Elon Musk's Twitter Cuts

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he insisted heavy cuts were essential to Twitter's survival. But despite getting rid of more than half the workforce, the financial challenges kept piling up. Advertisers pulled back because they worried about changes he was making to content moderation. It kind of makes you wonder why Musk wanted to buy Twitter in the first place.

Elon Musk took over Twitter with the promise of promoting free speech and making the loss-making platform profitable again. But his critics say he’s destroying Twitter’s culture and driving it to bankruptcy. How much danger is the company really in? In the first episode in a new series of Tech Tonic, Elaine Moore, deputy editor of the FT’s Lex column, asks whether Musk will save Twitter or destroy it.

In this episode we hear from Evan Henshaw-Plath, one of the original creators of Twitter; Rumman Chowdhury, Twitter’s former head of machine learning, ethics, transparency, and accountability who was laid off by Elon Musk; and FT tech reporter Hannah Murphy.

Presented by Elaine Moore. Produced by Edwin Lane and Josh Gabert-Doyon, Executive producer is Manuela Saragosa. Sound design by Breen Turner and Samantha Giovinco. Original music by Metaphor Music. The FT’s head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Special thanks to Hannah Murphy

Clips: TED Conferences, CBS, Joe Rogan Experience Podcast, MSNBC, CNN

We're keen to hear more from our listeners about this show and want to know what you'd like to hear more of, so we're running a survey which you can find at ft.com/techtonicsurvey. It takes about 10 minutes to complete and you will be in with a chance to win a pair of Bose QuietComfort earbuds.

Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.