Twitter Tantrums

Elon Musk, the freshly minted Chief Twit of the microblogging site, holding a kitchen sink makes a perfect visual for his maiden appearance at the Twitter HQ at San Francisco. It is almost like a sneak preview of his intentions of throwing the kitchen sink at half the employees, mainly the key members of the erstwhile Twitter kitchen cabinet, who dared to take him on when he withdrew his bid of the $44 billion deal earlier.

They slapped a lawsuit and threw the rule book at him in return. He had to eat crow and close the deal.

Musk, despite the heavyweight companies, SpaceX and Tesla, that he helms and his brilliant and futuristic entrepreneurial mind, continues to show signs of juvenile petulance and a quirky humour that borders on abrasive. The Twitter deal was handled in a 'drama queen' style which is his usual public posturing, a cocky cocktail of suspense, wacky humour and braggadocio laced with threats.

Heads rolled and a mass exodus ensued as Elon Reeve Musk a lá Donald Trump kept up the chant of 'You are fired!'. He emailed an ultimatum to the Twitter employees asking them to commit to "working long hours at high intensity" or leave. Most preferred to leave. He had to shut down the Twitter office as the staff exited en masse.

The new work ethic of 'hard core vision' entailed the expunging of the hybrid model necessitated by the Covid-19 lockdowns. No WFH (work from home), the Big Boss said, perhaps muttering sotto voce an expletive with a slightly different abbreviation. But he had to water down this diktat soon enough with some conditions to at least retain a skeletal staff to run the key systems.

From the kitchen sink to the linen closet, Musk advanced in his house cleaning project at the Blue Bird Headquarters in San Fran. He tweeted with a video clip displaying a closet full of '#Stay Woke' t-shirts showing covert disapproval in tone and in his thread of tweets. '#Stay woke' gained traction after the '#Black Lives Matter' campaign.

Musk's new 'merch' (merchandise) was T's with the slogan #Stay@work. His conservative leanings are sticking out a mile from his reinstatement of those who were barred from Twitter. Ironically, the Twitter addict Trump declined to rejoin since he has his own alt-tech social media platform, Truth Social.

With questionable followers like QAnon,a conspiracy theorist, who was convicted for taking part in the recent attack by the white supremacists on the Capitol in the U.S., one wonders at the percentage of truth in the website.

Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey in 2016, has been around for a while with 217 million monetisable users around the globe. That is massive! Not many know that our Desi microblogging site Koo, founded in 2019 is world's No. 2.already with 50 million downloads! With Twitter in turmoil, the founders are cooing with delight to position their site as an alternative!!

To write an epitaph for a pulsating platform would be a pity. #RIP Twitter trending now, generated by those who are leaving, and trolls, might be premature. Elon Musk likes to have the last word. This time the riposte with the tweet, "Twitter is Alive" or "Maybe we've gone to heaven/hell & don't know it" is passably funny!!