Is Twitter slipping into a dictatorship under Elon Musk?

There's a man gazing out at the night sky and imagining a world in which he is no longer on this planet. Instead, this man dreams of populating a planet we call here on Earth by the name of Mars.

Mars, a place which enjoys temperatures ranging from around -220 degrees F. in the wintertime at the poles, to +70 degrees F. over the lower latitudes in the summer. Let's not rush to book flights for that winter warmth...

This man also happens to be a billionaire and, realistically, could be capable of financing an expedition to Mars to complete said investigations into viable life outside of our gravity-limiting existence here on planet Earth. This man goes by the name of Elon Musk.

If you work for Twitter, or have done in recent months, then pondering which planet the current owner of the social media platform lives on might be a very relevant question.

You see, Elon does whatever Elon wants. His tactics for business have seen him amass a fortune to make him the richest man on this side of the galaxy. Yet, his nature, based on recent turmoil for staff at Twitter as well as users of the platform, would suggest that he will do whatever suits him - even if it could plunge the value of his own company.

The latest person to question Elon's business strategy has been The Kink's guitarist, Dave Davies.

Taking to the social platform late yesterday (15 February), the musician shared a screenshot of his previous tweet linking to a Kinks video on TikTok. Beneath the tweet was a notice that read: "We put a warning on this Tweet because it might have sensitive content."

"Dear @elonmusk, would @Twitter please stop putting warning ons on everything from ‘the Kinks’," Davies captioned his follow-up post.

"We are just trying to promote our Kinks music."

In a second tweet, he clarified: "The Kinks are a brand name. We have been the Kinks since 1963."

He later replied to a fan: "The word robot should be banned. We got robots running our lives. At least I’m a Kink and not a fukin robot."

This latest backlash comes after Elon Musk allegedly reconfigured the platform’s algorithm so his tweets would be more widely viewed.

It was reported by tech news site Platformer, based on interviews and internal documents, that a disgruntled Musk called for an emergency effort after a tweet he sent during Sunday’s Super Bowl game failed to achieve as much engagement as a tweet from Joe Biden.

The effort was sparked when a tweet from the president, who has 37m followers, generated nearly 29m impressions while a similar tweet from Musk – who has 128m followers – generated little more than 9.1m impressions. A fragile ego indeed, if this is true.

"Any people who can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this problem," wrote James Musk, a Twitter employee and cousin of Elon Musk. The cousin had posted urgently in the company Slack at 2.30am the following Monday morning (13 February), asking all employees who can code to participate.

A new algorithm was then deployed by engineers to artificially inflate Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000, ensuring that more than 90% of Musk’s 128.9m followers see them.

Even if you don't follow Musk, you are also being served his tweets in your feed through the 'For you' tab of the app’s home page, which curates tweets from a number of accounts, including those a user is not following.

Earlier in February, a report from Platformer also revealed Musk had fired a principal engineer at Twitter who told him views on his tweets had decreased organically, with interest in the erratic CEO waning.

Musk seems to have a penchant for firing staff. He laid off nearly half its workforce in November 2022. At the time, Musk defended the cuts and other cost-cutting measures, stating the company was losing $4m per day.

There is some room for self-reflection from Musk though as he launched his own Twitter poll asking if he should remain as chief executive. The answer from Twitter users was no.

Musk has promised to step down and find a replacement as soon as later this year.

The man also known as Tesla chief executive, Musk donated shares worth $1.95 billion in the world's most valuable automaker to charity last year, a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) showed on Valentine's Day - Tuesday 14 February.

Musk donated about 11.6 million shares between August and December last year, according to the filing, which did not say which organisation or organisations were the recipients.

The world's second-richest person now owns around 13% of Tesla.