Up until the acquisition of Twitter, Elon Musk was seen as this sort of eccentric guy, a little on the weird side but nonetheless a highly successful business mogul. He had to be. How else to you get to hold the title of the world’s richest man? With the Twitter purchase though, it turns out maybe the emperor has no clothes, or perhaps just enough clothes to make you want to get the guy some sunblock.

I applauded the powers that be at Twitter after the decision was made to ban Trump after the Jan. 6th insurrection. People died as a result of his recklessness. It was the right thing to do and it didn’t matter if you were an ex-president or not.

Like many others I had concerns about the buyout of Twitter by Elon. His motives seemed suspect. He claimed twitter interfered with free speech and promised to bring back open dialog. I decided to stick around and see how things unfolded. It didn’t take long at all to unmask the real Elon. He just can’t help himself. He overestimates his sense of humor and his intelligence.

The first thing I noticed was that he seemed to be running his newly acquired $44B business from tweets in full public view. It started with some push-back from Stephen King who complained about the $20 fee for being a blue-check. Keep in mind that even at $20 for every blue-check, Twitter’s revenue shortfall would be far from resolved. That’s why I was surprised when Musk replied back to King with “How about $8?” Say what? You just dropped your price by over 50% in about 2 seconds without giving it any thought. It was one of the most puzzling and impulsive things I’ve ever seen by a company leader, in real-time no less. My thoughts were wow, this is weird. I better stick around, this could be entertaining.

The next rather odd thing Elon did was retweet a conspiracy theory about Paul Pelosi (82) who had been attacked in his own home by an intruder with a hammer. For some reason Elon thought it would be wise or funny or ? to propagate the lie that Mr. Pelosi’s attacker might well have been his gay lover trying to get out of the house instead of in. It was neither wise nor funny. It was careless and sick. By this time I’m getting the sense that Mr. Musk is not only impulsive but possibly a bully and immature.

The next several days we were witness to Musk getting absolutely roasted over the coals by the vast majority of users on his own platform that he just paid $44B for (well, maybe $22B of his money and $22B from the Saudis). It turns out some of his advertisers were not amused by the Paul Pelosi retweet and decided to leave. I was definitely sticking around for this. Logging in to scan the feed for the barrage of insults as the wheels were falling off added high amusement factor to my day. One can imagine if this scenario happens to any other company they are going to step back, re-evaluate the events of the day and try to lure those advertisers back. Nope, not Elon. Someone tweeted that Elon should retaliate by organizing Twitter users to boycott the advertisers for leaving. In his infinite wisdom Musk opines in a tweet that he will go “thermo-nuclear” on the advertisers for causing him loss of revenue. Really? I’m starting to think this guy doesn’t really know that much about business or is just plain dumb.

Now faced with a significant drop in advertising dollars, Musk launches in to the next project on his agenda: Fire 1/2 the employees. In 42 years in the corporate workforce I had never heard of a company axing 50% of its payroll in one knee-jerk event. That’s a real risky number to just pick out of the air. Clearly Elon is a risk taker in a big way. One thing Elon didn’t consider is that by pissing off half his workforce by unceremoniously firing them on short notice, they might not all go quietly. Witness the new nickname he got assigned by his ex-employees the day after they were given the heave-ho: Space Karen. It wouldn’t surprise me if a fair amount of Twitter source code now lives in a private Github repo. I was waffling between him being bad at business or just plain dumb and now I’m leaning more towards dumb.

Elon, unable to sense any consequences from his actions so far, then doubles down on his emperor status and starts dictating terms of employment for the remaining employees. These include a 12×7 work schedule, no more work from home and oh, pledging allegiance to Elon The Great. As it turns out, a goodly portion of the remaining employees told Musk to pound sand and went their merry way. Now he’s down to bare bones.

Having fired most of his content moderation employees, Musk is now at risk of his platform spewing hate speech to the point of getting kicked out of the Apple store, which would be the final blow for Twitter.

The internal conflagration has been very enjoyable thus far, but I felt I’ve seen about enough. Elon as a person is no longer a mystery. He’s an impulsive, arrogant, mean spirited, risk taking fool. That’s why when he announced he intended to re-instate the account of Donald Trump I deactivated my account. No need to stick around for the rest of this clown show. I can read the highlights on my next platform. Maybe Mastodon, Tribe Social or Post. Something will work out. At this point it’s just embarrassing. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.