2022 Saga of Twitter: An unstable and turbulent year for Musk-led micro-blogging platform

Social media platforms are always trying to reform their features to make sure their dedicated user base remains fresh and addicted. But no other social media platform has gone through a change like Twitter has. Twitter, a micro-blogging platform that is represented by a white mountain bluebird on a blue background, has gone through stages in 2022, many would define as turbulent. And at the centre of the madness is the second richest person on the planet, Tesla & SpaceX CEO and now also Twitter CEO Elon Musk.

Twitter was acquired by Musk in the last days of October with him gearing to make major changes targeting the creme de la creme of the platform. Musk claims that he has been fighting for more transparency within the company. This month saw Musk reveal practices carried out by the former administration of Twitter which included censorship practices, questionable collaboration with the US government and federal agencies and a controversial role in the COVID pandemic. "To be totally frank, almost every conspiracy theory that people had about Twitter turned out to be true," Musk summarised following the epic disclosure of the Twitter Files.

Taking a look at the unstable yet explosive journey of Twitter through 2022:

January, 2022

It seems like Twitter had been on Musk's mind since last year at least, because the tech billionaire notably began purchasing Twitter stocks covertly on January 31, 2022. Twitter at the time was staging a battle with disinformation and misinformation in the heat of the US Presidential elections result and the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Former President Donald Trump (having been banned from the platform in 2021) along with his clique of staunch followers continued to disown the result of the 2020 US Elections along with conspiracies regarding the origin of coronavirus, led Twitter to tag and flag posts spreading disinformation. Twitter was feeling pressure from the centre also to change their policies regarding fake news.

February, 2022

The status quo did not change for Twitter for much of the second month this year. The company had grown massively since its inception back in 2006. When the company was made public in 2013, the company had approximately 2,000 employees with a continuous plan for expansion. By the end of 2021, the company reported more than 7,500 full-time employees. 

March, 2022

As the Twitter deal simmered in the mind of Elon Musk, he publicly began using the platform to ask questions and creating polls regarding the transparency and working of the platform. On March 25, he created a poll asking, "Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?" 70.4 percent of users voted ‘No’ in the poll.

April, 2022

April was the ‘proposal’ phase of Twitter as Elon Musk established himself as the biggest shareholder of the company revealing that he had acquired a 9.2 percent stake worth nearly 3 billion USD at the time. The billionaire was already known for using Twitter having more than 80 million followers at the time. The market also believed that a takeover bid was not a far stretch.

On April 5, Twitter announced that it was appointing Musk to its board with then-CEO Parag Agrawal saying he Musk was a “passionate believer and intense critic” of the platform. A week later, Parag announced that Musk would not be joining the board. On April 14, claiming its “extraordinary potential” for free speech and democracy, Musk announced an offer to buy Twitter at $54.20 per share, valuing the company at more than $40 billion.

On April 15, Twitter announced a limited-duration shareholder rights plan that may thwart billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s attempts to take over the company. After some deliberations and talks, a deal was reached on April 25 for Musk to acquire Twitter as the sole owner of the platform. Musk tweeted, “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.” 

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey also took to the platform to post a series of tweets saying, In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.” He also added that “Elon’s goal of creating a platform that is “maximally trusted and broadly inclusive” is the right one”.

May, 2022

In early May, Musk secured more than 7 billion US dollars in external funding for the deal. Some contributors included Saudi Arabian investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal; Oracle founder Larry Ellison; Binance, the cryptocurrency exchange; and Qatar Holding, part of the gulf state’s investment fund. Referring to Donald Trump’s ban on Twitter, Musk said that he would reverse the ban saying, “I think it was a morally bad decision and foolish in the extreme.”

The spam bots and fake accounts controversy began around mid-May when Musk announced that the deal was “temporarily on hold” as he awaited a detailed report supporting Twitter’s claim that fewer than 5% of its users were spam or fake accounts. 

On May 16, the Tesla boss replied to a thread on spam accounts by Twitter’s CEO, Parag Agrawal, with a poo emoji. After that, the Tesla CEO’s stance hardened, as he stated that the deal “cannot move forward” until his concerns about the counting of spam accounts were resolved.

