Elon Musk’s Impact on Twitter’s Stakeholders: A Candidate’s Perspective
By Josh Lam and Vivian Chong
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On Monday, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, officially secured a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion. As two MBA students hoping to build careers around making technology platforms safer, we have been anxiously following the twists and turns of Elon’s courtship with Twitter’s board of directors over the past two weeks. Since the board’s decision to accept Elon’s offer, Twitter itself has exploded with hot takes from armchair experts and actual experts on the buyout’s potential consequences (or lack thereof). However, we have seen far fewer perspectives from those viewing Twitter as a potential future employer.
Like all large social media platforms, Twitter’s trust and safety team (known as its “Health” team) bears the responsibility of maintaining healthy discourse on its platform and mitigating the constantly evolving risks to users and society. It is difficult to overstate how critical a role this team plays. Social media-fueled tragedies such as the persecution and killing of the Rohingya people in Myanmar and the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol demonstrate how content shared on these platforms can have very real and devastating consequences.
It is the prospect of mitigating these real-world harms that initially attracted us to working at Twitter after graduation.
Over the past several years, Twitter’s Health team has built a reputation as an industry leader by piloting innovative product features to combat misinformation, rigorously enforcing content policies to promote constructive discourse, and prioritizing trust and safety as a core business function. Like many of Twitter’s own employees, we now worry that this hard-earned progress is at risk. Elon Musk’s stated reason for buying Twitter is to build “an inclusive arena for free speech.” His tweets suggest that this translates into scrapping much of Twitter’s moderation policies, which employees put in place to prevent harmful content such as violent threats, harassment, and spam.
Contrary to Elon’s view, experts on social media governance agree that, to allow free speech to flourish, moderation is not just helpful but necessary. An unpoliced town square devoid of content moderation will quickly devolve into a space where civic discourse is drowned out by harassment and misinformation, restricting participation to a privileged few and further alienating marginalized groups. Even setting aside the psychological harms to victims of online abuse, such an environment is not a particularly pleasant experience for ordinary users. As online speech researcher Evelyn Douek notes, competing platforms such as Reddit, Parler, and Gettr all came to this realization after trying, and failing, to embrace a laissez-faire approach to moderation.
From Tesla to SpaceX, we have seen Elon Musk – a self-described “nano-manager” – leave a personal imprint on each company that he runs. Elon has proposed a litany of product changes since the buyout, ranging from open-sourcing the Twitter algorithm to “authenticating all humans”. While some of his ideas are promising, none indicate a nuanced understanding of how online risks are disproportionately borne by historically marginalized groups. Any content moderation policies put in place under his watch will likely reflect Elon’s particular online experience as a white man with a net worth of $273 billion and 84.4 million Twitter followers. With a devoted cult of personality, Elon is mostly shielded from the type of targeted harassment, bullying, and hate speech faced by marginalized populations such as women, ethnic minorities, and LGBTQ folks.
Given how he dismisses targeted toxic behavior as a concern, it is hardly surprising that Elon’s answer to defining the bounds of speech on Twitter is to simply outsource the problem to governments. When asked by TED’s Chris Anderson about his approach to determining legitimate speech, Elon responded that Twitter should write its policies to “match the laws of the [individual] country,” even when those laws may be written by authoritarian regimes that seek to suppress their citizens’ voices. With governments around the world increasingly using internet crackdowns as a tool to suppress dissent and concentrate political power, Elon’s solution – which he has since doubled-down on – is frustratingly short-sighted.
Putting aside concerns over the future of Twitter’s content moderation strategy, there is also the question of whether we would want to work for Elon the person. To put it lightly, Elon Musk is polarizing. On the one hand, his antics can be endearingly relatable for a public figure: he freely uses Twitter to post memes, make jokes, share philosophical musings, express political opinions, and occasionally interact with other users on the platform. For a multi-billionaire mogul with the power to single-handedly move stock markets, he is utterly unfiltered, which is perhaps why he has attracted so many devout fans.
On the other hand, we also know that Elon can be an abusive bully. He told Black Tesla employees to be “thick-skinned” about suffering racist harassment while on the job, went on spontaneous “firing sprees” that led to workers avoiding his desk in case it jeopardized their careers, publicly posted crude sexist jokes about women’s bodies, and called a diver involved in the Thai cave rescue a “pedo guy” without any evidence. While Elon’s fans might defend his actions as “innocent trolling”, we doubt that even they would describe him as the model of a responsible leader.
As our business school professors have stressed, to achieve sustainable long-term value creation, business leaders should think beyond maximizing shareholder value and take into account the effects of their decisions on all stakeholders – including the employees that keep the platform running. We have seen little indication that Elon recognizes this responsibility. Mere days after the buyout, Elon has already publicly criticized or amplified criticisms against three top Twitter employees, prompting vicious online attacks against them from his more extreme followers. It is difficult to imagine the stress of working for a company whose new owner is publicly attacking your colleagues for the amusement of his 84 million followers – and not knowing whether you might be next.
The corrosive effects of working under a personality like Elon Musk will be particularly damaging to employees on Twitter’s Health team, especially since employees responsible for content moderation already face an uphill battle to make their voices heard. As Columbia University sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh observes, these employees typically face the unenviable task of pushing back against engineers in the name of user safety. This is not a fair fight. Because they contribute more to the bottom line, engineers have more resources and wield greater influence. By downplaying the value of content moderation externally and internally, Elon further tilts the balance of power away from Twitter’s Health team and towards its engineers, making it less likely for critical safety features to see the light of day.
We hope that our worries are overblown. As the Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel argued, it is far too early to make any definitive predictions about what an Elon-led Twitter will look like. Perhaps Elon leverages his centralized authority to experiment with alternative business models that prioritize safety-focused outcomes. Perhaps he leans into his crypto sympathies to reinvent Twitter as a decentralized online park, transforming it into a digital space that is designed, governed, and owned by the community. Or perhaps Elon will simply lose interest in running Twitter and move on to his next pet project in a year or two. What Elon thinks may not even be relevant if new regulations such as the EU’s Digital Services Act leave him no choice but to maintain a stringent level of content moderation. The only certainty is that whatever route Elon decides to take, he will leave a trail of tweets for us all to debate over.
Regardless of how the story unfolds, business school has taught us to view the recruiting process as a two-way street. Just as companies evaluate candidates for culture fit, we should evaluate companies based on our own personal values. We want to work for a company that respects its employees, prioritizes the well-being of all stakeholders, and leaves a lasting positive impact on society. While we hope that Elon Musk’s Twitter will live up to these principles and steward its power responsibly, only time will tell whether his purchase jeopardizes what makes Twitter great.
About the Authors:
Joshua Lam is a MA/MBA candidate at the Yale School of Management and Jackson Institute for Global Affairs
Vivian Chong is an MBA candidate at the Yale School of Management