Twitter Chief Twit and right-wing crashing car manufacturer Elon Musk's latest bungle at his $44 billion ego prize Twitter may hurt his new CEO, Linda Yaccarino's efforts to rebuild confidence. Musk imposed a "rate limit" for how many posts Twitter users could read, leading some users to get a "rate limit exceeded" message and a block. He's since revised the threshhold and said the action was to discourage artificial intelligence companies from "scraping" information from Twitter users. Subject to the whims of the volatile Musk, the new limits are 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 per day for unverified and 500 posts per day for new unverified users. Until he changes them again.
But for a social media site that's bled advertisers and users in the past year and more, the restrictions are being seen as sabotaging Musk's efforts to increase site use and revenues, something Yaccarino was hired to do. From the cited Reuters article:
"Ad industry veterans said the move creates an obstacle for Yaccarino, the former NBCUniversal advertising chief who started last month as Twitter's chief executive officer.
Yaccarino has sought to repair relationships with advertisers who pulled away from the site after Musk bought it last year, the Financial Times reported last week.
The limits are 'remarkably bad' for users and advertisers already shaken by the 'chaos' Musk has brought to the platform, Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester, said on Sunday.
'The advertiser trust deficit that Linda Yaccarino needs to reverse just got even bigger. And it cannot be reversed based on her industry credibility alone,' he said.
Lou Paskalis, the founder of advertising consultancy AJL Advisory and former marketing boss at Bank of America, said Yaccarino is Musk's 'last best hope' to salvage ad revenue and the company's value.
'This move signals to the marketplace that he's not capable of empowering her to save him from himself,' he said." (our emphasis)
Making matters worse, social media alternative to Twitter, Bluesky, said it was experiencing unusually high sign-up rates apparently as a result of Twitter users bailing out on Musk's site.
A spoiled, narcissistic man-child like Musk won't let someone out shine him, and he knows he screwed up the purchase and management of Twitter and can't save it himself. Maybe Linda Yaccarino should have seen the handwriting on the wall when she took the position, but now that she's there, she can only watch the owner destroy his overpriced acquisition by more erratic and self-sabotaging moves.
BONUS: Another bad move: he's still not paying Twitter's bills.
