I believe Elon will learn the hard way that yes you can solve tech problems by throwing humans at them but you can't solve human problems by throwing tech at them.
I think Elon is already feeling the blowback from immediately misunderstanding it based on this tweet[1]. It's going to be interesting to see how he intends on making up that $5b/year.
It is very typical for big advertisers to have a change of ownership exit clause. It is also very typical for these contracts to only establish the unit rate, but without a required minimum spend amount.
The bigger nail in the coffin is IPG recommending their clients pull out; they probably represent a third of F500 ad spend. I would not be surprised if the other three firms in the big four are recommending the same. It's not just car brands.
edit: it'll also be interesting to see if other social media sites (primarily Facebook, Reddit, Snap, or TikTok) or advertising platforms (Google) retaliate against Tesla now that Elon owns a direct competitor. Tesla enjoys quite a lot of "free" word of mouth advertising on their platforms, and those platforms all have the means to bury positive sentiment and/or amplify negative sentiment towards Tesla.
this reads like a Trump quote. People are free to use their speech to pressure advertisers into dropping Twitter. Or, rather, "voting" with their wallet.
We can be critical of his actions, but at this point, assuming incompetence is foolish.
I'm not trying to dickride the guy, obviously a lot of people contributed, but this literally just happened and we all saw it. How are people rewriting it successfully?
Tesla has done a great job to shake up a complacent status quo of car manufacturers, and to especially lead the curve of EV adoption in the US. That's not nothing, yes, and is absolutely a team effort. It's also not the best run business model and there's a lot of questions still about the long-term sustainability in their cost cutting and their over-reliance on credits and promised but not delivered features. If we want to credit Elon as the sole "business guru" and the company is relying on business models that are less than stellar, it's fair to criticize Elon's role in Tesla with respect to their ongoing business model issues.
There have been times where Tesla's stock, to generate additional liquidity, has had SEC violations alleged against it and most of those were directly "great business man" Elon Musk posting SEC violations directly to social media and pretending they were honest mistakes (and having enough reasonable doubt to not get the "Martha Stewart treatment").
I don't think there's "rewriting". There's 15 years of questionable business practices that was criticized at the time, yet seem easy to sweep under the rug now that Tesla looks popular and is a darling of certain investors.
Intelligence comes in a lot of ways - clearly Elon Musk is incredibly intelligent, but only in some ways and not in every way.
Trying to play devils advocate here, I don't fully believe that Musk will be incompetent in handling Twitter, but I definitely think given the current evidence it's possible his understanding of how to operate Twitter is less comprehensive than how to operate a hardware driven tech company.