Elon Musk's reign as Twitter CEO has not gone well by pretty much any objective measure, from hemorrhaging money to unreliable functionality.
Yesterday, a fault in the platform's API rendered half the site's functionality useless, prompting Musk to issue another one of his embarrassing responses to Twitter's seemingly crumbling underpinnings.
And of course, probably the most infamous decline Twitter has seen since Musk's takeover last year is in the company's staffing relationships--the platform has become a revolving door as employees routinely quit or are fired--and in some cases rehired only to be re-fired or to quit again.
But it seems things are far worse than any of us knew--new reports say that Musk's relations with Twitter's staff have deteriorated so badly that Musk is now accompanied by round-the-clock security--that even accompanies him to the bathroom.
And you thought you and your coworkers didn't like your boss...
According to a new report by the BBC, things within the walls of Twitter HQ are profoundly worse than any of us realized.
As their source put it:
“For someone on the inside, it’s like a building where all the pieces are on fire."
"When you look at it from the outside the facade looks fine, but I can see that nothing is working. All the plumbing is broken, all the faucets, everything."
Musk's paranoia has resulted in his bringing in loyal Tesla engineers to handle things at Twitter--where they have no experience and have no idea what they're doing since electric cars and a social media app are two different things.
Perhaps that's why so much of the site crashed yesterday.
But even surrounded by loyalists, Musk seems to be paranoid beyond measure.
As the BBC's source reported:
“Wherever he goes in the office, there are at least two bodyguards – very bulky, tall, Hollywood movie-[style] bodyguards. Even when [he goes] to the restroom."
The source went on to say that they think Musk's paranoia ultimately comes down to money--the company has bled out so much value that Musk has fired the entire cleaning and catering staff and has even tried to sell office plants to employees for a quick buck.
For his part, Musk took to Twitter to do his usual song-and-dance, completely ignoring the allegations about bodyguards, but instead responding to the BBC's report that the app has also lost all functionality to protect users from trolls, disinformation, and the victimization of children.
This went over about as well as you'd expect among Twitter's users.
And the whole bodyguard situation just underlined for many people how unfit Musk is to run Twitter.
Anyway, with a presidential election getting underway and Twitter being one of the world's main news platforms, this is all probably totally fine. What could go wrong?