June, 2022

Musk threatened to terminate the deal on June 6. Lawyers representing Musk accuse Twitter of committing a “material breach” of his agreement to buy the company by failing to hand over sufficient information about the number of spam users. For its part, the Twitter leadership signalled that they wanted to finalise the deal: "We intend to close the transaction and enforce the merger agreement at the agreed price and terms," they pledged. On June 16, Musk met directly with employees at the company for the first time since agreeing the takeover, focusing on “freedom of speech” in an online address. Musk also warned that costs at the company exceeded revenue, describing it as “not a great situation”. 

July, 2022

On July 8, Musk announced that he is terminating the deal, claiming that Twitter is “in material breach of multiple provisions” of the merger agreement. Twitter, backed by an agreement that did not appear to contain much wiggle room for walking away, said it will take legal action to make Musk buy the company, reported The Guardian. Four days later, Twitter lodged a  lawsuit in the US state of Delaware, where the company is incorporated, demanding that Musk closes the deal on the agreed terms. Musk immediately tweeted, “Oh the irony, Lol”. Twitter, meanwhile, reports a drop in revenue due to the uncertainty generated by the takeover saga and a weak advertising market.

At the end of the month, Musk countersued Twitter, accusing the company of deliberately miscounting the number of spam accounts on its platform as part of a “scheme” to mislead investors. Twitter’s own lawsuit against Musk is dismissed as “gaudy rhetoric”, as both sides kept up the corporate cat-calling. Twitter describes the suit as “a story, imagined in an effort to escape a merger agreement that Musk no longer found attractive”.

August, 2022

The month of August for Musk and Twitter was one that saw them gearing for the trial, but no further than that. By the end of the month, Musk added accusations from a Twitter whistleblower, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, to his countersuit, reported The Guardian. Zatko, a former head of security at Twitter, accused the company of serial failings in its information security set-up. Zatko, who was fired by Twitter in January, had filed a whistleblower complaint against Twitter in which he warned that the company was “grossly negligent in several areas of information security”.

September, 2022

Musk failed in an attempt to delay the Delaware trial as a judge ruled that the case will go ahead from October 17. “I am convinced that even four weeks’ delay would risk further harm to Twitter,” wrote Kathaleen McCormick, of Delaware’s court of chancery. By the end of the month, the Delaware court released text messages before the trial between and his closest confidants. One of them being, American controversial podcaster Joe Rogan asking Musk in April whether he would “liberate Twitter from the censorship happy mob” to which Musk replied, “I will provide advice, which they may or may not choose to follow.”

October, 2022

The trial which was supposed to commence on October 17 did not eventually happen because Elon musk eventually offered to buy Twitter with experts saying he did so because he would have lost in the Delaware trial. The Delaware judge Kathaleen McCormick, on October 5 declined to postpone the trial but Musk was persuasive saying, “Trust us…we mean it this time,” prompting McCormick to give both sides to complete the deal by 5pm on October 28.

On October 13, A court filing from the social media company said that Musk was under a federal investigation related to the Twitter takeover. The filing did not say what the focus of the investigation is, or which federal authorities were investigating. Seven days later The Washington Post reported that Musk had told prospective investors that he planned to axe nearly 75% of Twitter’s 7,500 employees if he took over the company.

Musk visited the Twitter headquarters on October 26 in San Francisco, carrying a sink, tweeting, “Let’s sink it”. He reaffirmed to Twitter employees that he did not plan to lay off as many as 75% of the company’s staff. A day later, news surfaced that Musk had completed the deal with several top executives including CEO Parag Agarwal, CFO Ned Segal, Head of legal policy, trust and safety Vijaya Gadde, and Twitter's legal counsel Sean Edgett departing. On October 28, Twitter confirmed the deal in a filing to the US financial regulator. The filing said the deal closed the previous day. "The bird is freed", Musk tweeted on October 28.

