Twitter co-founder uncertain if Elon Musk is the right person to own social media platform

Elon Musk “doesn’t seem like” the right person to own Twitter, the social media platform’s co-founder Biz Stone said in an interview with The Guardian. Stone also said that improvements to morale and content policies at the business have been reversed under its new proprietor. Biz Stone is one of the four founders who set up the company in March 2006, the other three co-founders are Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass and Evan Williams.

Stone, in the interview, spoke about how positive changes he had helped oversee in recent years had been unwound by the Tesla chief executive. Speaking about running social media companies for a living, he said it was not a "win-win situation" and it was tough because “50% of the people are gonna be happy, 50% of people are gonna be upset with you”.

“You have to be OK with stuff that you just don’t like or don’t agree with being on there,” said Stone, adding: “Otherwise, you should just go buy a magazine or a newspaper or something where it’s OK to have a specific leaning.” Asked if Musk was the right owner for Twitter, Stone said: “It doesn’t seem like it right now, but I could be wrong.”

Musk has been spear-heading the massive changes at Twitter that have become unpredictable from time to time for which he has come under intense criticism by peers. He had recently come under fire for temporarily banning journalists from the platform and reinstating previously banned accounts such as those belonging to the former US president Donald Trump and the self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate.

Stone had returned to the business in 2017 at the behest of then-CEO Dorsey to “guide the company culture, that energy, that feeling”. Stone said improvements during his four-year stint, particularly in morale and overseeing content, have been lost under Musk. “We made a lot of improvements in those areas. And that’s all gone now."

Stone said the concept of Twitter would survive, regardless of the company’s current financial struggles. “I don’t know that Twitter as a company is going to succeed for ever but the idea of Twitter I think will be around,” said Stone, pointing to the success of alternative platforms such as Mastodon.

“It would only matter that Twitter the idea continued. And that’s happened. That seems to be happening already. Mastodon seems to be winning the open-source, decentralised version of Twitter. People seem to be going there.”

Stone speaks on Twitter Files

Decemeber 2022 for Twitter was marked by the release of the Twitter files, a series of reports containing internal emails, messages, chat logs, and other documents to which access had been provided to investigative journalists by Musk. Till date, eight batches of Twitter files have been released with various ground-breaking revelations with Musk promoting the release. 

Stone added that employees should not have been named as part of the release of the so-called Twitter files, a series of internal documents detailing decisions such as the suspension of Donald Trump. “When that happens, people get a lot of harassment,” said Stone. “It’s really bad.” Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, was reportedly forced to leave his home when Musk posted tweets misrepresenting Roth’s 2016 academic thesis, “Gay Data”.

The Twitter Files shed light on the platform's sweeping censorship practices and suspension of undesired users; its communications with the FBI, CIA, and other federal agencies; the US government's meddling with the platform; and Twitter's censorship of information about COVID-19 that was inconvenient to the US government and which elevated the positions of public health authorities regardless of veracity.