Elon Musk and the Logic of Disruption

 Elon Musk and the Logic of Disruption

 Elon Musk’s entry into the Twitter boardroom meant things were never going to remain the same figuratively and in the material sense of the word. In the last few days, recent tweets from @elonmusk have since confirmed our suspicions. In a sense, Elon Musk went to Twitter’s digital aviary, not to be a passive board member, but rather he arrived at the place to engender disruptions from within and create enhanced visibility for Twitter, drive more engagements and increase revenue, among other noble business and humane aspirations. The new man in the boardroom simply wants the bird to soar higher and sing better sweet songs, symbolically.

Elon Musk is a visionary, a man with an arresting sense of the future and an intimation of possible competition. This may be intuitive, the ability to see what’s coming for Twitter and how to deflect. A guest on Fast Money talk show on CNBC, Sahil Bloom, New York based content creator and Managing Partner at SRB Ventures has observed that Elon Musk “moves fast. The guy just moves love him or hate him.”  

At 330 million active monthly users, the current state of Twitter doesn’t appear to excite Elon Musk, a man with an exposed capacity for conjuring the seemingly impossible, indeed, a restless imaginative human phenomenon as typified in his other entrepreneurial exertions in space technology, automobiles and in other terrains where many had no concrete motivations and didn’t see more than what was in the initial picture frame.

It would have been disastrous for the app had the innovations Musk is suggesting came from a rival app. And one hopes many readers and users will appreciate this point. It is quite effortless to pick another competing choice if that alternative offers leeway that leads to a seamless user experience. It is indeed unattractive that Twitter deprives many users the use of the edit button whose use far exceeds what we can possibly imagine. The absence of the edit key makes twitter appear as though a highway patrol cop waiting for one to make an infraction, and then pop out from the corner to issue you a ticket. It is even possible to hint that the blue bird is teasing us: “make your mistakes and let me laugh at you. I want to see how you will hide your errors and edit your misspellings. If you don’t like what you’ve written, delete it. But why worry, because I’ve already seen your hidden underbelly.” Another popular blue app with the alarm icon has a feature which allows for adjustments. Perhaps, this one in question is only trying to be like its brethren, @LinkedIn. But nothing is certain here.

The new Twitter innovations Musk is hinting at should be viewed as products of his disruptive logic. Could Elon Musk have been this phenomenal had he made gasoline and not electric cars at Tesla? One can guess an answer to this question. This is where he calls to mind the anguished hero in one of my short stories which is due out soon. In “Smashing Berlin,” the reader will confront Destiny who insists with an almost palpable sense of authority that, ““I have come to disrupt their thinking. I am here to cause beautiful confusion.” And he goes on to say: “I distorted the technological and agricultural space with my imaginative and bold software. I have come home to rearrange the pieces on the…chessboard of this beautiful and great republic.”

When Elon Musk acquired his 9.2% stake in the California based company, some of us didn’t see it coming that twitter would be on the verge of losing one of its distinguishing letters. But that seems the case now with Elon’s poll of 10 April 2022 where he sought public opinion with: “Delete the w in Twitter?” But Titter appears a play of words on teats in animal anatomy! It zings in harmony if we begin to see a message from Titter as a Teat. Musk’s sense of humor is intergalactic, out of this world indeed. But perhaps, his question is just intended to be for weekend titters. The memes have started flooding in already, with some creatives giving the blue bird a bloated crop! At the time of writing this article, the poll was only 109, 568 votes short of a million responses with 18 hours to go. In another tweet, Elon had written: “convert Twitter SF HQ to homeless shelter since no on shows up anyway.”

Elon Musk is seeing something someone did not see. Let us sit and watch as well. And perhaps, we may see the logic of disruptive boardroom moves by the new master sheriff at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters. But his disruptions only seek to onboard new and active users, tickle tired users and do so much more. Should Twitter innovate or remain the same? The answer to this pressing question is on the fingers of the app’s millions of users, and not in the glassy towers and boardrooms of Silicon Valley. And twitter is about to find out.