November, 2022

Musk established himself as the sole owner of Twitter. Then, the layoffs began. "In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday," an internal memo at Twitter said. According to some estimates, 3,700 employees were fired. On November 17, hundreds of Twitter employees started resigning en masse after the deadline set by Musk that required employees to decide whether they wanted to be part of "hardcore Twitter 2.0." As the number of resignations went up, Twitter closed its office buildings and suspended badge access.

Musk told his investors that he would stay on as Twitter CEO only temporarily. On November 20, Musk asked his followers in a poll if former US President Donald Trump should be allowed back on the platform. The poll's final result showed 52% to 48% in favour of the Trump account's restoration. "The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei," Musk tweeted, citing a Latin phrase meaning "the voice of the people is the voice of God." After that, Trump's account reappeared on the platform.

December, 2022

The last month of the year for Twitter was marked by the release of the Twitter files, a series of reports containing internal emails, messages, chat logs, and other documents to which access had been provided to investigative journalists by Musk. Till date, eight batches of Twitter files have been released with various ground-breaking revelations with Musk promoting the release. 

The Twitter Files shed light on the platform's sweeping censorship practices and suspension of undesired users; its communications with the FBI, CIA, and other federal agencies; the US government's meddling with the platform; and Twitter's censorship of information about COVID-19 that was inconvenient to the US government and which elevated the positions of public health authorities regardless of veracity. "The United States government pressured Twitter and other social media platforms to elevate certain content and suppress other content about COVID-19," journalist David Zweig wrote on December 26. "Whether by humans or algorithms, content that was contrarian but true was still subject to getting flagged or suppressed."

On December 19, Musk conducted a poll on Twitter asking whether he should step down as CEO. “Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll, tweeted the Twitter CEO.  The poll received 17,502,391 votes, 57.5 percent of which voted ‘Yes’ to Musk stepping down. After staying silent on this for two days, Musk tweeted, "I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software & servers teams." On December 22, Musk defended his massive cost-cutting at Twitter as necessary for the social media platform to survive next year, due in part to debt payments tied to his $44 billion takeover of the company. “This company is like, basically, you’re in a plane that is headed towards the ground at high speed with the engines on fire and the controls don’t work,” Musk told a late-night audience on a Twitter Spaces call.

Ever since his Twitter takeover, Musk’s moves have been highly indecisive. On December 18, he established a policy banning links to other social media websites on Twitter, including Facebook, Instagram and Linktree, only to reverse the rule less than 24 hours later. He also announced the removal of the blue tick from accounts and instead launched a subscription service for anyone who wanted to get verified. The colours of the ticks have also changed according to the profile.

On the last day of the year, Musk announced that Twitter will now have a few new changes such as allowing swiping to switch between recommended & followed tweets, trends, topics, and increased length of videos that can be uploaded on the platform. "Twitter navigation is coming in January that allows swiping to the side to switch between recommended and followed tweets, trends, topics, etc. To switch until then, tap the stars icon in the upper right corner of the home screen," Musk tweeted. In a follow-up tweet, Musk noted that swiping across lists will also be enabled.

Suffice to say, more changes are expected by the now Elon Musk-led Twitter.

Where has Jack Dorsey been?

“Folks at Twitter past and present are strong and resilient. They will always find a way no matter how difficult the moment,” the Twitter co-founder wrote in a tweet. “I realise many are angry with me. I own the responsibility for why everyone is in this situation: I grew the company size too quickly. I apologise for that.” Dorsey co-founded Twitter in 2006 alongside Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams. Dorsey held the top job twice throughout leadership changes and stepped down as CEO last year. The company’s then-chief technology officer Parag Agrawal succeeded Dorsey as CEO before leaving as part of Musk’s takeover. Dorsey still owns over 18 million shares of Twitter, which is roughly 2.4 percent in the micro-blogging site.

Dorsey has said that he remains invested in the company and its well-being. After news of Twitter employees being sacked hit the news, Dorsey also tweeted saying, “I am grateful for, and love, everyone who has ever worked on Twitter. I don't expect that to be mutual in this moment...or ever…and I understand.” Dorsey has since shifted his focus to solely managing his payments company Block, formerly known as Square and has deeply dived into cryptocurrency.