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X tests charging new users $1 to tweet, retweet::The Elon Musk-owned company said it was an effort to combat bot activity and “manipulation,” with the rollout beginning in the Philippines and New Zealand.
I’m curious, have we ever seen this sort of public breakdown of a business before?
I know we’ve seen businesses just make bad decisions and fail, but I can’t think of a time when it’s been due to the childish whims of a CEO who seems almost malicious about it, seemingly knowing it’s damaging the company, and going on very public rants about the changes.
Like, imagine if Enron publicly said “lol regulator stealth mode UwU” before going nuclear.
A much slower pace, but Jack Welch immediately comes to mind. Tons of short-term decisions that made the numbers go up but had disastrous long-term consequences not just for GE, but all of America. Lawsuits for everything from illegally dumping chemicals into rivers to discriminatory lending. GE used to be a shining pinnacle of manufacturing and innovation: now it’s a weird scribbly logo on the cheapest appliances you can find. He championed outsourcing and intra-company competition, practices that spread and went on to destroy other companies.
Or you could point to Ed Lambert buying and merging Sears and KMart in 2005. Sears especially was egregious. It started as a mail-order catalog designed to make high-end goods affordable to the middle class. It provided good wages and benefits, good quality products, and innovated the retail environment. The idea was that by paying gold wages he would end up creating more customers, and there are tons of examples of Sears employees in the 50’s who had Searss-mad houses filled with Sears-made products. It wasn’t all great (kind of getting close to a company town, also heavily reliant on cars and suburban sprawl). But a lot of what we think of as the sterotypicall “American Dream” was driven by Sears.
By the early 2000’s when Lambert bought it, it definitely wasn’t as dominant as it used to be- it had lost some market share to Wal-Mart and other competitors, and the mail-order catalog business was waning and kind of replaced by TV shopping channels. But it still had a sound logistical network. Online shopping was just getting off the ground, Amazon was still just for books, eBay was incredibly sketchy. There were people at the time who wondered if Sears could just transition their catalog business model to he Internet and become dominant again. Instead, Lampert cut costs. Closed stores, outsourced what he could, cut wages and benefits, reduced quality, sold off brands. Old Craftsman tools are still covered today for their quality and durability, while the modern tools are rusting in landfills. They were in prime position to be what Amazon is today, but chose to squander it instead.
Musk might be setting a speed running record with Twitter though.
Carly gutting HP is another one, though maybe not on the scale of what you listed.
I agree sears is an example but what you said isn’t why. I’m thinking of how they had a lunatic Ayn Rand fan ceo who made departments compete with each other for resources. If grills did better, tools suffered even if tool sales were up.
True, I just felt like I kind of covered that talking about Jack Welch. He is, afaik, the one who really started off the trend of intra-company competition. I mentioned that other companies follow GE in that regard, and Sears was one of them for sure.
Robert Palmer flying DEC straight into the ground?
Machinima, maybe?
#14 YouTube channel in 2014.
#1 in gaming.
Gone in 2019.
Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. What happened to them?
Some company AT&T owns bought them and was going to integrate them into their business but just ghosted them.
Basically what’s happening to Bandcamp, I think.
A lot of YouTube channels I watch have a ‘how I got out of a shitty Machinima contract’ story. Ross Scott is the main guy that comes to mind.
Isn’t it amazing how money can propel you forward regardless of how moronic you are as a business person?
Gerald Ratner (UK high street jeweller) did a pretty good job, calling his own products “crap” and almost destroying the company. He’s on Wikipedia.
Depends how you look at it. From the point of view that Twitter was a public asset then what Musk is doing is damaging.
But if you think of Twitter as a company with a dubious financial situation that was taken over and is being transformed into a different service, then it’s their business.