work for someone like Musk.
In Twitter’s rising dictatorship, he is the dictator. I have never worked for a dictator, but it will not be fun. Every morning you will wonder what mood the dictator woke up in, and depending on the mood you cannot control, your future could take a positive or a negative turn. No, not fun.
Every Twitter employee is at Musk’s mercy, as are all his users. You can be an employee today; ten minutes later, you can’t. At the same time, you can write on the platform as a user, even a paying one, but three minutes later, you could be thrown out the door without knowing why.
Dictatorship and dictator are appropriate words to use in this case.