Elon Musk has a pretty tried-and-true playbook for doing business — he’s used it for years to build companies from Tesla to SpaceX. Unfortunately for him, it is not a model that can turn Twitter into a profitable company. It’s one that will take the social-media company down in flames. Here’s the Musk playbook: Enter a field with very little competition. Claim that your new company will solve a massive, global problem or achieve a seemingly impossible goal. Raise money from a fervent group of true believers and keep them on the hook with flashy, half-baked product ideas. Suck up billions from the government. Underpay, undervalue, and overwork your employees. Repeat.
Twitter is the antithesis of an “Elon Musk company.” It’s an influential but small player in a field that is dominated by giant, well-funded competitors. The government is more likely to put the clamps on Twitter than give it some windfall contract. And Twitter’s employees have options: They can leave and work for companies that treat them much better than Musk ever would. But perhaps most importantly, a lot of people think Twitter — and Musk’s ownership of the company — is part of a global media problem, rather than some grand solution. And without a big, world-changing promise to paper over his sophomoric product ideas and erratic management, Musk’s Twitter takeover is doomed. (…) This chaotic management stands in contrast to the goals that Musk claims his companies are capable of achieving. Right now, Musk is making big promises about what the future of Twitter will look like to entice people to the platform: amazing video tools, 4,000-character-count tweets, a suite of premium features, an end to annoying bots. These sort of product teases are also standard for any Musk-led Tesla presentation. In 2019, he promised that the company would have “over 1 million robo-taxis on the road” by the next year. So far, Tesla has none. More than two years after taking initial orders, the faithful are still waiting for their Cybertrucks. Even products that do materialize, like Tesla’s Model 3, arrive years later than promised. And as it was being built, employees complained to me that Tesla’s lack of planning and testing in building the Model 3 line led to sloppiness and defects down the road.
via businessinsider: Elon’s stale playbook At Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk was a jerk with a grand vision. At Twitter, he’s just a jerk